COLUMN: Agenda for Ridiculousness

From Eric Goldstein's, "Upon Further Review," Fall '97 From Eric Goldstein's, "Upon Further Review," Fall '97 Over the course of the past few months, the scope of educational opportunities offered at Penn has grown at a staggering rate with the announcment of a number of joint-degree programs, interdisciplinary minors and sub-matriculation plans. However, in looking ahead toward a bright future of cross-departmental learning, the University is ignoring its primary charge. Before the administration looks to expand its areas of study, it should reexamine the quality of its current programs. One such example of the University's flawed sense of priorities is the proposed Foreign Languages Across the Curriculum program. The interdisciplinary program would allow students to study various subjects using a foreign language. For example, a Latin American history class may be taught in Spanish or an Israeli foreign policy class could be taught in Hebrew. However, before the University begins instituting cross-departmental foreign language classes, it should strive to make sense of the pathetic state of its current foreign language departments, like the Romance Languages Department. What administrators would find is a department without a mission. What is the goal of the Romance Department? Is it to instill an appreciation of French, Spanish and Italian in students? Is it to help students prepare for life in an increasingly multinational world? Or is it to tutor students for the foreign language proficiency exam? As it stands, the primary focus seems to be on giving students the most basic understanding of language. The curricula of the lower level classes are stale, high-school-style how-to-courses. Students work out of juvenile workbooks, memorize vocabulary lists and try to form the simplest of sentences. This is fine for a first-semester introductory course, but by the time a student arrives in a 130- or 140-level class the workbooks should no longer be necessary. Local high schools have French students reading Sartre and Voltaire, while Penn has its French 140 students reading kindergarten-level books like Le Petit Prince? If students' appreciation and understanding of foreign language is really of value to the administration, then the top priority should be reworking the curriculum of the existing courses, not adding new courses. The fact is few students who work their way through Penn's foreign language classes will ever be fluent enough to actually take part in an interdisciplinary program involving a foreign language. Yet another example of the University's misuse of allocations is the new legal studies/history minor that is going to be offered next fall. The irony of this Wharton/College joint program between is Wharton doesn't presently offer a legal studies concentration for its own students. Shouldn't that be higher on Wharton's priorities than offering the discipline as a Wharton/College minor? At first glance, the relatively new Actuarial Science minor offered by Wharton -- which combines aspects of risk management and mathematics -- seems like a productive off-shoot of the insurance curriculum. But it too is flawed. Again the issue should not be the value of the new offering, but the quality of the existing departments. It is not a secret that the Math Department annually receives among the lowest ratings by students for the quality of its lower-level classes. A number of factors contribute to this: the poor facilities (specifically the David Rittenhouse Laboratory), the tedious curriculum and the poor instruction provided by teaching assistants in recitations. The focus of the Math Department should be an internal audit of its own courses, specifically the intro level classes like Math 140,141, 150 and 151, not a cross-departmental minor with Wharton. If implemented, these new minors and cross-departmental programs would enrich the educational environment at Penn. Unfortunately, the University has limited resources. By allocating money to programs like FLAC and the various new minors and joint degrees, previously established programs lose out. The University's priorities must be to improve current programs before starting new ones. Only when existing departments are satisfactorily serving students' needs should FLAC be implemented and new minors offered. The new programs are all logical and worthwhile extensions of existing departments. But the resources devoted to them could be better allocated. The sudden wave of these cross-departmental programs stems from University President Judith Rodin's call for interdisciplinary coursework in her Agenda for Excellence. Unfortunately, while these programs flourish, other older programs flounder. The effect of these cross-departmental degrees, however, is not excellence. Rodin nor any other administration can hide from the fact that a number of current departments are struggling to fulfill their missions. The glut of new programming will never succeed unless the mother departments are qualified to run them. If the Romance Language and Mathematics departments are struggling as is just to instruct current students, what makes the administration think they can handle a new core of responsibilities. Penn cannot sacrifice quality of education for quantity of education.