Disciplinary dangers. (Perspectives).

EDUCATORS INTERESTED in liberal education fully recognize that disciplines look at different aspects of the world of knowledge or have different ways of looking at the same topics. That recognition is part of what we hope to impart in a liberal education. In fact, the importance of being able to understand and integrate different disciplinary perspectives is the primary rationale given for distribution requirements in general education programs. AAC&U's Contemporary Understandings of Liberal Education explains the learning goal "understanding multiple modes of inquiry and approaches to knowledge" as "the emergent way of talking about the 'distribution requirements' that for much of the twentieth century dominated--and in many institutions still do dominate-- general education programs." A newer addition to many general education programs is our interest in combining perspectives, deriving both from our recognition of the complex challenges of the twenty-first century and from the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of scholarship. Contemporary Understandings highlights "multidisciplinary and integrative learning designed to create an awareness of relationships, tensions, and complementarities among ideas and epistemologies" as one of the "newly emphasized learning modes."

Students entering college may be at the intellectual stage of accepting their own fairly single-minded view of the world as a true representation of the world rather than as a particularized view conditioned by their historical period, culture, and place in nature. This is one way of posing the challenge of broadening our students' horizons, a challenge that Bucknell University understands as part of our mission. In the early l990s, as we were developing our new general education program, the planning committee asked faculty to describe shortcomings of our entering students that such a program should address. A shortcoming salient to many faculty was that entering students "don't know where they are in time or space." Partly in consequence, our general education program (the Common Learning Agenda) was designed with an interdisciplinary first-semester Foundation Seminar encouraging openness to considering multiple perspectives--multiple perspectives both as an intellectual skill necessary to critical thinkin g and as a foundation for a distribution requirement and for later interdisciplinary courses, particularly a senior capstone designed to pull the threads together.

However, despite the rhetoric, in twelve years of overseeing the planning process and implementation of the Common Learning Agenda, I have found that faculty members' own proprietary disciplinary loyalties get in the way of our attempts to construct such a liberal education for our students; in contrast, faculty persist in their desire to offer majors that require more and more of students' undergraduate credits. Similarly, in my reading for this article, I found that Contemporary Understandings cited, as one of the obstacles to advances in liberal education, the continuing belief that disciplinarity is sufficient background for advanced work. A related AAC&U paper, General Education: The Changing Agenda (1999), lists the need to confront growth of the major as a challenge for general education reform. Recalling misunderstandings on my own campus, I think there are several factors that often tip the curricular scales in favor of disciplinary interests.

Disciplinary Interests

Our own particularized disciplinary attitudes prevent our appreciating the approaches of other disciplines. Through ignorance of other disciplines, we often fail to see when we are being narrow-minded. Even in my own case, when I tried to re-energize the stalled general education planning by finding common ground among faculty and making the case for multiple perspectives, I inadvertently stepped on disciplinary toes by using language appropriate to my discipline yet discordant to some in the creative arts. I wrote, "I want our students to be able to get outside their own intuitive perspective--to recognize where they are situated in nature, in history, among the world's cultures, and in a pluralized American society...." Whereas, to me as a social psychologist, intuition represents the unexamined biases of self-interest, stereotypes, prejudices, etc., I was informed by a studio artist that a professor in the arts not only values, but also seeks to put students in touch with, the intuitive. Unfortunately, in attempting to espouse all students' being exposed to a variety of disciplinary perspectives, I excluded one type of perspective as legitimate because of my ignorance of other disciplines.

As my tenure as dean lengthens, my perspective is less limited by my original disciplinary training. But faculty members are more able to continue living within the assumptions of their own disciplines, perhaps extending their understanding to those other disciplines that share common ground. Only in special circumstances, such as our College of Arts and Sciences curriculum committee, are faculty disciplinary assumptions directly challenged. There, I've heard humanities professors proclaim without embarrassment that ambiguous questions were the most appropriate measures for our first assessment of the Common Learning Agenda because they would yield the most meaningful answers, and I've seen social scientists and scientists react with horror at the prospect of the unreducible data that would result. In discussions of the nature of the liberal arts degree, scientists were surprised that social science and humanities faculty did not accept their argument that science majors must start with students' first semest er and require more courses than would be necessary to achieve an equivalent level of disciplinary expertise in the social sciences or humanities.

