New curriculum

When the current curriculum collapses under its own weight (and you know it will), I am prepared to offer the following curriculum reform proposal:



The following are the requirements for students at Gettysburg College:



(1) 32 credits.

(2) A major in a discipline of your choice, comprising 11 credits, give or take.

(3) An interdisciplinary concentration in the program of your choice, comprising 11 credits, give or take (by program I mean things like ES, AAS, CWES – all the things that started out as interdisciplinary programs but some of which evolved into departments).

(4) A 2 course, 2 credit sequence taken in the first year called “World Civilization”, team-taught by faculty in all departments.



No. 3 replaces all of the crazy interdisciplinary, clustering, STS, portfolio crap that the current curriculum imposes on our students. In choosing their major-concentration combination, students would surely be “intentional” and would inevitably understand the different “modes of inquiry” in the different disciplines.



No. 4 means that for a year or so, the College faculty needs to have a series of discussions about what are the essential bits of knowledge that we want all our students to have. At some point the call would go out to each department and program to identify a week or two worth of material on the “big ideas” in that field of study. Economics, for example, might decide that Smith, Keynes, and the power of incentives might be the big ideas we want to convey; biology might decide that evolution and genes is most important; AAS might decide we really ought to talk about the impact of the slave trade. All of these big ideas would be folded into a historical narrative. Departments and programs would contribute faculty to these courses, so each section would be team-taught by oh I don’t know, 10 different faculty members. The course would be taught big-lecture style, perhaps associated with some small seminar-style tutorials. World Civilization takes care of all the “distribution” requirements in the current curriculum. It would be a difficult course, a trial-by-fire for all of our students. They would have to READ BOOKS!



Nothing else. Clean and simple.