Word: northwestern
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
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...
...student at Harper says sarcastically of the proposed requirements there, "Some people are under the impression that this is going to be an Ivy League college someday." A student at Syracuse said his college's plan would lead to a "ridiculous, arbitrary core." But student newspapers at Stanford and Northwestern lauded proposals there...
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...
...unwillingness to compromise recently helped defeat proposed curricular reforms at Yale and Princeton. Many educators find no contradiction between the ideal of a single core of knowledge necessary for an educated person, and the fact that virtually every group of educators comes up with different specifications for that Core. Northwestern's Weingartner says, "there are many good ideas floating about. We don't have a tradition in which being educated is definable...