The following "Resolution of Understanding Regarding Curriculum Reform" will be offered for the faculty's consideration at the faculty meeting on November 4. Though prepared by faculty members not on the Ad Hoc Curriculum Review Committee, it is being put forward with the committee's full knowledge and approval and is in accord with the committee's intentions and expectations regarding implementation of the proposed changes in the curriculum.

Date: 23 Oct 98

RESOLUTION OF UNDERSTANDING REGARDING CURRICULUM REFORM

The Rice faculty, now assembled for the second reading of a motion to adopt the plan of the Ad Hoc Curriculum Review Committee, wishes to record three points concerning its understanding of the plan in question. This is done for the sake of providing guidance to those who will select the courses that qualify as university-wide distribution requirements, should the Ad Hoc Committee's plan be adopted. Accordingly, the faculty requests that this resolution, once adopted, accompany the President's charge to the committee.

First, it is the faculty's understanding that the Ad Hoc Committee's plan does not presuppose that excellence in undergraduate teaching can be called forth by fiat or tailored to any fixed list of criteria. Although the plan calls for as many as 25 to 50 new courses to be developed over a five-year period, and warns that established courses initially found acceptable may later be disqualified, the faculty takes it for granted that newly-designed courses will not be presumed inherently superior to existing ones, and that many long-established courses that already have fine reputations will qualify for university-wide distribution credit under the new plan.

Second, the report explicitly mentions some criteria for selecting distribution courses. Those criteria are understood to be suggestive, not exhaustive. They do not constitute a checkoff list to be mechanically applied. Apart from the requirements that courses have substantive content and be accessible to non-majors, none of the criteria explicitly mentioned are so vital as to "trump" all competing considerations. Interdisciplinary courses, for example, are not inherently superior to those that bring a single disciplinary approach to bear upon multiple positions, problems, or theories. Every course proposed for credit must be evaluated on its own merits, in light of considerations that are numerous and will vary from case to case.

Third, the discretionary authority that this plan bestows upon the yet-to-be-created Committee on General Education is a high trust. Those who serve on the new committee will betray that trust if they succumb to either of two dangers. One would be to err excessively on the side of inclusiveness, qualifying so many courses for credit that students are deprived of the institutionalized guidance about educational priorities that any plan of curriculum reform must provide. The other danger would be to exclude courses on unduly narrow grounds, whether political or methodological. An affirmative vote for the plan now before us signifies the faculty's confidence that members of the new committee will carry out their trust in an ecumenical manner, shunning orthodoxies of all kinds and taking with utmost seriousness the legitimate claims of both innovation and tradition.