SAS profs invited to discuss pilot curriculum

In the fall, the Committee on Undergraduate Education will give further review to its proposal to test a pilot curriculum. The Committee on Undergraduate Education's proposal to test a revision of the existing curriculum of the College of Arts and Sciences, which was granted provisional approval by the faculty in the spring, will be examined again this fall. CUE Chairperson Frank Warner said Tuesday that the committee is inviting between 80 and 100 faculty members to convene in September with the goal of fleshing out more specific details to the proposal, which included a recommendation for an experimental overhaul of the General Requirement. "Our job between now and December is to get these groups of faculty, as many as possible, as broadly constituted as possible, working on the pilot curriculum" said College Dean Richard Beeman, who has fully endorsed the proposal. CUE presented the proposal at a faculty meeting in late April. At that time, 33 professors in the School of Arts and Sciences endorsed the idea of the pilot curriculum on at least an experimental basis, with the stipulation that the 14-member committee return in December with a more precise and detailed plan. Under the committee's proposal, 200 students -- beginning in the fall of 2000 -- will be exempted from fulfilling the College's General Requirement and will instead participate in a pilot curriculum. Randomly selected members of the Class of 2004 who express interest in fulfilling alternate requirements will then be enrolled in the pilot curriculum, which will require them to take one course in each of four specified categories, one per semester during their freshman and sophomore years. Writing and oral communications requirements are also included as part of the pilot curriculum. The proposed categories -- which Beeman termed "illustrative and not definitive" -- are tentatively titled "Freedom, Equality and Community," "Science, Culture and Society," "Earth, Space and Life" and "Imagination, Representation and Reality." But the actual content of the courses to be offered under the broad-based, interdisciplinary categories has not been determined and has remained a focal point of debate among faculty members since the proposal was first introduced. The meeting in September, according to Warner, will enable faculty members to voice their opinions about what directions the courses should take, though no final decisions about actual syllabi will be made at that time. "My approach to [the categories] is that they'll evolve," said Warner, who is also a Mathematics professor. "There's a lot of flexibility." Student Committee on Undergraduate Education Chairperson Aaron Fidler, a Wharton senior, said he supports CUE in trying to incorporate diverse ideas and views into the proposal. "Being a plan that right now looks to try and encompass all aspects of the college?[CUE] needs to get as many professors' input as possible," Fidler said. Out of this initial meeting will likely emerge four different committees of faculty members, each one charged with helping to formulate the curriculum for the courses under each of the four categories. An additional committee of faculty members will assess the efficiency of the pilot curriculum by monitoring the progress of its original participants. CUE's proposal says that a decision to extend the "pilot curriculum" to all students will be made by SAS faculty no later than the spring semester of 2004. "I'm not going to step forward and propose that we implement a new curriculum for the whole student body unless I think it is demonstrably more successful than our old one," Beeman said. "We the faculty are responsible for the integrity of our curriculum, and if after rigorously assessing the pilot curriculum, we think it's preferable to the old curriculum, then I think we should go ahead and implement it," he added. At a faculty meeting in December, CUE will present an updated proposal calling for the implementation of a pilot curriculum in the fall of 2000. If approved at that point, then the experiment will officially begin in the fall. Both Beeman and Warner said they hope to alleviate some of SAS' faculty members most pressing concerns by engaging them in conversation several months before the proposal is again raised. Some professors, particularly in the natural and physical sciences, have argued that the pilot curriculum's four categories are too confining and attempt to compress too much important material in too short a period, Beeman said. Others have raised the concern that the pilot curriculum, in reducing the number of required courses from 10 to four, would be so popular among participating students that it would easily gain support from the University.

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