Word: curriculum
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...when the Columbia College faculty instituted a required course in Contemporary Civilization, sometimes referred to by current students as "philosopher of the week." Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago from 1929 into the '50s, started a more ambitious program, a four-year, totally prescribed, liberal arts curriculum to fight what he once called "the peculiar brutality and aggressive stupidity with which a man comports himself when he knows a great deal about one thing and is totally ignorant of the rest." Like Columbia, Chicago wanted its students to share a common intellectual experience and hoped to insure...
Outside help is available, however. Northwestern, Syracuse and Johns Hopkins have all recently won large grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to hire faculty and develop programs for their general education experiments. A Mellon spokesman says the foundation has no set policy of helping curriculum experiments, but considers aiding institutions that present strong educational plans...
...liberal arts school of the State University of New York at Binghamton, has not yet decided what will replace its old Nat Sci, Soc Sci, Hum program, but H. Daniel Cohen, acting dean of the college, says the faculty is considering three options. One is an eight-course core curriculum for all students; another would let students choose among five or six sets of eight-course curricula; the third option (which Harper calls the Harvard Plan) would be a three-area distribution requirement with a limited choice of courses...
Many observers are reserving judgement on the Core until Harvard develops specific courses because they realize the strength or weakness of a liberal arts curriculum lies in the individual courses and not in broad guidelines. Choosing to reform courses and not guidelines, a Johns Hopkins Physics professor, Gordon Feldman, is leading an experiment to develop four interdisciplinary courses that students can use in the next two years to fulfill general education requirements...
More than that of any other school, Northwestern's new curriculum resembles the Core. Last spring, just days before Harvard voted in the Core, Northwestern substituted a six-area distribution requirement for a four-area one. The new program adds the study of values to the traditional Soc Sci, Nat Sci, Hum triad, and sets up historical studies and formal studies (math and quantitative reasoning) as independent course areas. The study of values and history mirrors features in Harvard's Core that the Faculty proudly points to as special innovations. Formal studies is Dean Weingartner's pet project because...