After twelve years of weekly curriculum committee meetings of successive groups of faculty members serving three-year terms, I am convinced that misunderstandings among the disciplines are frequent and are not becoming any less so. I will return later to the fact that some degree of cross-disciplinary understanding usually results from the discussions of the curriculum committee. There the members have been selected to maintain quality and comparable standards in every major, but also to preserve the Bachelor of Arts as a liberal arts degree and to ensure that all students encounter general education requirements and flexibility outside the major appropriate for a liberal education. But, outside this group charged with understanding other disciplines, narrow disciplinary thinking often rules the day.

Specific Challenges

Faculty outside of explicit interdisciplinary partnerships may resist appropriation of their disciplinary expertise. On our own campus, some philosophers resisted other faculty addressing critical thinking as part of the goals of the first-semester Foundation Seminars. And, some history faculty responded negatively to the expectation that courses meeting the Disciplinary Breadth distribution requirement address in some way the history of the discipline. Those who were not truly historians could not be expected to do so adequately, they claimed; and the historians should not be expected to instruct their non-historian colleagues. Similarly, those whose disciplinary courses deal with ethics or creativity probably still are not convinced of their colleagues' ability to handle these complex topics. Nor are faculty whose professional identities involve issues of diversity comfortable when their less-expert colleagues list their courses as fulfilling our Human Diversity requirement. These stated concerns reprise th ose made about composition by English department faculty when we instituted a Writing-Across-the-Curriculum program in the early 1980s--in spite of the subsequently demonstrated ability of our faculty across all disciplines to teach writing.

Faculty seem to lack confidence in their own ability to teach outside what they have defined as their own disciplinary or interdisciplinary field. Let me insert here that the increase in the number of faculty members with interdisciplinary identifications does not necessarily indicate that faculty interests have become broader. Many interdisciplinary fields, such as cell biology/biochemistry, represent a rather specialized intersection of two broader fields. Even broader multidisciplinary fields, such as women's studies and international relations, tend to take on characteristics of a discipline--such as developing doctoral programs and journals with that identification, and the corresponding shared assumptions. Faculty who are approached to teach interdisciplinary Common Learning Agenda courses, such as the capstone, often protest they could not teach a broad, integrative course without teaching outside their expertise.

Faculty development activities using examples of faculty colleagues who have accomplished the goals of such courses are helpful, and team teaching is a solution that generally benefits all team members. This is especially true when it is supported by outside funding such as our Hewlett Foundation grant to support teams' summer work in developing courses to address our requirements on Human Diversity and on the Natural and Fabricated World. Departments often are more creative when meeting general education goals could result in a new position (or the return of position not fully justified on the basis of enrollments). For example, the coordinator of the Common Learning Agenda and I unsuccessfully sought volunteers for capstone seminars on broad topics of general interest, such as "food" and "shelter," that could integrate many disciplines. The feasibility of such broad courses was demonstrated only when the theatre and dance department accepted my invitation to make a similar capstone seminar on "clothing" pa rt of the expectations of a new position in costume design. But, it continues to be an uphill battle to get some faculty to model the "broad analytical and transferable habits of thought" and "life-long interest in learning" outside their own discipline that are part of our goals for our students.

Political/structural factors favor disciplines over broader educational interests. The fear that an instructor needs a great deal of background in a discipline to adequately deal with it, even within the context of a general education program, echoes the concern that disciplines have for their own majors: They fear that if they are "forced" to take an unwieldy number of courses to meet general education requirements, students will not have enough courses to be experts in the major discipline.

Thus, the process continues as described in Harriet Sheridan's compelling 1990 essay, "How the Major Killed General Education." Notwithstanding recent efforts to incorporate general education goals into the major, Sheridan argued that disciplines are formidable opponents to general education. The rise of the major fostered development of departments, which are primarily interested in the well-being of the major. They are self-perpetuating power centers of our colleges and universities.

Other authors have noted the relatively recent appearance, during the twentieth century, of specialized academic majors and have discussed the inevitable "collapse of the disciplines" (Menard, 2001) and the "fossilized structure of majors organized around disciplinary departments, even though... it is nearing extinction" (Kimball 1996). Menard argues that confidence in disciplinary knowledge has been undermined from within by antidisciplinary forces such as feminism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism and points out "the essential arbitrariness of disciplinary boundaries." Kimball argues that majors fail to provide either foundations of well-defined disciplines or instrumental advantages for students. However, Kimball also admits that faculties cling to the fossilized structure of disciplinary majors and that new fields continue to aspire to disciplinary status.

