In January 1982 the Association of American Colleges (AAC) began the Project on Redefining the Meaning and Purpose of Baccalaureate Degrees. Set against a background of perceived deterioration of curriculum coherence, the Project’s charge was to survey the conditions of undergraduate learning and to recommend a thorough program of reform that would go beyond the piecemeal changes and recommendations then being made or instituted. After almost three years of intense study, guided by a Select Committee of educators*, the Project has produced Integrity in the College Curriculum: A Report to the Academic Community (AAC, 1985).
American undergraduate education, according to the authors of the report, is in serious trouble. At the root of the problem is a curriculum portrayed as incoherent and in a state of disarray. There is no systematic course of study, no planned program of what students should know and when, no comprehensive vision of the mission of postsecondary education, and virtually no agreement on required courses of learning. Instead, we have a potpourri of course selections driving undergraduate enrollments that renders the baccalaureate degree almost meaningless as a measure of academic learning. Indeed the report argues that we are in the midst of an unparalleled crisis of integrity, decline, and devaluation of the bachelor’s degree.
A significant portion of the study enquires into why this state of affairs has come about. Blame is placed with administrators, students, and faculty—but it is college faculty who must share the greatest responsibility. Faculty have become adept at protecting their departmental and disciplinary interests; students have made demands for dropping required courses and certain distribution requirements, along with comprehensive examinations; college administrators, in an atmosphere of “survival” and competition for student enrollments, have succumbed to the pressures of a marketplace curriculum. The result, the report states, is a collapse of “structure and control” over the curriculum. There is no longer a college-wide authority that is able to look out for the interests of the college curriculum as a whole. The curriculum committees responsible for preserving the integrity of the curriculum have largely failed, paralyzed by the disciplinary interests and departmental advocacy of its members. When it comes to curriculum, “anything goes.”
The report also scores college faculty for an undue emphasis on research. Faculty rewards are governed by it. Those who concentrate their energies on teaching or on service to the college are penalized in tenure and promotion decisions. Research, the report believes, obviously is a central and laudible aspect of a faculty’s work. But when it becomes the solitary model that defines the faculty’s relationship to the college and students, then “the profession of college teaching” is the loser. Of course most college faculty teach, but what do they teach when they teach? The models for teaching, again, harken back to the memories of role models ensconced in a person’s graduate training and education. In almost no graduate program, the report notes, is there an attention to how to teach a subject matter.
Nothing less than wholesale reform is needed if our college curriculum once again is to find “coherence,” “integrity,” and “meaning.”
Nothing less than wholesale reform is needed if our college curriculum once again is to find “coherence,” “integrity,” and “meaning.” Here the task is two-fold. The faculty “as a whole” must reassert their authority for the curriculum “as a whole.” This will require the support of administrators, presidents, and trustees, who in turn must affect a “fit” between the construction of curriculum and the college’s educational mission. And second, the report calls for a minimum required curriculum.
The required curriculum are not really courses, but rather criteria that attempt to combine “ways of knowing” with “knowledge.” Nine criteria in all are listed: “1. Inquiry, abstract logical thinking, critical analysis; 2. Literacy: writing, reading, speaking, listening; 3. Understanding numerical data; 4. Historical consciousness; 5. Science; 6. Values; 7. Art; 8. International and multicultural experience; 9. Study in depth.”
Concerning the need for “historical consciousness,” the report notes:
We carry within ourselves the seeds of historical consciousness and experience: we grow older and know that we were younger; we have a history. So does everyone and everything else. The more refined our historical understanding, the better prepared we are to recognize complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty as intractable conditions of human society. The student with a sharply honed historical consciousness knows that everything is not what it seems to be, that what should be a simple solution to a simple problem will not work because unexpressed historical forces and traditions lie just beneath the surface waiting to be awakened. Such a student does not believe everything read, becomes a cautious skeptic, learns to recognize that events occur sequentially, and that the sequence matters. A consciousness of history allows us to impose some intellectual order on the disorder of random facts. . . . Facts do not speak for themselves: meaning must be drawn from them by minds soundly trained, nurtured to recognize their opportunities, experienced in making the connections and grasping the complexities that history piles up around us. Historical consciousness helps to make the world comprehensible.
The AAC report comes in the wake of two recent others: William Bennett’s To Reclaim a Legacy (see Perspectives, Feb., 1985), and the National Institute of Education’s Study Group report, Involvement in Learning (see Perspectives, March, 1985). In 1983 the National Commission for Excellence in Education focused national attention on the schools when it claimed that our schools were beset by a “rising tide of mediocrity.” The schools study—and other studies and enquiries that are still appearing—has made secondary education in the states a national issue. The reports on postsecondary education in 1984-85 promise to do the same for colleges. A survey of the American Council on Education released in March states that six of ten colleges are now reviewing their curricula, looking at quality, general education requirements, and the skills and knowledge that students should possess on graduation.
Enquiries concerning the AAC report, Integrity in the College Curriculum, should be addressed to: Association of American Colleges, 1818 R St. NW, Washington, DC 20009.
* The Project’s Select Committee is composed of the following educators: Arnold B. Arons, Prefessor of Physics, Emeritus, University of Washing!on; Ernest L. Boyer, President, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; David W. Breneman, President, Kalamazoo College; Carleton B. Chapman, Professor and Chairman, Department of the History of Medicine, Yeshiva University; Martha E. Church, President, Hood College; Elizabeth Coleman, Professor of Literature and Humanities, New School for Social Research; Harold L. Enarson, Senior Advisor, Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education; Paul R. Gross, President and Director, Marine Biological Laboratory; Richard Kuhns, Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University; Arthur Levine, President, Bradford College; Theodore D. Lockwood, Director, Armand Hammer United World College of the American West; Robert H. McCabe, President, Miami-Dade Community College; Charles Muscatine, Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley; Leonard Reiser, Fairchild Professor, Sherman Fairchild Center for the Physical Sciences, Dartmouth College; Gresham Riley, President, Colorado College; Frederick Rudolph, Professor of History, Emeritus, Williams College; Linda B. Salamon, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, Washington University; Jonathan Z. Smith, Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago; Mark H. Curtis, Select Committee Chair, President, Association of American Colleges.
