The “problem of general education” haunts any college trying to design a core curriculum, but standardizing across schools is a poor solution.

Question: What would bernyour ideal solution to the “problem of general education?"

Louis Menand:  Yes,rn general education, of course, arernthe courses that every student’s required to take in order to graduate rnfromrncollege.  And most colleges thatrnhave a general education requirement, so called, use a distribution rnmodel, Irnthink that’s what Yale uses, in which students have to take three rncourses,rnusually, in each of the three divisions in the academy, natural science,rn socialrnscience, and arts and humanities. rnAnd generally, they can take any three courses.  Sorn that doesn’t really add up to a veryrnprescriptive curriculum, obviously, because students can cherry-pick thern coursesrnthat they’re interested in, or the courses they think will be easy.

So a real general education model that is, say, onern that Irnthink has some legitimacy is one that has requirements that actually arern shapedrnby a rationale of the particular kinds of knowledge that students are rngoing tornneed.  Columbia has one, Harvardrnhas one, Stanford and Princeton have them, obviously Chicago, St. rnJohn’s, theyrnhave a Great Books curriculum, and so on. rnSo, those are the models that are available.

My own view is that the general education rncurriculum that arncollege picks has to be appropriate for the kind of student body that itrnhas.  I don’t think the samerncurriculum fits every student body. rnNow, that’s a little bit of a circular proposition, because rnColumbia hasrnthis Great Books curriculum, it’s called Literature and Humanities in rnthernContemporary Civilization, and they’ve had the same, roughly the samerncurriculum for about 50 years.  Sornwhen students apply to Columbia, they already know, they’re already rnselectingrnthat curriculum, that’s something that they want when they apply torncollege.  If you were to imposernsuch a curriculum at Harvard or Yale, students would object, probably, rnon therngrounds that they’re being required to do something that they basically rndidn’trnopt for when they applied.  SornColumbia kind of gets away with it because it’s grandfathered in, so to rnspeak,rnto the institution.

I think at a place like Harvard, our experience, I rnwasrninvolved with, at various stages, in trying to implement a new generalrneducation curriculum, our experience was that Harvard’s all aboutrnspecialization, that’s not just true of the professori, it’s also true rnof a lotrnof the undergraduates, too, and they come, they kind of know what they rnwant torndo, they select it because they have a strong aptitude for something inrnparticular.  So to try to have arnkind of one-size-fits-all general education curriculum for them will rnprobablyrnnot fly.  You know, you have tornhave students wanting to take the courses, otherwise you’re not going, rnthey’rernnot going to be very effective.

So Harvard has something that manages, I think, to rnprovide arnlot of options for students, but still fairly prescriptive about the rnkinds ofrnsubjects that the courses ought to cover. rnJust started, the new curriculum has just begun this year, it rnactuallyrnseems to have gotten off to a pretty good launch.

Question: To what extentrnare curricula shaped by “consumers” (parents of students)?

Louis Menand:  Yeah,rn zero.  Because, I mean, ideally, zero.  Because the way universities operate is the decision rnaboutrnwhat students need for the degree are... is the decision made by thernfaculty.  Should not be made by anyrnother group, administrators, trustees, parents, students, and so on.  Obviously input is helpful to facultyrnin trying to come up with a curriculum, but ultimately it’s the rnfaculty’s jobrnto know what students need to know. rnMake a decision about it and present it.

The difficulty with coming up with a curriculum is rnmainlyrnthat faculty aren’t trained to think in terms of general education.  They’re trained to think in terms ofrntheir own discipline, or their specialty. rnSo when they’re asked, what are your views about what everybody rnought tornknow, it’s not something that they’ve ever really given thought to, it’srn notrnpart of their training.  They havernviews, but they tend to be quite eccentric and quite different from onernanother.  So getting faculties torncome to a consensus about something that they’ve never really thought rnabout orrnhad to worry about in their careers before can be a rather slow process rnand arnlong process, it certainly was the case at Harvard, and it’s the case rnwith mostrnof the general education curricula that I know of, it takes four or fivern yearsrnjust to get everybody on board with one idea.