Not presuming the imminent demise of either majors or disciplines, AAC&U's Contemporary Understandings challenges departments "to rethink the ends of education to assert their own accountability for forms of learning that prepare students to navigate a kaleidoscopically complex world" and asserts that "the separation between general education and the major is no longer useful." Given the power of departments and the current competition for resources within colleges and universities, even that moderate argument could fall on many well-socialized and uncomprehending ears.

Without hoping to do away with majors or disciplines or imagining the possible multidisciplinary departments of the future, we can more simply accept Wong's (1996) argument that we need to reconnect our specializations and develop on our campuses "structures and incentives to encourage and reward continuous conversations at the intersections of the varied specialties."

Institutional Support

Individual campuses can support the national efforts to enhance liberal education by adopting or enhancing campus structures that promote students' broader interests. Existing agents within both the administration and faculty can fulfill this function. The academic administration is one structure charged to represent the totality of students' academic experiences rather than just the portion represented by their majors. Those of us responsible for liberal arts colleges, whether they stand alone or are part of a larger university, spend a great deal of time justifying the breadth of a liberal arts education to external constituencies, to potential applicants, and increasingly to our own students and faculty. Given the limited understanding of liberal arts education (see Hersh 1997) and the decreasing proportion of students pursuing liberal arts degrees (see Oakley 1992), that is time well spent.

Even in other types of institutions, whether or not there is a separate administrator for the general education program, the value of the liberal learning parts of students' education must be a consistent and committed message from the deans, vpaa/provosts, and presidents, if more specialized interests are not to prevail. I once thought the "finger in the dike" to be an appropriate metaphor; more recently, I have come to realize that academic administrators also have to help build the dikes. Opportunities for faculty to support liberal education have to be created and reinforced by administrative support, faculty positions, course releases, summer stipends, and in the tenure, promotion, and salary systems of the institution.

Faculty Remedies

Moreover, a core group of faculty who focus their attention on the broader educational needs of students also is needed. Perhaps the point is, again, about perspectives. At my own institution, members of the curriculum committee have long been expected to set aside or rise above their disciplinary backgrounds and departmental interests, in order to take the perspective of the college as a whole. Like jury members who accept their role as being fair evaluators within the parameters of the law rather than acting on their own attitudes, the curriculum committee members accept this charge during their tenure on the committee.

We were fortunate at Bucknell that our broadly representative planning committee forwarded the Common Learning Agenda proposal to our broadly representative curriculum committee for their discussion and eventual presentation to the whole college faculty, thereby giving ownership of general education to a continuing and powerful committee. The Common Learning Agenda process fortuitously made explicit the curriculum committee's responsibility for proposing, implementing, and assessing general education, whereas previously it had dealt primarily with proposed changes in majors.

In the succeeding years the curriculum committee has recognized the ever-increasing aspiration of the departments to add courses in the major; it has explicitly defined itself as the protector of students' liberal education in opposition to this pressure for expertise and students' own tendency to accept specialization as a way of reducing anxiety about postgraduate success. Its credibility and power derives from the fact that it remains the body overseeing proposed changes in majors; thus, it has power over departments. The approval process for curricular changes has become the dike that keeps liberal education from drowning under pressure from disciplinary and interdisciplinary specialization.

Our fortuitous committee evolution could be duplicated more intentionally on other campuses. Disciplinary assumptions and departmental loyalties will not soon disappear. Yet, charging a representative group of faculty to transcend their disciplinary backgrounds and assume responsibility for students' being liberally educated seems to counter those pressures in a way that guarantees serious attention to students' broader educational needs.

WORKS CITED

Gaff, Jerry G. 1999. General education: The changing agenda. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Hersh, Richard H. 1997. Intentions and perceptions: A national survey of public attitudes toward liberal education. Change. March/April.

Kimball, Bruce A. 1996. A historical perspective. In Nicholas H. Farnham and Adam Yarmoliosky, eds. Rethinking liberal education. New York: Oxford University Press.

Menard Louis. 2001. College: The end of the golden age. The New York Review of Books. October 18.

Oakley, Francis. 1992. Community of learning: The American college and the liberal arts tradition. New York: Oxford University Press.

Schneider, Carol G. and Robert Shoenberg. 1998. Contemporary understandings of liberal education. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Sheridan, Harriet W. 1990. How the major killed general education. Proceedings of the Forty-sixth Annual Meeting of the American Conference of Academic Deans, January 10-13.

Wong, Frank F. 1996. The search for American liberal education. In Nicholas H. Farnham and Adam Yarmolinsky, eds. Rethinking liberal education. New York: Oxford University Press.

EUGENIA P. GERDES is dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of psychology at Bucknell University.