Now More than Ever: Liberal Education and Curricular Reform at Yale

Peer Review, Winter 2004 by Laurans, Penelope

In the fall of 2001, on the occasion of the tercentennial of the University, President Richard Levin called for a study of the education in Yale's oldest component, the undergraduate college. No full-scale study of Yale College education had been undertaken since 1972. Since that time, changes that were new in the early 1970s-notably the opening of the college to women and to all sectors of American society-have been fully incorporated into the life of the school. Changes scarcely foreseen thirty years ago have transformed Yale in other obvious ways. Among them, the computer revolution has made intellectual problems soluble in ways unimaginable a short while ago while also changing the way we teach, write, and (arguably) think. Thanks to technology and a host of other forces, the points of the globe arc in touch with each other to a degree that no citizen of 1972 could have envisioned. In addition, stability in the institution's leadership (Yale's president was celebrating his tenth anniversary as president and the dean of Yale College his eleventh as dean), recent physical renewal of the campns, a score of other changes in the larger society, in the landscape of high education, and within Yale itself mack: this a ripe moment to reconsider the curriculum. And so, over a period of sixteen months, a committee: involving thirty faculty members (four from the junior faculty), four recent graduates, and eight current undergraduates examined the character of education in Yale College. The committee's report was released in April 2003.

The committee began with an historical overview of Yale and other univcrsitv curricular reviews, and realized from reading these that too many reports end up on the trash heap of time. The most recent Yale reports-those of 1952 and 1972-tailed to achieve their goals because a small committee proposed radical alteration without ever thinking of the possibilities of accomplishing it. Our much larger committee desperately wanted this new report to succeed, and so we focused hard not only on what education we wanted for our students, and how to identify and achieve consensus on that, but also on the particular nature of Yale. We examined what worked and did not work in what we already have here, and especially how to actually accomplish change within our culture. As much as it identifies and responds to a world ol change, therefore, the committee also spent a considerable amount of time thinking about how Yale can do what it already does better than it now does it.

The committee gave extensive consideration to some initiatives-a requirement in moral reasoning, for example, and credit for community-based learning, which is now popular-and, for a complex of reasons too lengthv too address here, rejected them. There was some sympathy for the idea of integrating career planning into liberal arts learning, which is certainly already done by a portion ol our students. But in the cud, there was an "allergy" to the "practicality" and "utility" that many other curricular reviews have endorsed. This too may have something to do, for better or worse, with Yale's own institutional nature. What follows, however, focuses on the initiatives we recommended rather than thusc we rejected.

Now More than Ever

"What we must want for our students," Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead writes in tho introduction to the report on Yale College education, "is that in the unforeseeable succession of worlds students will live to inhabit they will be able to summon the powers of mind to understand (and help others to understand) . . . how to act in it in creative!, thoughtful ways. In our judgment, the student best eqnippeel for the future will be a person litteel with multiple skills that can be brought to bear in versatile ways on changing situations: a person who keeps finding new uses for things already learneel and keeps gaining new learning from the facts he or she encounters."

This conception of liberal arts education may have an old fashioned ring, but a year's reflection led the Yale committee to conclude that this education is not only not passe but may be even more valuable lor the future than it has been for the past. Knowledge has burgeoned almost unimaginably, beyond the capacity of any curriculum to cover it. Learning how to learn, gaining confidence in one's capacity to learn, ami acquiring the sheer joy of learning are still at the heart of a liberal arts education, and they remain the best preparation for a useful an el happy life.

Yet while the discipline of the mind cultivates! by a liberal arts education remains much the same as it has been since ancient time's, the world in which this mental discipline will be exercised has changed dramatically. A focus on preparatiew for global living and for a world in which science and technology rapidly transform and shape our lives is as much of a part of the report as its affirmation of the importance of good writing and the development of opportunities for practice in the arts.