We are totalitarians

The curriculum of Gettysburg College has many flaws; it has been referred to as a camel built by a committee (which I think is redundant - isn't a camel an animal built by a committee?). At the core of all its many problems is a fundamental flaw: it is a totalitarian curriculum. The curriculum is the Soviet economy; the cluster is the Volga, the hideous spawn of the state-controlled automobile industry.

Ok, here's what I'm thinking. For want of a better term, let's call the standard off-the-shelf liberal arts college curriculum a Liberal curriculum. It seeks to impart a broad general education to all students while letting each individual student pursue his own interests - "breadth and depth". It respects tradition, but invigorates it by connecting it to modern issues and interests. It is minimalist: apart from a small number of requirements (his social obligation), the student is given a lot of freedom.

Advising under the standard curriculum is simple and flexible. A minimalist approach to advising is simply to remind the student of the requirements and sign the necessary forms. The advisor can do his job without necessarily believing that the curriculum is the right curriculum. He is free to tell the student "look, four language courses is an idiotic requirement, but it's the law, it must be obeyed." No harm done. Many faculty members desire to take advising to the next level, seeking to get their advisees to understand the importance of the various elements of the curriculum - "taking four language courses hellps you become an enlightened global citizen." Huzzahs and pats on the back to those advisors.

Our curriculum seeks to create of the student a "New Man". The goals of the curriculum are not to give students some contact with lots of different areas of study; they are to cause the student to be intentional about his studies, to be able to integrate the different components of his studies, to appreciate different modes of inquiry, to become informed global citizens, to appreciate diversity in all its (to be precise, two) forms. And that's not all: the curriculum does not work unless the faculty advisors accept those goals and are prepared to regurgitate them to students. Under our curriculum, I am not doing my job unless I am enlightening students as to the reasons they are to understand the four (not three, not five) modes of inquiry characteristic of academic studies. It does not do for the advisor simply to inform students of the requirements under the new curriculum, because to do so is to allow the student to be non-intentional in his approach to course selection. The designers of the curriculum understood the change it required in the faculty's mode of thinking - hence the re-education camp we were made to attend a few years ago where we learned the importance of linking course goals to curricular goals to means of assessment.

One can criticize our curriculum because it's a pile of crap. I think there are five modes of inquiry, not four, and I think that what's important for a first year student to understand is content, not epistemology. I think "science and technology" is no more important than "religion and society" or "culture and politics". And I think the way to integrate one's thinking is to have a minor in an interdisciplinary program, not to engage in a wild night of cluster f***ing. But the more fundamental criticism is that our curriculum is only workable in the way its creators intended if faculty allow their brains to be reprogrammed to accept its principles; being sensible people, most faculty members do not allow themselves to be reprogrammed; consequently the curriculum is doomed to failure from the outset.