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The Liberal Arts at The College of William and Mary:
A Common Curriculum For 21st Century LeadersThe mission of the College is to prepare young men and women to assume positions of leadership at the highest levels of our society..The undergraduate curriculum at the College must be designed to ensure the accomplishment of that mission The Society for the CollegeJanuary 29, 2012www.societyforthecollege.org Executive SummaryThe College has recently gone through an exercise in asking itself what it means to be a liberal arts institution in today’s world and is now evaluating its curriculum to incorporate that discussion. The Society for the College offers here a proposal for fundamental reform of the curriculum intended to preserve and advance the idea of a liberal arts education. Our proposal further provides the College an opportunity to distinguish itself from other institutions by offering a curriculum designed to ensure that students graduate with the kind of comprehensive understanding of the world necessary for them to assume leadership roles in society at large.We begin with a traditional definition of the liberal arts: that form of education that is worthy of a free person. Translated into terms applicable in today’s society, we conclude that a liberal arts education should provide a solid grounding in the skills and knowledge necessary to assume a practical and effective leadership role in public and private life. Students at William & Mary expect to become leaders, persons of consequence, and the College’s mission is to prepare them for that role. The curriculum itself must incorporate that definition and purpose. The curriculum can and should include room for the specialization of a major, built atop a foundation of essential general knowledge, with some room for experimentation. We leave specialization to the academic departments, and experimentation to individual students. Our mission here is to define the general subject matter with which we believe a future leader in our society should be familiar. In essence, we recommend replacing the current GER system with a stronger, deeper, and more focused set of requirements incorporating a specific list of courses. The result would be a common curriculum to be spread out over 15 credits in each of the first two semesters and 12 credits in each semester of the sophomore year. This paper incorporates two proposals: an answer to the question of what constitutes the liberal arts and an expression of that answer in the form of a concrete curriculum proposal. We urge the College to incorporate our thinking into the curriculum review process and for the College to articulate a new and reinvigorated interpretation of what it means to be a national liberal arts university in the 21st Century. A conscious attempt to give solid form to the liberal arts in the modern context would make the College stand out among its peers and competitors. Indeed, we believe that our proposed common curriculum would attract much favorable attention from prospective applicants. More importantly, however, it would lead to the graduation, each year, of hundreds of new alumni fully prepared to lead their society well into the future. IntroductionThe College has recently gone through an exercise in asking itself what it means to be a liberal arts institution in today’s world and is now evaluating its curriculum to incorporate that discussion. The Society for the College offers here a proposal for fundamental reform of the curriculum intended to preserve and advance the idea of a liberal arts education.Discussion: What is the Purpose of a Liberal Arts Education?The curriculum must be deliberately founded on an articulated and defensible statement of the meaning of the term "liberal arts." Otherwise, the College cannot claim to be a liberal arts institution.We begin with a traditional definition of the liberal arts: that form of education that is worthy of a free person. Taken literally, this definition might seem utterly irrelevant in a free and democratic society, which might suggest to some that the entire concept is irrelevant. In reality, however, the core concept underlying the definition is still enormously relevant, particularly to an institution like William and Mary. In classical society, a liberal arts education was only available to individuals of considerable means. By definition, slaves were excluded, and the vast majority of free citizens had no access to formal education, much less to training in the liberal arts. Because an education in the classical liberal arts - grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy -- was available only to the elite, the liberal arts were in fact the skills and body of knowledge required of a leader in classical society. By that definition, the concept of a liberal arts education is not only relevant to the College today but should underpin and underlie everything the College does and should most especially form the basis of the undergraduate curriculum. To examine the question from a more utilitarian perspective for a moment, what is the value of a William and Mary degree? Why do students attend the College in preference to other institutions? In essence, students go to college to better themselves, and they choose William & Mary because it presents them with the best option for achieving that goal. Moreover, in early adulthood none of them knows where life will lead, no matter how devoted they may be at that age to a particular subject or career. So they must prepare themselves for a range of possibilities over the course of their lives. And for what are they preparing themselves when they arrive in Williamsburg? What are their hopes and