Report by William Martin

Chair of the Curriculum Reform Committee to the General Faculty

December 4, 1996

Charge to the Committee
Members
Differences in the Meaning of "General Education"
Possible Formats and Prospects for Reform
How Faculty Will Be Involved


Charge to the Committee
Our charge was to develop a program of general education, and not to overhaul the entire curriculum, although some changes in the curriculum may well be involved. We've been given two years to come up with a proposal. This charge flows from a sense that our curriculum, while perhaps not bad, is still less than it could be. We are working closely with our colleagues, with students, with alumni who tell us what it was that they wish they had learned here, and with employers who tell us what they wish our students knew when they hire them, so that we might do something worthwhile, even something admirable. We have no settled notions as to what such a program might look like. We have looked at a lot of curriculum programs that we've been able to lay hands on and a they are a bit daunting.

Committee Members
Last spring our committee was appointed jointly by the President, Provost, and Faculty Council. I will go over the list of members so that you will be able to contact any of us about the committee's work. The members are

ext. 4871
Brandon Bidlack student member 630-8607
Sid Burrus Computer and Electrical Engineering ext. 4020
Priscilla Huston Special Assistant to the Provost ext. 4007
John Hutchinson Chemistry ext. 3469
Carol Quillen Historyext. 2269
Walter Isle English ext. 5606
Ben Lee Anthropology ext. 2583
Kathy Matthews Biochemistry and Cell Biology,


These are good people with considerable experience in thinking about curriculum.
Differences in the Meaning of "General Education"
We have found that people have many different ideas about what general education means. For some, it's a matter of content that everybody should know: foundational concepts and facts in humanities, social and natural sciences, engineering, and aesthetic disciplines concerned with knowledge and understanding of cultures in an increasingly transcultural world. For others, general education consists of skills: developing skills in writing, speaking, quantitative reasoning, moral and ethical reasoning, and exposure to various technologies involved in research and education. For others, there are combinations of these in which students work independently or collaboratively to help them prepare employment, graduate or professional school, and a lifetime of learning.

Possible Formats and Prospects
There are several ways of accomplishing theses goals: small freshman seminars, large foundation courses, core curriculum plans, programs that are tailored specifically to individual departments or divisions, and required credit distribution systems. Some of these are quite exciting but wouldn't work at Rice; others seem quite plausible for our situation, our resources, the size and quality of our faculty and students, the strength of our programs, our location in Houston, and so on. Given our strengths, we think it might be possible to devise approaches no one else has implemented. We've been impressed also that in schools where they've taken this pretty seriously, many of the faculty feel rejuvenated, and while they were reluctant at first, they got truly excited by some of the possibilities. We're now ready to take the next step.

How Faculty Will Be Involved
Shortly after the beginning of the next semester, we're going to ask you to join our conversation. We're going to send a brief questionnaire offering various conceptions of general education and asking you which ideas come closest to your own. This will be a fairly short questionnaire. We hope everyone will respond and give us comments on some basic aspects of general education programs.

In addition, on paper or by e-mail or on the web we will offer illustrations of what other schools have created. This will be done to stimulate your thinking, not to tell you that you have to choose among them. Some clearly wouldn't work at Rice; others might work fairly well. Looking through them may cause you to come up with something new. We hope to hear from all of you who take seriously your responsibility as scholars and educators, who care about the young people in our charge, who are concerned with this community, and who are good and decent people. In responding to this document we also want you to tell us what you are already doing that might fit into a program of general education and to think about what your division, and what your department, and what you might be able and willing to contribute. We need to know what costs might be bearable in terms of personnel and what kinds of resources might be needed to justify your contribution. We've not been offered a blank check [at this point Martin looked at the President to make sure that a blank check was not forthcoming], but we have been offered reasonable assurance that we're not working in a zero-sum situation.

Each one of the members asked essentially the same question when we were invited to be part of this committee: "Is this serious and can something really significant happen?" I believe I can tell you that it is and that it can. When we've had an opportunity to ruminate over your responses, we plan to come back to you in meetings of various sizes, perhaps involving whole divisions, clusters of professors across departments, and so on. At same time, we want to have a number of meetings with students, perhaps students and faculty together. Some facilitators and speakers may also be brought in. But under no circumstances do we plan to sit in our meeting room and come up with a packaged program and present it to you in the spring of 1998.

You'll be kept abreast of what we're doing and given regular opportunities to contribute to that process. In addition, we're going to develop a web site that will enable you to communicate with us and with a lager community.

We don't expect to achieve unanimity, but we do hope to achieve a degree of consensus that will make Rice a better place for students, for faculty, and for those who come after us. It takes time to do this sort of thing, so we need to get going. We'll be in touch. We encourage you to encourage your colleagues to participate.

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