The oriel common room: general education and faculty culture - Perspectives

Liberal Education, Wntr, 2002 by Robert Holyer

A FACULTY COLLEAGUE ONCE REMARKED that general education revision has become a fad. I replied that a stronger argument could be made that it has become a permanent institution. By one reckoning, the current phase may be dated from the late 1970s with the study of general education reform by the Carnegie Foundation, However, Ernest Boyer and Arthur Levine (1983), the writers of that study's report, identified two earlier revivals of interest in general education. The first began during the First World War and continued through the Depression when it was eclipsed by the rise of vocationalism. The second began during the latter years of the Second World War and found its symbol in the Harvard report of 1945, General Education in a Free Society. However, while discerning a certain historical ebb and flow, Boyer and Levine found general education revision to be a permanent undercurrent of higher education that displayed a remarkable continuity of interest over the decades.

Remembering that the point of any curriculum is to facilitate a certain educational experience for students, it is wise to ask: Is there any indication that this long history of general education revision or any single new curriculum has produced better-educated students? And if there is, are the results at all proportional to the efforts?

Beset by these doubts, we do not find the studies of what affects undergraduate development reassuring. In what is still the best and most thorough study of the college experience, Alexander Astin (1993,331) concludes:

One of the major surprises of this study is the relatively weak influence on student development exerted by the formal general education curriculum. There are some significant effects associated with particular curricular variables, but the magnitude of these effects is almost always much weaker than is the case with measures of either the peer environment or the faculty environment.

At the same time, if Astin's findings are even generally correct, a concern to improve a student's educational experience should not focus solely or even primarily on curricular revision. What Astin found to be far more important is a student's interaction with faculty and peers. Thus, what seems to be far more promising--even if more difficult--is serious attention to student culture and the role of faculty in student learning.

To assess the effect of the general education curriculum, Astin distinguished three different forms: the true core, the distributional approach, and the major-dominated approach. Since the distributional system is by far the most common, Astin considered four additional variables: the inclusion of courses on contemporary issues, options for individualized work, interdisciplinary work, and the degree of structure in the distributional requirements (34-35). Of these seven features the only one that has some significance for student development is the true core curriculum (334). To conclude that these other features--and many not co nsidered by Astin--have no effect on student development would be premature. Consequently, to revise a general education program to enhance student learning is not an unreasonable hope.

Faculty culture

In The Idea of a University, John Henry Newman identified another element, the influence of faculty upon one another. In attempting to realize one of the central goals of general education, to overcome the fragmentation and distortion of disciplinary specialization, Newman turned in this instance, not to the curriculum, but to faculty culture. He writes (1996, V: 77):

It is a great point to enlarge the range of studies which a University professes, even for the sake of the students; and though they cannot pursue every subject which is open to them, they will be the gainers by living among those and under those who represent the whole circle.... An assemblage of learned men, zealous for their own sciences, and rivals for each other, are brought, by familiar intercourse and for the sake of intellectual peace, to adjust together the claims and relations of their respective subjects of investigation. Thus is created a pure and clear atmosphere of thought, which the student also breathes, though in his own case only as he pursues a few sciences Out of the multitude. He profits by an intellectual tradition, which is independent of individual teachers, which guides him in his choice of subjects, and duly interprets for him those which he chooses. (Emphasis mine.)

What we have here is certainly Astin's insistence on the importance of faculty influence on students, a strong emphasis throughout Newman's thinking on liberal education. What is added is that this influence is itself shaped by the influence of faculty on one another. More importantly, in this passage at least, Newman looks to this influence rather than to the curriculum to address one of the central and abiding issues of general education: how students who study only "a few sciences out of the multitude" overcome the distorting tendencies of their disciplinary specialization. In other words, breadth of understanding, a sense of the mutual relation of the disciplines, and the more accurate view of reality that comes from seeing the connection of things may arise, not from a requirement to study all branches of learning, not even from what we now call interdisciplinary or team-taught courses, but from a faculty culture nurtured and shaped by cross-disciplinary conversation.