Imagining the future citizen: can a college derive a general education program from its mission statement?

IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Benjamin Franklin counseled his readers to do the available good. If mud increases Philadelphia's miseries, and if stones can be had to cobble the streets, then one's course is clear. Alongside his pragmatic citizenship, we also celebrate in Franklin his enormous intellectual curiosity. He once rode his horse into a whirlwind, to see if his whip would cut it.

In any individual, citizenship and intellect need not imply one another. Selfless public benefactors may have no proclivity to question, and a particle physicist may bear no thought for the polity. Yet the mission statements of contemporary American liberal arts colleges tend to be similar in their aspiration to produce active citizens with curious minds.

Certainly, Franklin can be found lurking in the Mission Statement of Franklin and Marshall, a college he founded. Franklin and Marshall "aims to inspire in young people of high promise and diverse backgrounds a genuine and enduring love for learning, to teach them to read, write, and think critically, to instill in them the capacity for both independent and collaborative action, and to educate them to explore and understand the natural, social and cultural worlds in which they live."

Now, if general education is the component of the curriculum that most effectively fosters curious citizenship, then arguably the best liberal arts colleges do not direct a high proportion of their resources toward the achievement of their stated mission. Rather, faculties tend to remain federations of strong teaching and research departments. Unless a college has a visibly unorthodox curriculum that has earned the admiration or disdain of reporting deans and presidents at other institutions, its general education program will have no impact on its ranking at U.S. News and World Report.

Designing a new curriculum

In 1995, the Franklin and Marshall (F&M) faculty had little passion left for its general education curriculum. Initially, the "College Studies" curriculum, in effect since 1981, was a dedicated distribution system, in which courses met rigorous general education criteria before they were included. But, over two decades it had quietly regressed to a simple distribution system. Leading members of the faculty, sensing the need for a curriculum with an articulated purpose, urged that we undertake a revision in the light of a guiding question: "At its best, what kind of citizen might a liberal arts curriculum produce?" Our previous aim for general education had been to have students attain a degree of breadth. The new one would be to influence their future motives, actions, and attributes.

For a large part of the twentieth century, Franklin and Marshall had been a college whose survival was consequent upon its pre-professional strengths. Then, historical forces conjoined in the mid-1990s to provoke a typically prudent faculty to begin to act like dreamers. Nationally, the culture wars were cooling down, giving way to a less politicized era that would accentuate community service. Colleges and universities were feeling a new opportunism regarding their capacity to affect the moral development of their students. Locally, considerable power in the F&M faculty had passed to a generation in its forties, too young to be traumatized by the budget crises of twenty-five years earlier. Meanwhile, the endowment had grown, establishing a climate of greater financial security and a new freedom to experiment.

In 1997, after two years of deliberation, the F&M faculty voted in near unanimity to implement a new general education curriculum. The degree of teaching power they agreed to devote to extra-disciplinary general education is remarkable: F&M's new curriculum requires that students complete three extra-disciplinary courses in their first two years. As they were denied any departmental affiliation, these "Foundations" courses were to be outside the curricular marketplace in which classroom enrollments and numbers of majors translate into budget increases and new tenure lines. Motivation for any department to contribute to the program was thus idealistic, collegial, and, arguably, imprudent.

Foundations courses are divided among three categories: "Culture, Community, and Society," "Mind, Self, and Spirit," and "The Natural World." They reach beyond the disciplines to emphasize the question-forming stages of thought. Rather than grounding general education in disciplinary perspectives (such as "Introduction to Political Science"), Foundations courses address broad questions (such as "What is Justice?"). If a discipline can be likened to a lawn mower, then a Foundations course asks "What is grass and why do we maintain it?"

In the absence of explicit definition, it may prove illustrative to cite a few course titles. At the greatest level of generality, there are "Mortality and Meaning" and "A History of Space and Time." At a second level of generality, one could name "Derangement and Blame," "Drugs and Behavior," and "Science and Religion." As these titles indicate, the faculty, having rejected the constraining uniformity that a core curriculum imposes, had created a hybrid, a compromise between the consensuality (or canonicity) of a core curriculum and their own urge to pursue individual intellectual passions.

