Is the SCU proposal in line with best practice? A resounding "yes"

An article New Definition for Liberal Education by Scott Jaschik published in Inside Higher Education summarizes a new AACU report calling for college curricula that... look a lot like what the SCU committee is proposing for the core at Santa Clara. Integrative and interdisciplinary learning is the proper counterweight to the specialization of majors. We don't serve students well by encouraging "bad dabbling" which is what many distribution requirement-oriented cores do (we've all heard the story of the student who takes Chem 5 in the summer and sleeps through every class and barely passes).

Ed Glaeser again on the Scientific Method in the Core

Now that the rubber hits the road at Harvard, Glaeser tries mightily to change the direction of the revision... from an article in the Harvard Crimson:

A thorough general education requirement on the scientific approach to society would require two courses. First, students should take a course that teaches the crafting of rigorous hypotheses. This could be a class on evolutionary theory and human nature, psychology, political theory, or even economics. The key requirement should be a focus on rigorous theory about mankind. I tend to think rigor improves with mathematics, but I am perfectly willing to accept that there are verbal substitutes.

Second, students should take a class on evidence and statistical inference. This could either be pure statistics or empirical tools taught through the lens of a particular topic. Decent citizenship of the world is incompatible with statistical ignorance. A Harvard education must train people to separate compelling evidence from froth. Statisticians do have a comparative advantage in this, but I can readily imagine great core courses taught by Florence Professor of Government Gary King or Ford Professor of the Social Sciences Robert J. Sampson teaching students empirical methods with a focus on politics or sociology. The analytical reasoning component of the proposed system includes such courses but comes up short of mandating them. While other methods of analytical reasoning like logic are important, a statistics-oriented course should be required.

The scientific method should not be an afterthought at Harvard and it should not be confined to the physical sciences. Whether Harvard students are going to be running non-governmental organizations in Africa, hedge funds in Greenwich, or even academic institutions in Cambridge, they will need to analyze situations and process data. In considering a new system of general education, the Faculty should embrace the scientific methodology that will enable students to do this effectively.

Core Revision Proposal available

The Core Committee's proposal has been sent out via email in PDF format. If you want to cut-and-paste because you really want to rewrite a paragraph or two, here is an online version. This version does not preserve all of the formatting, but is perfectly legible.

"Spock, we're only human..."

Bones McCoy of Star Trek always had a mild expletive before that, but since we're modeling civility on this blog I thought I'd leave it out. What did he mean? We have children, we teach classes, we go to movies... and putting final touches on a draft proposal just doesn't happen automatically... we're looking at end of the week...

What kind of courses enable a student to learn the Scientific Method?

The Scientific Method is a common learning goal of most core curricula around the country. Of course we want our students to understand this most important achievement of scientists. How best to ensure that understanding? Are hands-on experiments in laboratories the only way possible?

Here is a syllabus from psychology that addresses the scientific method.

A graduate course in political science at Duke... is this not the scientific method?

A UCSD grad course in social science research methods.

A hilariously over-ambitious UC Berkeley course in advanced econometric methods for undergraduates... by a great researcher, but really, could more than a handful of undergraduates succeed here?

SCU proposal out next week

We are trying to put the final touches on a proposal that will have minimal typos and maximum clarity, for distribution to faculty early next week, to then begin our next round of feedback and revision.... We look forward to your comments.

Stanley Fish writes about our jobs...

Stanley Fish's blog on the New York Times is great as provocation.

Of course, before you can do your job, you have to know what it is. And you will not be helped by your college’s mission statement, which will lead you to think that your job is to cure every ill the world has ever known – not only illiteracy, bad writing and cultural ignorance, which are at least in the ballpark, but poverty, racism, ageism, sexism, war, exploitation, colonialism, discrimination, intolerance, pollution and bad character. (The list could be much longer.) I call this the save-the-world theory of academic performance and you can see it on display in a recent book by Derek Bok, the former and now once-again president of Harvard. Bok’s book is titled “Our Underachieving Colleges,” and here are some of the things he thinks colleges should be trying to achieve: “[H]elp develop such virtues as racial tolerance, honesty and social responsibility”; “prepare … students to be active, knowledgeable citizens in a democracy”; and “nurture such behavioral traits as good moral character.”

Fish says all he can do is "academize" these virtues, not achieve them. As a great many comments to his blog suggest, this is a deliberate misunderstanding of what universities do. Critical thinking about these virtues is exactly what is meant, at the university, by achieving them. What does Fish think that Socrates was trying to do when he engaged his community in reasoned dialogue. Was he a simple moralist? Still, Fish's broader point, perhaps clumsily made, is that some professors think that moralizing is the same thing as academizing. Some students that I advise have told me that they have had the following experience: (1) they expressed the opinion that raises in the minimum wage were perhaps not the "no-brainer"* way to reduce poverty; (2) the comments are received with stunned hostility by a faculty member; (3) discussion is ended. The point is, even if raising the minimum wage in the United States is an effective way to redistribute income to reduce poverty, it is not the only way (an earned income tax credit might be more effective, say), and the point of learning in the classroom is to find out why it might be effective or ineffective in particular places and times.

*On the "no-brainer." Vice-President Cheney's recently remark, accurately quoted, apparently, that "dunking" people in water was a "no-brainer" if the purpose was to save lives... well, it just shows why we need Ethics requirements more than ever, right?

Resources for understanding what quantitative literacy is...

A St. Olaf's site gives summaries of QL at a good group of universities. There is no great consunsus, everyone seems to be muddling about.

A sample assessment test from Whittier suggests, to me, that QL is almost absurd as a college course. All of these questions are items that a student should pick up in a normal course of study with a reasonable set of distribution requirements, including a math requirement.

Michigan State University's final report on QL.... nice set of learning outcomes. They call for a QL Foundations course (rememdial math plus other stuff) and then Applied QL courses through the majors... interesting.

What makes for a great lecture?

Not necessarily active learning. But then again, we can't all be like Richard Feynman...

Responsibility and engagement

As part of my own academic work on Sudan and Darfur I keep coming across the word 'responsibility,' in the context of the general responsibility to protect that is increasingly becoming a rhetorical norms for the world community. Empirical studies are lacking on whether the incidence of humanitarian interventions are on the rise or not; one of the problems is that under the Cold War the two powers took care of their clients and the problems of their clients, while under the new order the U.N. and regional organizations are now doing that work, to an increaing degree, and of course the nature of conflicts changed to more violent and civilian-targeting civil wars.

I find it interesting then that the theme of responsibility and engagement is also preoccupying academia and curricular revision. The AACU has launched a new initiative called Core Commitments to get 20 schools onboard to create and pilot some new ideas in this area. Their website is a good introduction.