An example of a successful program

In 1977, I started a program in the College of Arts and Scienes that has as its tag line “undergraduates building professional skills through community service and research.” The curriculum committee over the past 30 years has been supportive and my students, most of whome are dual majors, are win academic awards at a very high rate. A recent artile on it can be found at http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/perspective/ and the web site for it is listed above. The College of Arts and Sciences is the only place this type of major could be done. A side benefit to the College is that students have a choice to stay in the College rather than go to a professional undergraduate program. The main benefit is that it serves student needs both intellectually and vocationally.

Bill Coplin, Director of the Public Affairs Program at Syracuse University, at 7:00 am EST on January 25, 2008

One issue that repeatedly comes up in engagement with professional schools—though we’re a small college we have business, nursing, engineering, and education—is what these programs see as the necessary size of their curricula in meeting accreditation requirements.

On several occasions I’ve had conversations with chairs in these programs to see what kinds of things could be done to encourage Business majors or the like to minor in English and vice versa. I’m repeatedly told that there is no room in their majors programs to allow for such things—though, of course, they’d be glad to get English majors minoring in their departments when they have minors.

I wonder whether truly collaborative relationships are possible so long as professional schools understand the shape and size of their major curricula as primarily responsible to external accrediting agencies. The liberal arts, and especially the humanities, will always end up being an “add-on” rather than something essential that can be fruitfully integrated with programs focussed more narrowly on specific forms of postgraduate employment.

Peter Kerry Powers, at 9:50 am EST on January 25, 2008

Turf Issue?

Oh my, adults continuing to play in the sandbox as they consider what’s best for the younger ones.

So, here we are -again- debating about turf and I’m not sure if it’s the silliness or patheticalness of the debate that got my attention ... so, until I can uncover the actual source, suffice it to say that just prior to reading this in HigherEd, I read this in the Philadelphia Inquirer (01/25): “23 arrested in W. Phila. High ‘turf’ brawl.”

Oh well, nothing quite as secure as the same ol’, same ol’.

Michael, at 11:15 am EST on January 25, 2008

Wrong Context, Wrong Audience, Right Time

I love Mr. Guess’s story, and also find much to recommend in Jerry Pattengale’s comment (showing relevance is important).

But conducting this debate ~within~ the academy itself is a kind of red herring. It’s the wrong context. I personally have found many faculty members in professional schools who generously acknowledge the “skills” learned through the liberal arts.

The real context for the angst in this debate is not the academy, but U.S. society at large—-and the ever-present nemesis to “non-useful education” that is “bottom-line capitalism.” Unless you can show me a direct value-added component of education, say the myopic industrial/service manager, then what’s the point?

A great many university faculty labor against the notion, particularly in the U.S., that the liberal arts yield nothing tangible. For this debate to be productive, the promoters of the liberal arts, as well as sympathetic professional school faculty, need to take this to the public. All must act in union against this widespread faulty logic: If college, then job.

In sum, it’s the right time to discuss this (it never goes out of style in the United States), but it’s being directed to the wrong audience. — TL

Tim Lacy, at 2:10 pm EST on January 25, 2008

Vocational?

We are wrestling with this as a small school that is pursuing both deliberately professional studies including teacher ed and deliberately constructed Bachelor programs unabashedly centered in the liberal arts and interdisciplinary study, and I think we are doing surprisingly well. No blood, and most of us are still civil... I’m not sure but what the debate does still have to go on in and out of academe. Often the world outside academe is quicker to acknowledge the value of an integrated, liberal education that we are inside academe where liberal education is often confused with battle lines drawn on disciplinary defintions, not on integration of a liberal education. For example, no one says science is not “useful,” yet we are too quick to forget that science is part of the liberal education — the book of nature. The core statement in the recent AACU that often gets overlooked is “The liberal arts are vocational.” Business leaders, whatever they are, often recognize that before we are willing to since it means giving up old boundaries. We fail to make or heed our own arguments.

DavidA, VPAA at St. Catharine of KY, at 8:35 pm EST on January 25, 2008

I view this article with interest, since we are engaged in a similar discussion at Pratt Institute where I teach architecture.

Some in the liberal arts at Pratt regard the role of architecture to be to teach about columns, and the liberal arts to teach how to think (critically of course).

Some in architecture, while appreciative of the liberal arts, resent this dismissal of a discipline that we date at least back to Imhotep, and see as a powerful investigation of the human condition.

In addition to there are the issues of the Student-Mentor Relationship, and the Project.

STUDENT-MENTOR RELATIONSHIP

In a liberal arts class the student might spend three hours a week as part of a group of perhaps 15-20 with the instructor. This liberal arts class might be one of four or five such courses the student is taking.

What is the student’s participation in this course? For some, they respond to the instructor and occasionally to each other. Others might never say a word throughout the course.

Contrast this with a studio in the architecture department. The student is one of perhaps 8 to 15. They spend 8 hours a week in the studio. The studio is their prime focus during the semester, with the student spending as much as an additional 20 hours a week +/- of outside time working on the studio project.

Of the 8 hours a week in class, as much as entire hour might be one-on-one between one student and the instructor, and much of the rest of the time the student might be witnessing the instructor working with other students, or participating as a group with the entire class.

At the end of the semester, a jury made up of the instructor, other instructors, and often prominent outside professionals review each of the student’s work pinned up on the wall. Typically 20 minutes is spent with each student, during which they present their ideas, explain how their work manifests these ideas, and answer questions and challenges form the jury.

The studio instructor is thus teacher, mentor, mother hen, psychoanalyst, life coach, etc. Are all studio instructors up to the demands of this role? No, just as not all liberal arts lecture/seminar course instructors are up to the demands of their roles, but many are and all try.

With the exception of some advanced graduate seminars, no place else, outside art, architecture, and design studio programs, do students have this kind of educational opportunity.

THE PROJECT

The other distinguishing feature of studio education is that it is focused around a project. If a liberal arts course were to address for example our culture’s moving from books to digital information, students might read essays and sit in class listening to the instructor, and perhaps write a paper.

In studio education, each student might design a library. After researching what is a library, including the change from books to digital, the student designs their own building, manifesting their conclusions. And in architecture today at Pratt during degree project (thesis), the student does plenty of writing about their ideas, working with a writing instructor who has a joint appointment from both liberal arts and architecture.

The totality of the design process, including the visceral process of making something with ones hands, provides a depth of educational experience that is very different from that in the liberal arts classroom.

John Lobell, Professor at Pratt Institute, at 10:35 pm EST on January 25, 2008

Emily E LaBeff

Emily E LaBeff, Chair of Sociology at Midwestern State University was also a panelist. This should have been acknowledged in the posting. Thank you.

Daniel Winslow, Collection Development Librarian at Midwestern State University, at 10:50 am EST on January 30, 2008