{"id":117,"date":"2009-04-14T13:14:23","date_gmt":"2009-04-14T18:14:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2009\/04\/14\/thoughts-on-core\/"},"modified":"2009-04-14T13:14:23","modified_gmt":"2009-04-14T18:14:23","slug":"thoughts-on-core","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2009\/04\/14\/thoughts-on-core\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on core"},"content":{"rendered":"

The University of Richmond is currently considering various options for changing the required courses for first-year students.\u00a0 For over a decade now, all first-year students have been required to take a two-semester core course<\/a>, which is taught in many sections by many faculty members, but which has a common syllabus in which everyone studies, talks about, and writes about the same Important Texts.\u00a0 Proposals have been made to change core, possibly replacing one or both semesters of it with first-year seminars on a wide variety of different topics, so that both instructors and students could choose to study topics of particular interest to them.<\/p>\n

I’ve had a number of discussions on these options with my colleagues, including several members of the committee charged with developing them.\u00a0 In at least one case, I think I utterly failed to make a colleague understand my point of view, and since he’s a very smart guy, I conclude that I explained myself poorly.\u00a0 Here’s my attempt to do better.<\/p>\n

I agree with the general proposition that it’s a good idea to require first-year students to take rigorous<\/em>, writing-intensive<\/em><\/strong> courses in which they engage with big, important ideas<\/em>.<\/strong> \u00a0 These are all goals of core as presently constituted.\u00a0 But there’s another aspect of core, namely that all students should simultaneously engage with the same<\/em><\/strong> big, important ideas — that is, that all of the 30+ core sections should read the same books.\u00a0 I’m completely unconvinced of the merit of this, and I think that there are big disadvantages associated with it.\u00a0 Something like the freshman-seminar model, in which students in different seminars study different things, seems to me better in virtually every way.<\/p>\n

I’ll get into detailed arguments below.\u00a0 First, though, I want to make one thing very clear: I don’t think that core as it exists is a bad thing, just that it’s not the best thing we could be doing with the resources at hand.\u00a0 If we were talking about replacing core with nothing, I think I’d be opposed to that replacement.\u00a0 But I think we can and should replace core with something better, and I think that a set of first-year seminars would be such a thing.<\/p>\n

To me, the main disadvantage of core is that few faculty members have expertise in all or most of the various areas studied<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

I don’t think that most proponents of core dispute this fact, but many deny its importance.\u00a0 The argument goes that the point of core is to “engage with” the texts, and to use them to get practice thinking about big, difficult ideas.\u00a0 The instructor is not supposed to be an expert but rather a facilitator in this process of intellectual maturing, so expertise doesn’t matter.<\/p>\n

I don’t buy this.\u00a0 Presumably the texts in core were chosen because the ideas in them are actually important and worth understanding.\u00a0 Those ideas are in many cases also difficult to understand.\u00a0 Someone who’s spent a lot of time studying Nietzsche, or Plato, or Darwin, or many of the other core texts, will be better able to facilitate students’ understanding of these difficult ideas than someone who hasn’t.\u00a0 In each case, there are fruitful modes of thought for engaging with the ideas, and other modes of thought that are not fruitful.\u00a0 A first-year student engaging with these texts needs a guide who can steer them in the fruitful directions.\u00a0 That is, they need an instructor who’s got expertise.<\/p>\n

If I put in a huge amount of effort over a long time, maybe I could reach the point where I could do a barely adequate job guiding a student through Nietzsche.\u00a0 But with the same amount of effort (or less) I could do a great job guiding the student through Galileo. \u00a0 Which is a better use of faculty resources?\u00a0 Which gives the student a better experience?<\/p>\n

(Incidentally, people have told me that I’m selling myself short in the above statement.\u00a0 I honestly don’t think I am.\u00a0 I have many flaws, but a low opinion of my own intellect is not one of them.\u00a0 I think I’m a pretty smart guy.\u00a0 I just don’t think that being smart is enough to make up for a lifetime of not<\/em> studying something.)<\/p>\n

