Back to the Main PageMr. Flippen, members of the Commission, I'm pleased to be here this morning to discuss with you issues relating togeneral ed, the core curriculum, and quality. I can assure you faculty in the Commonwealth are committed to quality instruction, scholarship, and service. Indeed, the high regard with which Virginia's system is held is directly attributable to its faculty, who are the system's very lifeblood.
I'd like to lay out for you a set of principles to consider when thinking about gen ed. I take it as a given that general education is valuable. If we merely prepare students for near-term employment we will have failed in our mission. Our task is far more serious, to nourish lifelong patterns of learning and community participation that will help our students to become and remain engaged in the world around them. I also take it as a given that general education, while important, is but one goal of a curriculum; competence in a substantive major is also key. As my Faculty Senate colleagues noted in an op-ed piece earlier this year, "faculty have always debated the appropriate role of practical/specific skills versus general/cultural learning in a college education." My point here is simply that both are important, and that the curriculum reflects multiple legitimate goals.
What principles would I suggest to you to help frame your thinking about general education?
First, cores should be tailored to address the unique missions of each institution, not one-size-fits-all. One strength of Virginia's current system is its diversity. This diversity would be undermined by national-or state-mandated central planning that forced the same set of requirements on each school.
Second, faculty are in the best position to articulate, implement, monitor, and update the core at each institution. We are, after all, the producers and conveyers of the knowledge. Faculty, being a contentious lot, are unlikely to agree on all the particulars of any curriculum. We are united, though, in our belief that the process by which the curriculum takes shape must be guided by faculty. We are open, of course, to input and evaluation from sources outside the academy, but this input is most properly made through existing, faculty-based channels (for example, the Core Curriculum Committee at my own institution, Virginia Tech).
Third, cores are dynamic, constantly evolving. They always have been and always should be. The world our students face today is different from 30 years ago, and will be different 30 years hence. Therefore, in its particulars, there is no gold standard from the past against which today's cores should be judged. The core from each institution should be, and is, continually evaluated.
Fourth, cores exist as a coherent whole, not as a set of isolated courses. I am often struck by people's failure to appreciate what I call the ecology of the university - that is, its complex interrelationships. For example, ad hoc recommendations are made that faculty teach more, with little apparent appreciation of consequences for the generation of new knowledge, economic development, or extramural funding. With reference to the curriculum, we all probably have courses we think no literate person should do without, and I'm equally sure that if we combined these lists it would completely consume our already crowded 120 curricular hours. When we make recommendations about individual courses, particularly ones we would require of everyone, we should ask, first, whether the broader aims of this course are already being met within the existing core, and, second, what will be the trade-off in terms of opportunities foregone within the existing core.
Finally, beyond specific intellectual content, cores convey "transferable" skills such as how to create, retrieve, and communicate knowledge, how to think critically, and how to write. These skills can be gained in diverse content courses. Thus, there can be multiple paths to the same broader endpoint.
I offer these broad guidelines within the 3-minute constraint I have been given, and hope you will find them helpful as you work to ensure the continuing quality of our precious system of higher education.
Posted: December 18, 1998
By The
Educational Policy Institute of Virginia Tech
sjanosik@vt.edu