To encourage faculty creativity, governance was assigned a minimal role in the program. Each faculty member who creates a Foundations course presents it to interested peers for their comment and counsel. Once that occurs, the course requires no other official approval. A professor who insists on teaching a course that is truly idiosyncratic can be discouraged, but not denied.

The faculty seemed to agree that the present generation of American students is over-entertained and insufficiently curious. Foundations courses would convert them to the pleasures of the intellect. Also, the faculty frequently noted that the present generation of F&M students focuses intensively on vocation, and therefore Foundations ought to dramatize the intrinsic value of learning. The faculty did not guess the extent to which students may resist an education built to counter their inclinations or how little they may welcome invitations to exercise greater curiosity.

On the faculty floor, skeptics resisted the urge to vote against Foundations out of bemused admiration for the idealism of their more zealous colleagues. Some, perhaps, anticipated that they would go about their disciplinary business unaffected by the utopian monster those colleagues had created. And so, with a center of political gravity halfway between the committed and the merely acquiescent, the faculty set our to create a large number of new courses--a minimum of sixty would be needed in the program's second year. Implementation began in the flail of 1998, and within that first semester, an irony appeared. With Foundations, the faculty had aspired to nothing less than the transformation of students. But, actually, to learn to teach the broadly conceived courses they dreamt of, professors would have to transform themselves.

Faculty engagement

The Franklin and Marshall full-time faculty FTE is about 160. Assuming a stable need of sixty Foundations sections (each enrolling twenty-five students) per year, ideally, if 120 faculty participated in the program, each of these faculty members would need to offer one Foundations course every two years, a rate that does not appear unreasonable. As of fall 2002, seventy-four tenured or tenure-track faculty constituted the reliable core of faculty participants in the Foundations program. In fall 2003, that number should exceed ninety, which is substantial, but still fails short of the target of 120. Consequently, some faculty must participate at a higher-than-desired frequency.

Where will we find the remaining participants? Inevitably, some of the gain must occur through hiring. New faculty must be told, "You are being hired to teach ancient philosophy, but in addition you must be a regular participant in the Foundations curriculum." Needless to say, academic departments must consent to this expectation. The 2002 Foundations Summer Seminar (see below) generated nine new faculty participants, and the 2003 seminars are fully enrolled at fifteen. Thus we entered the 2002-03 year with 74 + 9 = 83 tenured or tenure-track participants in the Foundations curriculum. At this rate we can project that we will have ninety-two or more in 2003-04, minus inevitable departures.

Finding time to develop Foundations courses has been one obstacle to fuller participation in the program, but there are others. To some extent, the lower priority that some faculty give to Foundations reflects the fact that these courses constitute a real departure from their previous teaching experience, and they are reticent to take the leap. Thus far, the untenured continuing faculty have been underrepresented, with 46 percent now creating, or having created and taught, a Foundations course, compared to 63 percent of the tenured faculty.

Why do the untenured hang back? In some instances department chairs are discouraging them--perhaps because they do not support the new curriculum, perhaps because they are counseling them to devote their discretionary time to research. The provost has disseminated the message that untenured faculty should not avoid teaching in what is, after all, the general education curriculum of the college, on the mistaken grounds that such avoidance is a prudent strategy for gaining tenure.

Academic discipline also seems to influence a faculty member's eagerness to participate. Of the three, The Natural World category is most in jeopardy, in part due to enrollment pressures in science departments, but also by the skepticism of some scientists, who understandably believe that students learn science by doing science and that science can't be done in a non-lab course. The same system of professional prestige that discourages the creation of courses for teaching science to an audience of non-scientists throughout higher education comes into play here. One looks nationally to such initiatives like AAC&U's Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities (SENCER) program, which fosters the creation of courses that link scientific learning to complex civic issues, to encourage faculty of American colleges and universities to produce non-scientist citizens able to assess arguments about global warming, drilling in Alaska, genetic testing, or the resurgence of tuberculosis.