A related issue is that core as presently taught is largely housed in the humanities, with relatively little participation from other parts of the university.\u00a0 This year, roughly half of the core instructors are from departments having to do with languages and literatures; if you combine those with history, philosophy, and the arts, you get about 3\/4 of the instructors coming from the humanities broadly construed.\u00a0 There’s one instructor from mathematics, one from leadership, and none from the natural sciences or business.\u00a0 Maybe that’s OK, but I think it’d be better if the first-year core courses were spread out more broadly.\u00a0 I don’t know for sure that that’d happen with a first-year-seminar model, but the odds have got to be better.<\/p>\n

Now let me discuss a few of the arguments I’ve heard in favor of core:<\/p>\n

1. The intellectual climate of the student body as a whole is enhanced, because all students campuswide can discuss the same body of work.<\/p>\n

In principle, I guess that’s possible.\u00a0 I’d like to see some evidence that it actually makes a significant difference. Do first-year students actually discuss the core texts with others who are not in their core class?\u00a0 Does that add to the intellectual climate more than the alternative, which is students having a bunch of different intellectually rigorous experiences that they can discuss with their friends?\u00a0 Personally, I doubt it.\u00a0 I think that exciting, rigorous, demanding course work has the potential to improve the intellectual climate, but I’m not convinced that there’s significant value added in that course work being uniform across campus.<\/p>\n

If you have actual data to suggest otherwise, please show it to me.\u00a0 (If you have anecdotes, on the other hand, please don’t.\u00a0 I’ll make a deal with you: I won’t mention my anecdata if you don’t mention yours.)<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0 The particular ideas in these particular texts are so important that all students must read them in order to be considered educated.<\/p>\n

In fairness, I’ve never encountered this argument firsthand; I’ve just heard it by hearsay.\u00a0 So maybe nobody really believes this.<\/p>\n

Anyway, the problem with this argument is that there are literally hundreds of texts as important as the ones on the core syllabus.\u00a0 If\u00a0 a student can’t consider herself well-educated without reading, say, House of Mirth<\/em>, then surely she can’t consider herself well-educated without reading <\/em>Adam Smith, <\/em>Galileo, Dante, Dickens, Mary Wollstonecraft, Lao-Tzu, Hume, Einstein, and so forth.\u00a0 (By the way, I don’t mean to pick on House of Mirth<\/em> — it’s one of my favorite novels.)\u00a0 The scholarly world is full of big, important ideas.\u00a0 We can have a system in which students and faculty can choose from a broad range of these ideas, while still guaranteeing that everyone is grappling with big, important ideas.<\/p>\n

3. The fact that all core sections study the same texts acts as a sort of “quality control”: in a seminar system, it’d be harder to assure that all students were getting an equally rigorous experience.<\/p>\n

We can if we choose impose uniformity of expectations on seminars.\u00a0 We can mandate a certain amount of writing, and we can have a faculty committee vet the syllabi to decide if the topics and readings are hard and significant enough.\u00a0 If we do that, I don’t see that the quality-control issues are any worse than with core as it exists now.\u00a0 Once again, if there’s any non-anecdotal evidence about the degree of uniformity of core expectations, I’d be interested to hear about it.\u00a0 (It’s taking all my self-control to abide by my earlier promise to keep my own anecdotal evidence to myself, by the way.)<\/p>\n

The issue of quality control comes up in other places as well, of course.\u00a0 Take the general-education requirements, for example.\u00a0 In order for a course to be designated as meeting one of the field of study requirements, its course description must be approved by some faculty body, and then after that we trust our faculty colleagues to behave professionally and do what they’ve promised to do.\u00a0 I don’t see why the quality-control issues are significantly different for a first-year seminar program.<\/p>\n

To summarize, I’m strongly in favor of a demanding, writing-intensive, first-year experience for students, in which they engage with difficult, big ideas.\u00a0 But I think we should choose a model for that experience in which students have a wide variety of different big ideas that they can choose from, rather than all students having to study the same thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The University of Richmond is currently considering various options for changing the required courses for first-year students.\u00a0 For over a decade now, all first-year students have been required to take a two-semester core course, which is taught in many sections by many faculty members, but which has a common syllabus in which everyone studies, talks … Continue reading Thoughts on core<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}