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Tuesday, October 17, 2006
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A Faculty Dedicated to The Curriculum as a Whole "What has gone wrong with the secular university?" asks the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, from a Catholic perspective. He's not, he says, complaining that the secular university isn't Catholic; he's complaining that the secular university isn't a university. It's a flimsy, fragmented sort of thing, a welter of specialized and unrelated courses which offers students no coherent conception of human nature, history, and culture. Anxiety about tenure moves professors toward conformity with established, specialized disciplines: "[L]ong-term adventurous risk-taking and unfashionable projects tend to go unrewarded, and are therefore increasingly rarely undertaken." Anxiety about grades and a career keep students risk-averse and conformist too. ...[W]hatever pattern of courses is taken by an individual, it is unlikely to be more than a collection of bits and pieces, a specialist’s grasp of this, a semispecialist’s partial understanding of that, an introductory survey of something else. The question of how these bits and pieces might be related to one another, of whether they are or are not parts that contribute to some whole, of what, if anything, it all adds up to, not merely commonly goes unanswered, it almost always goes unasked. And how indeed could it be otherwise when every course, even when introductory, is a course in a specialized discipline taught by a teacher who may be vastly ignorant of everything outside her or his own discipline? Each part of the curriculum is someone’s responsibility, but no one has a responsibility for making the connections between the parts. He proposes a tripartite curriculum: One element is mathematical and scientific, extending beyond physics to the chemistry and neurophysiology needed to understand recent discoveries about the brain. Another is historical, situating the history of ideas in their social, political, and economic contexts. And a third consists in linguistic and literary studies. All three have a philosophical component: philosophy of mind and body, the philosophical questions raised by different aspects of our past history, the interpretive and evaluative questions posed by our relationship to other cultures. So the faculty needed to teach this curriculum would consist of mathematicians, physicists, some types of biologists, intellectual, social, and economic historians, teachers of English and of one or two other languages and literatures, anthropologists, and philosophers. But it would be crucial that this should be a faculty dedicated not only to the teaching of their own discipline but also to the curriculum as a whole, a faculty with strong interests in and a worthwhile knowledge of some disciplines not their own, so that they, and not only the students, were able to formulate and pursue rival and alternative answers to the questions that give point and purpose to such a curriculum. The problem is a circular one. Graduate schools are specialization hothouses producing academics unable to integrate the particularities of their education into a larger intellectual world. Many professors express a weirdly complacent lack of confidence in their ability to understand, much less judge, the work of professors even in somewhat related fields. Institutionally, such professors are loathe to teach courses outside their limited range of expertise; and indeed in many schools there's a low prestige attached to professors who regard themselves to some degree as generalists, and who enjoy taking on new courses that make them stretch. The idea, on the contrary, is more and more intensive cultivation of your modest acreage. There's no way to get the sort of integrated curriculum MacIntyre's after under current conditions. The structure of training, hiring, and promotion in academia would have to undergo radical reform. |