There are also intellectual divides within the Foundations groups. In The Natural World category, disagreements abound. From the earliest discussions on the faculty floor, non-scientists felt they had a contribution to make. For instance, an economist has taught "Measuring the Natural World," and a classicist teaches "Archeoastronomy." Such courses have met with opposition from some science faculty. In part, this opposition stems from the reasonable argument that there can be no better "foundation" for understanding the natural world than, for example, "General Chemistry I." It also stems from an appropriate worry by scientists that we are letting slip our opportunities to increase students' understanding of science. The science-with-lab distribution requirement formerly was two courses, and now it is one. Some scientists anticipated that the requirement that students complete one course in "The Natural World" category would compensate for the loss of the second required lab course. To the extent that "The Natural World" courses are not about science, and not taught by scientists, that anticipated trade-off does not occur.

A second divide lies in the Mind, Self, and Spirit category, which is peopled by two groups: (1) those relatively few humanists who are not exclusively engaged in cultural studies (the latter teach in "Culture, Community and Society"), and (2) cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind. Opportunity abounds for collaboration between these two groups, to create courses that will look at "mind" from the perspective of the individual and of society, subjectively and objectively.

An important disagreement attends the Community, Culture, and Society category. From early days, certain faculty members in this group have inveighed against deconstructionist methodologies as premature offerings for beginning students, who should experience the intellectual or cultural "construction" first. Nevertheless, courses in various post-modernisms exist and provoke no special objection from students.

Then again, contested definitions signal vitality, and when the faculty chose not to vote decisively between the extremes of a core curriculum of great books and the minimalist alternative of a few distribution courses, they created a rubric that is sufficiently encompassing to encourage new and surprising faculty partnerships.

Pedagogical business

Much pedagogical business remains unfinished. When the program reaches maturity, the questions that anchor Foundations courses should engage the minds of bright eighteen-year-olds as immediately significant. Unfortunately, while the program is unarguably meant to center on the developing mind of the student, faculty are struggling to find methods of teaching that will achieve that centering. As one faculty leader has stated: "The heart of Foundations will be the new things we learn to do in the classroom."

It is generally recognized that graduate school prepares future faculty to be members of a guild rather than models of broadly curious citizenship. It may at times be the newest faculty who face the longest journey toward becoming truly interdisciplinary teachers. How does the college help faculty to learn to teach from a broader perspective? How does it help establish in the faculty the intellectual community that was an implicit goal throughout much of the development of the Foundations program? How can we establish in the minds of students a connection between this curriculum and the rest of their undergraduate careers and their lives-to-be-lived?

The most promising news concerns collegiality. The category groups that hear course proposals are usually well attended, and there is general agreement that the opportunity for faculty to discuss course content and pedagogy across disciplinary lines is invigorating. In addition, since 1995, the faculty has agreed to meet for one day in August, just before the students' return to campus, to address in plenary sessions some aspect of the Foundations Curriculum. In August 1999, for instance, the faculty met to discuss the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin as a foundational text and to address questions of pedagogy over lunch. Of approximately 159 faculty, 100 were in attendance.

In order for the Foundations program to grow, members of the faculty must understand and accommodate one another's often-discrepant ideas of what is most important about our new way of doing general education. To address that need, we began offering Foundations Summer Seminars for faculty in the summer of 2000, one seminar for each of the three Foundations categories. Simultaneous seminars of five participants in each of the three Foundations categories take place each summer. In the seminars, faculty who plan to teach Foundations courses develop their ideas and present them to one another. Each seminar is led by a convener who has taught a Foundations course and who is acknowledged to have considerable talents as a teacher. The College offers participants a stipend of $4,000, thanks to a generous grant from the Hewlett Foundation.

Each seminar participant agrees to present his or her new course to the appropriate category group in the fall, and to teach the course the following spring. Participants represent fundamental aspects of their own discipline in the seminar discussions, to the end that colleagues can encounter new ideas and texts, learn basic principles and pedagogies of one another's disciplines, and apply new breadth of skills and understanding in their own Foundations classrooms. The conveners have also agreed to serve as gadflies on one essential point--that these are beginning students, who must be permitted to understand an issue's importance before they can share in the professor's enthusiasm for it.

