Word: deane
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Educators at U.S. institutions that have just changed or are now changing their general education programs, say that over the years the purpose of general education requirements has been lost through options and exemptions for students and lack of guidelines about liberal education for faculties. Rudolph Weingartner, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, says Northwestern's old four-area distribution requirement assured only that students would take whatever courses in the various departments fit their schedules, without any concern for fashioning a coherent education...
...need to differentiate themselves, if only slightly, from other schools in order to attract students. But change is risky because a school making the wrong choice may lose students and have to close. "If you get empty buildings, you wind up as a Holiday Inn," says Howard Solomon, dean of undergraduate studies and academic affairs at Tufts...
...widespread return of basic skills requirements like math, languages and writing, prompts some observers to say colleges are moving "back to basics." Roderic B. Park '53, dean and provost of the College of Letters and Sciences at Berkeley, says educators dislike the term "back to basics" because "it implies that you have joined a movement of dinosaurs who don't have modern liberal education in mind. It's a movement that extends from good intentions to some very conservative ideas." Nevertheless, with high schools providing increasingly uneven preparation, college faculties are realizing they must teach students "with the short attention...
...school are trading in their old three-area systems for more finely-tuned divisions. Harper College, the 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...
...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 he thinks lumping math in with science allows students to avoid taking one or the other. Harvard's Core task force, chaired by James Q. Wilson, Shattuck Professor of Government, originally called for a separate math requirement, but the suggestion was defeated in the final version, much...