New University Core Curriculum Plan Enters Next Phase of Development

By Clay Risen Hoya Staff Writer

A proposal to overhaul Georgetown’s general curriculum requirements for all students is currently being debated by the curriculum committees and academic councils of the four undergraduate schools and will be presented to students at a town hall meeting on March 2. The proposal, called the Core Curriculum, was approved by the Main Campus Academic Committee on Jan. 22.

The plan could be in place as early as the fall of 2001.

The curriculum, which is meant to replace the current university-wide requirement of two English, two theology and two philosophy courses, must now be approved by the different schools, as well as receive final approval from University President Leo J. O’Donovan, S.J., and the Board of Directors, according to Interim Provost and Academic Committee Chair Dorothy Brown.

If approved, the curriculum would require all students to take one course from each of six interdisciplinary categories during their first two years, as well as two more courses in their senior year.

In terms of implementation, the curriculum would set up a Main Campus Core Curriculum Committee as well as a number of interdisciplinary subcommittees to make necessary adjustments in the curriculum, set standards for new courses and carry out seminars and grants in the different categories.

If the curriculum receives final approval, it will be tested in a pilot program during the 2000-01 school year and fully implemented in the fall of 2001, according to the proposal.

The six first-tier categories, to be taken freshman year are: Science and Nature, Human Behavior and Society, Understanding the Past, The Aesthetic and the Symbolic, Religious Experience and Belief, and Philosophical Reasoning and Reflection. The two second-tier categories, to be completed senior year, are: Religion and Culture and Ethics and Values.

According to Academic Union Chair Rob Feigenson (COL ’00), who also sits on the MCAC, the proposed curriculum will now go through a lengthy process of back-and-forth discussion between the academic councils, departments, the MCAC and various faculty committees. “It has been submitted to the university community for discussion, and it is the beginning of a long discussion.”

Feigenson added that while he felt the curriculum was a strong one, he anticipated some resistance to it because it is a major break from the discipline-based core curriculum currently in place. “The idea of an interdisciplinary method . has to be accepted as different. Changing that mindset is going to be difficult,” he said.

According to Brown, the major difficulty for the curriculum will be coordinating its requirements with the curricula of the different schools. For instance, the School of Foreign Service and the McDonough School of Business do not have science requirements, but under the new curriculum those students would have to complete a course in the Science and Nature category.

In addition to the interdisciplinary categories, the new curriculum would institute new, more interdisciplinary courses to reflect the topic area of each category.

According to the proposal, students would not be able to opt out of required courses by using Advanced Placement credits, although Feigenson said that this had not been fully worked out by the CAC.

Brown said the curriculum, which in one form or another has been in development for years, was crafted in light of what the MCAC saw as a “blurring of disciplines” in the academic world and the need to take a more interdisciplinary approach to core curriculum education. According to the proposal, “If our students do not receive sufficient training in the art of putting things into context, their learning risks becoming a dangerous solipsism on which human experience is compartmentalized in splendid isolation among its parts.”

Georgetown is not alone in proposing a major curricular change. In the last four months, both Duke and Rice Universities have debated changing to more interdisciplinary curricula. While most parts of the Rice proposal were rejected in November by the main faculty committee for being too “post-modern,” the proposal at Duke passed with heavy support, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Both proposals called for more interdisciplinary, “modes of inquiry” core curricula.