Word: generality
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
Some schools are merely tightening their general education requirements without substantially altering their form. Berkeley's Letters and Sciences program will require the Class of '83 to fulfill a math requirement stressing logic and quantitative reasoning as well as a foreign language requirement. The school, which already requires American history and American institutions courses, is also modifying its Nat Sci, Soc Sci, Hum distribution requirement to make students take courses in both areas outside of their major...
...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...
Unlike most schools, Harvard has long kept its general education courses separate from its interdepartmental offerings, thereby avoiding many interdepartmental squabbles. Others do not have the resources to develop a completely separate set of courses for gen ed. But even Harvard has not completely escaped the problem of academic politics, which complicates general education reform. Atlantic Monthly says departmental power struggles and the ensuing need for compromises between competing interests ensures that no single, clear vision of educational priorities guides faculties. "Somewhere in the profusion of competing interests, the goal of the pursuit of knowledge was submerged," says Alston Chase...
Since the Core was passed only last year, the extent of influence it will have on other schools is not yet clear. If officials at other institutions revising their curricula are familiar with any other general education program, it is usually Harvard's. But sometimes they tend to feel bitter about what they see as Harvard's undeserved limelight. Nevertheless, phone calls continue to pour into University Hall requesting information on the Core. Schools as unlike Harvard as the University of Tampa and the University of Puget Sound are considering core curriculums. As Riesman notes, "The affluent started out wearing...