dreams? It seems fair to say that few arrive in the Wren Yard aspiring to lives of mediocrity. No, they all intend to be - expect to be - have been promised that if they attend a good college they will be -- successful in any and every endeavor they undertake. They are a select group, and they plan to assault, scale, and surmount the heights of society. So what does that entail? Should the College be preparing students to be good citizens? Yes, but that surely is not enough. To be a "good" citizen is merely the basic obligation of every member of our society, no matter how favored or talented. Should the College instead be preparing students to become leaders in a self-governing society? Again - that alone is not enough. While it is surely true that the young men and women who enroll at the College are preparing to play professional or political leadership roles, that could be said of students at most of our institutions of higher education. The College, however, is a highly selective institution, and most college students attend universities of lesser academic reputation. Only 135 out of roughly 2,000 four-year institutions admit fewer than half of their applicants, and only about 50 of those admit fewer than 50% of applicants with an average SAT of 1250 (out of 1600). If those figures and reputations mean anything, William and Mary should represent something more: and we maintain that something more means preparation to perform and lead at the highest levels of our society. So we reach the same conclusion, whether considering the question in the context of how the College has traditionally defined itself or in light of the expectations of student and their parents. Students expect to become leaders, persons of consequence in their communities and professions, and the College’s mission is to prepare them to fulfill that role at the highest level. The classical definition of the liberal arts is not only relevant today, but of critical importance at William & Mary. Anyone who rejects this characterization of the liberal arts at William & Mary must, in our judgment, discharge two obligations. First, he must articulate good reasons why this characterization is inapt or mistaken. Second, he must offer an alternative characterization that improves on this one. Given the above characterization of the College’s core curricular mission, we turn to our main substantive question: What is required of a leader at the highest levels of our society? Proposal: The Ideal Content of the CurriculumAs an introductory point we will say that what is not required is a shallow understanding of a smattering of barely connected courses. An unstructured or loosely structured curriculum is hardly the best way to produce great professional or political leaders. By the same token, although some elements of the classical trivium and quadrivium remain relevant, the classical liberal arts subjects per se are inadequate to today’s world. Similarly, notwithstanding the intellectual appeal of Great Books curricula and similar programs and their value in producing prospective thinkers and intellectuals, they are much less likely to produce the kinds of leaders and public citizens William and Mary students aspire to be. What is required is a solid grounding in the skills and knowledge necessary to assume a practical and effective leadership role in public and private life. The curriculum can and should include room for the specialization of a major, built atop a foundation of essential general knowledge, with some room for experimentation. Today’s curriculum makes no attempt to define what knowledge is essential for any person, much less a prospective leader in our society. Like the food court in the Sadler Center, the GERs are a smorgasbord, an evening at the tapas bar, when a nutritious, four course meal is demanded.The Society has compiled a list of the general subject matter with which we believe a future leader in our society should be familiar. Any such list is of course open to well-reasoned revision. We offer the following list as an exemplar that is well-informed and forward-looking:
We have not attempted to make a definitive case for any of the elements in our list of subjects, and one could perhaps quarrel with some of them. But we are confident that they follow naturally and logically from our definition of a liberal arts education. And we are confident that our definition is not only sound but, as discussed earlier, also in keeping with what most students and their parents think they are paying for. Transforming the list of subjects yields the following suggested set of specific courses, which we believe should form the basis for a new curriculum at the College:
We recommend replacing the current GER system with a stronger, deeper, and more focused set of requirements incorporating the foregoing list of courses. This could be done through a common curriculum to be spread out over 15 credits in each of the first two semesters and 12 credits in each semester of the sophomore year (not including the creative and performing arts and computing requirements). This would allow up to 18 hours for classes in creative and performing arts, as well as other subjects, in the first two years. The required courses could be counted toward relevant majors and in extremely limited cases might be waived. The Principles of Applied Mathematics course could probably be waived for mathematics majors and any major that requires calculus or statistics. Most of our recommended curriculum, however, covers material that would not have been covered in high school. A typical schedule for the freshman and sophomore years might therefore look like this:
