Academia: Ten Designs

Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving

A busy week, so I couldn’t quite finish this yesterday, but here it is, a day late but hopefully not a dollar short.

Last week, I said that faculty in liberal education do need to look for structured ways to pull back towards a shared curricular vision, that when there is too much centrifugal force in a college or university curriculum, it becomes impossible to have coherent discussions within the faculty about what we collectively value. When that happens, not only do we lose one of our most important remaining domains of governance (still remaining even at some institutions where all other shared governance has been eroded away), we are increasingly exposed to insincere or malevolent readings of what we are doing together.

I suggested that I could think of at least ten designs of that kind, and noted that I’d rather try to integrate my teaching and expertise into any of those ten than just settle for a status quo where I do what I want for as long as I’m able without anybody ever telling me otherwise, in a curriculum where every individual faculty member is essentially trying to preserve an individual market share of enrollments against all other faculty, or even in a situation where every department is competing against each other in that fashion.

So here’s the list. I will give a brief explanation of each, but feel free to ask for more. Many of these exist in the world of higher education already; some have existed in the past. But all of them I think are plausible in the sense that they could be explained and designed and find faculty who could teach within that framework. Some of these designs are a bigger stretch for faculty with conventional doctoral training, however.

1. Great Books in the St. John’s College model. This is not merely an introductory core humanities class or several core courses throughout an otherwise conventional electives-and-majors model (that’s Columbia University or Reed College). St. John’s design is most fundamentally non-elective: all students take the same sequence of courses that reprise the “Western tradition”, that intermingle bodies of knowledge and practice that are elsewhere separated out as disciplines. The fundamental design principle here is non-elective, a curriculum where all classes are set in advance, year after year, which takes a faculty who all agree on what that required sequence should be. In St. John’s case, it also takes a faculty who are comfortable teaching in that integrative mode, which is a big ask.

2. STEM-centric with side humanities and social sciences in the MIT model. MIT actually has a fairly substantial number of humanities and social science faculty even though there’s little question about the central identity and focus of the institution. Note too that MIT’s STEM-centeredness is not necessarily pre-professional or narrowly aimed at credentialling for a contemporary labor market, but has the basic ethos of liberal education. I think one other thing that makes MIT’s model work and be a palatable structure even for humanists or social scientists is that MIT supports a fair number of interdisciplinary institutes and centers that host faculty, which allows humanists and social scientists to be called into collaborations rather than left alone in isolated departments at the marginalized fringe of the institution.

3. Problem-based or project-based on the model of the College of the Atlantic or Colorado College. The design idea here is that students decide soon after matriculating what ideas or questions they want study and work with, and then find faculty who can teach them the skills or area competencies required to sustain that work. This takes building a faculty who are highly responsive generalists and it takes having an unusually responsive and available system for advising students—you are building a custom curriculum for every single student. I’d argue that this should mean that the faculty at such an institution should be highly compensated because adapting to such an institution thoroughly makes it hard to support the development of specialized scholarship by individual faculty, and I don’t think most problem-based or project-based institutions have succeeded at compensating their faculty adequately for the intensity of teaching that model requires or for the sacrifices to their own marketability involved. But I don’t want to go too deep in the weeds here on the practical challenges of these design concepts.

4. Integrative liberal arts 2 years, then specific preprofessional track 2 years, in the model of Ashesi University. This makes the breadth-and-depth trade-off extremely tangible and structural rather than conceptual and vague. To do this really well, I think the integrative liberal arts phase has to be really interdisciplinary—broad classes on creativity, design thinking, philosophy and critical thought, etc. and then the preprofessional tracks have to be relatively few and obviously positioned to benefit from the integrative lead in. If you do a radically integrative 2-year general education core and then there’s absolutely no attempt to consciously harness or reference that work in the preprofessional track, this design fails pretty hard—it makes students feel like they’re being forced to waste their time for two years before the real thing starts. To do this right, the business track would need to be working from classes on creativity, communication, etc., and ideally most of your faculty would be involved in both phases of the curriculum.

5. Humanities-centric with a side of STEM, or Social-Scientistic with a side of Humanities. I have to confess that I can’t really think of anything that fits the bill except maybe certain art schools like Rhode Island School of Design, CalARTS, Cooper Union and a few others for the first, and for the second, I think the New School when it started out, or maybe the Committee for Social Thought at Chicago would qualify. If anyone’s got other examples, I’d like to hear them. But it’s certainly imaginable. I might even be prepared to argue that in light of certain kinds of predictions about artificial intelligence, a student with deep experience of the humanities might be better prepared to do prompt engineering than a STEM major would be. That’s a subject for a future column, though.