The most interesting result of the summer seminars has been an ongoing process for our faculty to enrich each other's treasury of pedagogical and disciplinary approaches. The full effect upon a faculty that has already demonstrated an eagerness to collaborate could prove to be transformational. The Foundation Summer Seminars have helped establish on our campus the "communities of scholars" that Lee Shulman has so eloquently advocated in "Teaching as Community Property; Putting an End to Pedagogical Solitude" (Change, Nov. 1993: 6-7).

Fine-tuning

Five classes of students have now passed through this curriculum. It will be a decade before we can ask whether the program made them more engaged citizens, and no doubt the data will be murky then. Their immediate reaction has been decidedly mixed. Most students say they learned from and appreciated two out of their three required Foundations courses.

Students do not entirely understand the mission of the program, and, possibly, the administration and faculty have not sufficiently explained its goals. In order to address this problem, faculty in Foundations courses will begin to employ preceptors--advanced students who act as peer tutors, generously funded by the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation--partly in the hope that these preceptors can help to correct miscommunications about the context and purpose of their courses.

In retrospect, "Foundations" may have been the wrong title, for numbers of students have expressed resentment that the courses are in general so hard. Expecting that they are another version of the First Year Seminar--i.e., a transition from high school to college level work--students are not prepared to encounter a professor who is attempting to model intellectual citizenship by thinking hard about large and possibly unanswerable questions.

In their turn, faculty frequently expressed hurt that some students disliked their courses. Necessarily, at the outset, the Foundations courses were all being taught for the first time, and their untested aspect provoked student resistance. For instance, students testified that they would witness their professor run out of material and retreat to repertory from the old "Intro to Geography" class, to finish out the hour. Also, many students place confidence in the apparent omniscience of their professors. Now, suddenly, quasi-divinities were revealing two kinds of uncertainty. They were acting as the inquiring citizen rather than the academic authority and occasionally failing to hide their own insecurities as to where the course was headed.

One stumbling block should have been foreseeable. In a distribution system of general education, some students will despise lab sciences, others may dislike literature, but in principle the array of 100-level courses they take will be chosen in search of a major, which is in turn connected to an anticipated vocation. Grumbling will be unavoidable, but dispersed. Because Foundations beats no obvious path to a major, some students consider their three Foundations courses an impediment to their education.

Future promise

Franklin and Marshall's Foundations program holds enormous promise as a means of educating students for a future of intellectually acute and engaged citizenship. For the Foundations program to prevail and become a model others might imitate, the faculty will have to embrace it with near unanimity, in order that the teaching might be shared among virtually everyone. At present it is possible that the portion of the faculty who continually teach in it will grow weary, or their more skeptical colleagues will win them back to a less strenuous system of general education.

In addition, a curriculum such as Foundations will have to attract in the main new faculty who are both able and inclined to move outside their disciplines, to teach broadly, to teach for citizenship, and hence to engage perspectives that the freshly minted Ph.D., finishing a dissertation on Sanskrit words in Finnegans Wake, might find incomprehensible. Furthermore, the college's tenure standards will have to adapt, to reward evidence of breadth of curiosity, as an additional criterion next to traditional measures of teaching and scholarship. A Foundations faculty will have to evolve over time until it is constituted by people who understand why they sacrificed a portion of research time and prestige in their discipline to pursue this iteration of the liberal arts.

The first wave of Foundations courses demonstrated what should perhaps have been obvious: No one becomes interdisciplinary by saying so, and there will probably be a small number of faculty members who, highly valuable in other ways, should be excused. We believe that a liberal arts college with the stamina to follow through on this enterprise would truly exploit the potential for intellectual collegiality in the faculty and education for citizenship in the students that smallness of scale allows.

In December of 2001, in the fourth year of the Foundations program, the faculty voted to continue it for another four years. Despite everything we have described in this essay, the measure easily passed. The Foundations curriculum has been given time to evolve. At this point, we have reason for optimism, and perhaps even pride.

(Our thanks to Dr. Alan Caniglia, associate provost for Institutional Research and Academic Planning and College Registrar, for his help in preparing this essay.)

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JOSEPH VOELKER is dean of the college of arts and sciences at the University of Hartford. JOHN CAMPBELL is professor of psychology at Franklin and Marshall College.