U.S. News & World Report, March 25, 1996 v120 n12 p57(2)
The core of the matter. (college curriculum content, core subject requirements) Alvin P. Sanoff; Missy Daniel.
Abstract: A report by the National Association of Scholars reveals that core subjects in undergraduate curricula have dropped from 9.95 in 1914 to 2.5% in 1993. Some scholars believe that colleges were forced to redesign their programs with the advent of new fields such as computer science.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1996 U.S. News and World Report, Inc.

In recent years, many of the nation's elite campuses have found themselves embroiled in conflicts over the content of the undergraduate curriculum. At Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., the controversy centered on a decision to stop requiring English majors to take a course on Shakespeare. At Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley, the flashpoint was the addition of non-Western culture requirements, leading conservative thinkers such as William Bennett to argue that Western culture was being sacrificed on the altar of multiculturalism. Says Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia University and an expert on the history of college curricula: "We are in the midst of one of the broadest debates we have ever had on what knowledge ought to be common to all people."

Now a new report by the National Association of Scholars, a conservative academic group, promises to add fuel to the often incendiary argument over whether most colleges have so watered down their curricula that they are producing graduates who lack knowledge of even the basics of Western culture. In its report, "The Dissolution of General Education: 1914-1993," the NAS examined general education--a set of required courses in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences--at the 50 universities and colleges topping the 1989 U.S.News & World Report rankings. The study looked at requirements at four different points in time--1914, 1939, 1964 and 1993--and found that the average number of mandatory courses had dropped from 9.9 in 1914 to 2.5 in 1993. At most of the schools, requirements in such core subjects as history, literature, philosophy and science had been abandoned. For example, while 38 percent of the schools had a literature requirement in 1964, by 1993 only 14 percent had such a requirement.

There has been "a purging from the curriculum of many of the required basic survey courses that used to familiarize students with the historical, cultural, political and scientific foundations of their society," the report concludes. As a consequence, says NAS President Stephen Balch, the nation is "in danger of losing the common frame of reference that for many generations has sustained our liberal, democratic society."

Different times. The S places much of the blame for a smorgasbord curriculum on campus revolts of the 1960s, a time, the report argues, "when the rage in higher education was a radical libertarianism based on notions of 'relevance' and the assumption that a special insight belonged to youth." The move from a structured curriculum was reinforced by the growing specialization of a research-oriented professoriate, whose members tried to establish their own areas of expertise and devoted less and less time to teaching. (According to the NAS, the average number of days classes were in session fell from 191 in 1964 to 156 in 1993.) In this environment, many professors saw no payoff in teaching broad survey courses that would not advance their careers.

At the same time, new academic fields such as computer science and sociology were developing. Between 1914 and 1993, the number of courses available to students at the schools in the NAS survey exploded from 14,874 to 70,901. The combination of a knowledge explosion and hyperspecialization made it increasingly difficult for scholars to agree on just what students should be required to learn.

"The world is changing so rapidly nobody is sure what knowledge is important," argues Kenneth Sacks, a deanat Brown University, which dropped all its course distribution requirements in 1970. Sacks contends that Brown students are none the poorer for the decision. A 1990 study showed that more than 75 percent of Brown undergraduates took at least four courses in each of the three major academic areas--natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities--even though they were not required to do so. The NAS argument that "somebody knows best" when it comes to curriculum, Sacks contends, is little more than "emotional nostalgia not based on reason."

Others, while acknowledging that the NAS's concerns are legitimate, fault the study for lacking historical perspective. Levine of Teachers College says the report ignores the fact that general education has been alternately embraced and rejected in the academic community for well over a century. Levine points out that an elective system championed by Harvard President Charles Eliot dominated higher education in the latter part of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century. Starting in about 1914, a push for general education began, with much of the impetus coming from those who believed colleges had gone too far in catering to student interests. One result: In 1919, Columbia University launched its famous and enduring survey course on Western thought, "Contemporary Civilization." General education fell out of favor during the Depression but flowered anew after World War II and remained popular until the '60s.

In recent years, argues Levine, there has been a slow drift back toward a more structured curriculum, despite the highly publicized controversies suggesting the opposite. Harvard reintroduced a flexible general education requirement in 1979. Students must fulfill requirements in such areas as historical study, literature and arts and moral reasoning by choosing from a list of about 100 courses. Five years ago, Oberlin College in Ohio moved from a loosely structured curriculum to one containing a series of distribution requirements in natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities.

Other schools are taking a new approach, moving from general education based on subject matter to one built around skills. Pomona College in California launched a program in 1994 that requires students to master a set of 10 intellectual skills. "We are equipping students with the capacity to be intellectually resilient," says Pomona President Peter Stanley. Among the required skills: reading literature critically, understanding and analyzing data and thinking critically about values and rationality. Students can choose from a number of courses to satisfy each requirement.

Traditionalists such as the NAS see such programs as long on flexibility and short on structure and rigor. Certainly, they do not guarantee that college graduates will have studied the great ideas of Western thought. So the debate is likely to continue unabated. Says Columbia's Levine: "It will take decades before this is all over."

Doing what's required--not much

Though the average number of undergraduate courses per institution has steadily grown in this century ...

[Data for chart is not available.]

... the average number of mandatory courses has fallen

[Data for chart is not available.]

USN&WR--Basic data: National Association of Scholars