6. Experiential/constructivist. I also can’t think of great existing models in higher education, though Berea College and a few others do privilege experiential or community work. I think you could think of this as the Shop Class as Soulcraft option, blending liberal arts and practical or trade education. I think this design structure would take experiential education and insist that it’s not just an option or a part of a curriculum but that all courses had to involve direct experience in the world with whatever the subject of study is. This is more of a part of standard liberal-arts curriculum than the main narratives that faculty and institutions offer, if you think about it. Any lab-based course is making a strong case that you only learn by doing. Lots of institutions have makerspaces. Many have community-based learning, and courses that have a practicum required. But to do this in a way that means all courses are primarily based in concrete material experiences but also include theoretical, conceptual and experimental work? I think that’s a plausible design that would answer in advance any questions about what the values of the curriculum were. I think also this could involve taking a trade school model with apprenticeships and stapling some form of liberal education/conceptual exploration onto it.

7. Art colony, perhaps vaguely on the model of the Penland School of Crafts, but there are other more ephemeral cases out there that kind of fit this concept. (Among them might be writers’ retreats.) I’ve already mentioned institutions like RISD, CalARTS, Savannah College of Art and Design, etc. and they probably fit the experiential/constructivist design idea as well. But here I’m thinking of an idea of a physically sequestered space for making art and design that has no highly formalized or fixed curriculum as such—where you have master artists, apprentices, etc. all resident near studios and supplies, where everyday life and culture are bundled together with the work of making art. So maybe you’d have a master potter say “hey, next week, for five days I’m doing some basic tutorials, for anybody who wants to join in”. You’d have your core faculty and then maybe you’d have visiting artists there for residencies. Students would approach both visitors and regular faculty to ask for guidance or tutorials on a just-in-time basis and maybe would work up to some kind of semi-regular portfolio review. I think it’s possible that you could expand this design idea to make it less art-centered, more broadly humanistic. (See the next concept for more.) I’m not sure you could have a social scientistic or STEM style of this design, however.

8. Conservatory/British tutorial. All depth, no breadth—a matriculated student just does the one thing with great intensity and a lot of responsibility for their own progression through regular practice, independent reading, etc. Definitely not for everyone—for a lot of people the conservatory model ends up being psychologically punishing as well as intensely high risk since it’s usually tied to a tournament economy where if you don’t win the top spots, there’s almost nothing left. But at least there’s little question about what the curriculum should be and what the purpose of the institution is.

9. No departmental disciplines, just big broad divisional units. E.g., the administrative units that design the curricula are a handful of broad containers that have many disciplines inside of them—Social Analysis, Performance and Art, Science and Engineering, Textual and Cultural Criticism, maybe. I don’t think this resolves most of the centrifugal pull in liberal education but it does commit the faculty’s structure to making people with quite different disciplinary training and skills remain legible to one another. If you make an anthropologist, a historian, an economist and a psychologist decide together what the next hire should be, they’re going to end up either cycling through their disciplines (a suboptimal outcome, imho) or they’re likely going to start thinking seriously about combinations or interdisciplinary fields—behavioral economics, public history, economic history, etc. or they’re going to privilege subjects of study where multimodal methods and interdisciplinary inquiry make sense—public health, bioethics, and so on.

10. Standard liberal arts dog’s breakfast but with a better list of ingredients (e.g., better maps/better meta). This is probably both the easiest and the hardest option on the list. Easiest in that it is just taking a curriculum that is built around departmental and individual autonomy but asking everybody in it to create better navigation, better descriptions, better metacognitive spaces and structures, better maps, so that students can see the implicit connections, both accidental and purposeful, within the curriculum and understand in advance what they’re getting into as they study across four years and make choices about classes. To do this work, you’ve got to have faculty be talking to each other a lot, and to have that be all faculty, e.g., not a social obligation that only a small number of (likely mostly female) faculty take seriously. You’d need a better standardization of descriptive vocabulary that was embedded inside of every course design—when you launched a new class, you’d be responsible for embedding links to other existing courses and faculty inside of it, for offering metacognitive explanations of its intellectual and methodological connections to the rest of the curriculum. Every course would have to paint its Venn overlaps with other courses. In process terms that’s hard work, and I’m not sure I know of an institution that does it tremendously well, especially on a relatively faculty-led or decentralized basis. To do this work really well in a consistent way across a whole faculty would take clawing back some less important administrative load that’s been piled on the faculty, and doing that very deliberately and assertively.

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