We wish to emphasize that the above proposal, from the list of subjects essential for future leadership to the proposed specific courses, is offered as a model for pursuing the College’s mission of producing professional or political leaders of tomorrow. We believe it to be a model that would be highly effective, but we welcome alternative models for achieving our common goal. A Critique of the ProposalThe specific curriculum proposal described above is an ideal, derived from first principles. Accordingly, it does not reflect current conditions at the College. To take just one example, requiring all 1400 freshmen to take a sociology course on "Media and Society" probably would exceed the capacity of such a small department. The same applies to public speaking and the theater department. There are probably many other examples. Implementing the model curriculum in its entirety would require significant changes in faculty hiring requirements and might require substantial additional resources. We recognize that immediate implementation of a radical new approach to the curriculum, in the face of the College’s financial position, may be impractical at this point.A related point raised by the proposal and the larger debate over the nature of the College and the liberal arts is the difficulty in striking the balance between teaching essential general knowledge and specialized knowledge in the major. This balance reflects a conflict between the core functions of the university: the preparation of students as leaders in society versus the pursuit of knowledge. Many faculty believe that research is more fundamental than teaching, and time spent teaching does little to help research. Ideally, students would learn by something like apprenticeship, and faculty would concentrate their efforts on working with the best prepared and most motivated students. This tends to push the balance in favor of research over teaching. The GER system implicitly addresses the matter by letting faculty teach what they want, without necessarily addressing what students need. A better way to address the issue might be to hire instructors whose primary function would be to cover the basic courses. Larger institutions effectively address it by having graduate students carry much of the burden, but that is not the model William and Mary aims for or claims to represent. And so we return to the previous point about changing how resources are allocated and perhaps requiring additional resources. In any event, the Society believes very strongly that the College must base the curriculum on a sound understanding of what it means to be a liberal arts institution. Even if practical considerations make full implementation impossible at present, the College should articulate what the ideal curriculum would look like and include as part of its strategic plan the steps required to reach that ideal. Any curriculum adopted without recognition of the correct underlying principles will not only be flawed but will tend to magnify its flaws over time, as changes are made in ignorance or disregard of the ideal. It is one thing to compromise on matters of principle in the face of reality; it is quite another to have no principles or to act on flawed principles. The Society could therefore support changes to the curriculum that do not immediately meet our preferred criteria, if made as part of a stated and deliberate effort to reform the curriculum over time. For example, the College might be able to modify the GERs to make them more closely acceptable if properly focused and with the addition of certain topics, such as the business subjects mentioned above. Even so, the list of GER courses would require much pruning, because there are far too many of them that fail to serve any meaningful educational requirement that is genuinely general. Our concern with the current GERs is that the underlying concept is at odds with the very idea of the liberal arts, as we understand it. Nevertheless, meaningful reform of the GERs, in the context of a broad and deliberate reform of the curriculum intended to move in the proper direction over time, as resources permit, would be a good first step. Having acknowledged the potential practical problems facing implementation of our proposal, we urge the College not to dismiss it out of hand. There may be ways to implement the proposal or a new approach to the curriculum based on its principles that are both innovative and cost-effective. As President Reveley has affirmed, "There is only one William & Mary." Coupling an innovative curriculum with a new financial model would be further proof of William & Mary’s unique status. The two reforms may actually be complementary and mutually supporting, if properly developed. ConclusionIn essence, the Society has put forth two proposals: an answer to the question of what constitutes the liberal arts and an expression of that answer in the form of a concrete curriculum proposal. We urge the College not only to incorporate our thinking into the curriculum review process but indeed for the College to take the lead and articulate a new and sounder interpretation of what it means to be a national liberal arts institution in the 21st Century. A conscious attempt to reinvigorate the liberal arts in the modern context and to give it solid form would make the College stand out among its peers and competitors. Indeed, we believe that properly structured, implemented, and marketed, our proposed common curriculum would attract much favorable attention from prospective applicants. More importantly, however, it would lead to the graduation each year of hundreds of new alumni fully prepared to lead their society well into the future.Contact: Andrew McRoberts ‘87 President, Society for the College andrew.mcroberts@societyforthecollege.org |
