I’m incredibly grateful to teach at an institution where I have enormous amounts of practical autonomy in scheduling and designing my courses. We don’t have a centralized bureaucracy or committee that reviews and approves new courses except for those designated as satisfying a writing requirement. For the most part, departments are the only administrative structure to review new courses or major changes to an existing course.
The major limits on any of us here have involve the structure of our departmental curriculum and the number of FTEs we have in a department. If the department builds a highly sequential structure for its major and only has three or four FTEs, then those faculty won’t have a lot of room to design new courses. In my department, we don’t have a sequence and we have a fair number of lines, so we have a lot of room to try new courses, thankfully.
I was thinking about this freedom a bit over the weekend after a faculty retreat, because one of the topics we considered was our institutional-level approach to general education. All the small groups of faculty at the meeting seem to have gone over a lot of the ‘classic’ approaches to general education: a core curriculum, first-year seminars, a set of required interdisciplinary courses in the first semester, a substantial system of designating a number of required competencies or skills and connecting those to specific courses, a single shared cohort-building course taught in many sections in the first year of study, etc.
I like all of these ideas and I can think of institutions where they seem successful. I’ve done external reviews or spent time at institutions with one of these various approaches, and read reports or assessments of others. The only thing I’m absolutely sure about any general education design that goes beyond open-ended distribution requirements is that it absolutely has to have some form of demanding quality control.
That’s hard to do right; it’s hard to build a quality control system that is itself high-quality, that comes from the faculty and is subject to faculty governance. It’s not a task that can be left to academic administration, who will inevitably pull the system away from its intellectual and pedagogical underpinnings towards whatever managerial trend is sweeping through higher education bureaucracies at a given moment. But it’s also not a job that you can leave to the normally well-functioning decentralized norms of faculty life and just assume everything will turn out for the best.
When a faculty as a whole call for designing general education courses of some specific kind, or want to tag courses with the responsibility of teaching a competency or skill that the faculty have collectively decided is important for all students to learn, they have to find a way to guarantee the results live up to the intent—and that they will stay that way over time.
Otherwise, what almost inevitably happens is that shared courses that are supposed to be very important to the education of all students and express a shared vision of faculty get ceded to the faculty who are either willing to teach them or are available to teach them. That subset of the faculty will include highly motivated and gifted teachers who are intellectually prepared to be stewards of the shared vision, but it will also include people who are adrift, who misunderstand the idea of the course, or whose departments are desperately trying to pawn off to someone else because their courses are badly under-enrolled. First-year students are a vulnerable population in that sense because they generally haven’t plugged in to the campus underground and learned which faculty their peers recommend avoiding if possible.
The same is true for courses tagged as teaching some basic skill or competency, whether it’s writing or quantitative reason or data science. High-enrollment departments under tremendous pressure often won’t want to lose a core faculty member to teaching a gen-ed course, so these kinds of requirements often end up in the hands of faculty who aren’t particularly good at teaching the skill in question. I’ve heard from undergraduates at other institutions about their disheartening experiences in those kinds of courses—the course designated for writing taught by a professor uninterested in writing who provides no feedback, the course designated for exploring ethics taught by someone whose last encounter with the concept of ethics was watching “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” in grade school.
In practical terms, this is why a lot of faculties considering a revision of general education end up deciding not to bother, because staffing the quality control structures is almost as difficulty as staffing the courses themselves. Do you appoint a single faculty director? That works well when you can find someone with a strong vision of the particular gen-ed program and good leadership skills, like Roosevelt Montás, but I think they’re in short supply. Do you empower a committee? That will be a committee that has a lot of work to do, and it will have to be done diligently.
On reading this, a student (or parent or member of the general public) might ask, “Hang on, don’t you have to have quality control for all classes?” Sure, yes, and a lot of the regular mechanisms at the departmental, divisional and institutional level do provide that on some level. So does the internal “market” of enrollment—the (hopefully) rare professor who really is bad at teaching is someone that students work hard to avoid.
But that’s the problem. Even in a university without tenure, perhaps especially, there are still professors who aren’t good at teaching. Sometimes it’s because faculty who can teach a particular subject that is much in demand are simply in short supply, sometimes it’s because that non-tenured faculty member has protectors. In states like Florida, I think soon enough it will simply be because the bad teacher will recite a loyalty oath to the Glorious Governor and faithfully prattle whatever orthodoxy is being demanded this week.
I don’t think it’s profitable to focus on “the bad professor”—an anecdotal figure who functions like “welfare queen” and other mythical sorts as an excuse to ruin systems and professions that are working pretty well. Let us say instead that you need something like quality control for a general education system, especially a new one, as a way of continuously re-synchronizing that system to the goals that faculty have agreed upon. A curriculum is subject to packet loss precisely because it’s built on a decentralized network; you need a mechanism for error correction.
The problem really is that almost all institutions engaged in the consideration of new curricular designs are also governed by austerity thinking, and hence, every possible mechanism of that kind dies before it can be proposed because it seems like an extravagance. So institution after institution launches some bold new innovative! redesign only to find that five years later students grouse about how it’s not doing any of the things it was supposed to do and it’s becoming the place that faculty who are underenrolled (for whatever reason) get sent to teach.
Redesigns are good. Rethinking general education is necessary. But doing it right means baking in something systematic that will secure a tight fit between intention and outcome in any such redesign. Which means dedicated resources and a generous vision of how to supply them.