The New Challenge

EEVERYTHING was going well for the Core Curriculum back in May 1979. In their first year of operation, the Core committees had attracted 85 courses to the fledgling program--53 of them new. The Core was more than halfway to its target of offering 80 to 100 courses a year, and Dean Rosovsky was ecstatic. "Under the circumstances I find it quite remarkable that we have been able to come up with the array of courses we are prepared to offer next year. I personally think it is an impressive start, and it is certainly a tribute to the willingness of the Faculty to face the challenge of the new Core Program, "Rosovsky wrote in his May 1979 report on the curriculum he had conceived.

It was an impressive beginning. Of course, the committees still had to grapple with a Pandora's box of problems--bypasses, exemptions, pass-fail options, science requirements, and transfer students, to name a few--but they had two more years to settle them. For the time being, their primary task remained finding new courses.

So the committees forged ahead into the second year. They solved a few of the nagging problems, but they added only 19 new courses to the program's repertoire. Combined with the loss of six classes for various reasons, that left the Core only 13 courses bigger than it was the year before. Not a disaster, but--in light of the first-year achievements--very disheartening.

What happened? As with anything new, the uniqueness of the Core faded after a while, and enthusiasm about it waned. Faculty members who were excited by the Core hopped on the bandwagon at the beginning, and those who were not seized by the euphoria of the program--the majority, it seems--remained complacently in their departments. To use Rosovsky's terminology, a good number of professors met the Core's "challenge" that first year, but many more were either too lazy or uninterested to pay attention.

Many faculty members working on the Core, including Rosovsky, insist that the target figures for the number of courses in the program were never etched in stone. But almost everyone involved in the implementation process agrees that the Core must offer more classes to provide an adequate range of choices. At this point in the program's development--almost half way--the professors who find themselves attracted to it are already teaching or planning Core courses. That means that to produce more courses, the Core subcommittees--on whose shoulders that responsibility rests--must alter their modus operandi.

For the last two years, the five subcommittees--one for each core division--have met on a semi-regular basis to review professors' course proposals. They examined proposed syllabi and reading lists, compared suggested course outlines with the Core guidelines, and often recommended ways to change the proposals so that they conformed with Core rules. The subcommittees frequently returned proposals to professors for revision. When a subcommittee found a course idea to its liking, it passed it along to the Core standing committee, which often sent proposals back to the subcommittees for reworking and occasionally rejected ideas outright. In the first year, for example, when the standing committee approved 85 courses, it gave the thumbs-down to about 20.

The process worked well the first year because the subcommittees had a plentiful supply of courses proposals to peruse. The second year, the number of ideas fell drastically. And the prospects for this year are dismal. Therefore, the subcommittees now face a "new challenge," as Edward T. Wilcox, secretary to the standing committee, says. They must "go out and attract courses and people who didn't arrive in the natural course of events," he explains.

To do that, the subcommittees must become more aggressive. Instead of meeting every now and then to discuss course proposals that fall into their laps, they have the responsibility to take a close, critical look at the offerings under their jurisdiction. Where they see deficiencies--the lack of a class on some aspect of ancient or medieval history in Historical Study B,or the general dearth of courses in Science B, for example--they should create course proposals, find qualified instructors, and then do everything they can to convince professors to teach in the Core.

PINPOINTING the problem spots in each Core area and developing course ideas may require some subcommittees to hold marathon brainstorming sessions. They should also send a questionnaire to students--especially freshmen and sophomores--asking what they would like to see added to the Core. This is not to imply that the subcommittees--which each include two students--would be incapable of doing the job themselves. But suggestions from students who must select from the Core offerings could evolve into workable course ideas.

The subcommittees probably will succeed in coming up with new course ideas because most of their members recognize the Core's course development problems. The obstacle will be finding professors willing to teach in the Core. The burden of adding courses to the Core, therefore, also falls on those Faculty members who refuse to venture out of their departments. To provide students the widest range of choices in the Core, the subcommittees have to start raiding those departmental refuges. But at the same time professors must be more receptive when the subcommittees come knocking at their doors.