These beliefs were echoed in the alumni body. According to Henry Clay Folger Professor of English William Pritchard ’53, the longest serving faculty member, “There is some sense among alumni that the present administration may move to a more structured curriculum,” he noted.
Within the student body, some students have also perceived this supposed administration inclination towards imposing requirements, although not all view limits on the Open Curriculum with disdain. Daniel Freije ’11, who has attended several of President Tony Marx’s recent speeches, explained, “If President Marx and the rest of the administration want to create moral, well-rounded, enlightened individuals, then it seems to me that certain courses—or at least certain areas of study—should be required. The fact that they do want that makes me think that the Open Curriculum’s days are numbered.”
However, both Marx and Dean of Faculty Gregory Call resoundingly deny these suspicions. According to the two senior administrators, the administration does not aim to alter the Open Curriculum. Any planned changes would, in fact, solidify the “openness” of the curriculum, rather than undermine its inherent values. The administration hopes to increase the openness of the curriculum by requiring students as well as advisors to be more thoughtful about the course selection process. Marx argued that, “the Open Curriculum works if everyone is thoughtful and deliberative. It is not intended to be an uninformed set of choices.”
The thrust of reform will center on the advising process. According to Call, “The opportunities that the Open Curriculum provides also place a greater burden on the advising conversation. Without the range of choices already being narrowed by requirements, it’s a challenge.” The faculty and administration are trying to determine how to better inform advisors of course options and the different sets of skills that specific courses target.
The administration is exploring how to utilize new technology to relay this information to advisors. Asked Marx, “Can we devise a form of information technology that will provide to faculty and students some indication of where the distribution of courses that students have taken has been and what else students might consider?”
Marx explained that the Committee on Education Policy, which sets the curriculum of the College, “is currently deliberating what categories of courses might be most usefully highlighted for faculty and students to help inform advising about how best to use the Open Curriculum. They are having the debate about what the categories might be, whether it’s writing or quantitative skills or science for non-scientists or arts for non-artists.” However, without requirements, which Marx and Call assure students the administration has no plans to implement, any division would ultimately depend on students and their advisors.
Suspicion of a more significant curricular change may stem from communications from Marx, such as a letter to alumni dated Sept. 22, 2006, in which Marx stated, “For the first time since 1978, the faculty has resolved to institute a new requirement: that all students select among courses specifically designed to improve writing and offered across the disciplines. In addition, a faculty committee is deliberating on how to ensure quantitative literacy.” This statement refers to a series of recommendations that the faculty approved in May 2006. One of these resolutions stipulated that all students take a “writing attentive” course. The faculty has since deliberated on what constitutes “writing attentive.” As there is still no consensus or plan for what the requirement would actually entail, its implementation has no time frame.
A Look Back
The current faculty deliberation resembles a path already well-traveled in Amherst history. The College has gone through significant curricular change since its founding in 1821. In its first days, every student at the College, crammed into South College, took the exact same courses and the professors likewise had much heavier course loads than they do now.
More than a century later, in the era of World War II, the College underwent radical, though temporary, transformations. The faculty and administration decided at this crucial intersection that the time was ripe for curricular change. A faculty committee convened to recommend a new direction for the curriculum. In the academic year of 1947-48, the so-called New Curriculum or, according to Brian E. Boyle ’69 Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science Norton Starr, “the Great Curriculum,” was adopted by the College. Students and veterans alike returned to a new curriculum and a new school.
The New Curriculum underwent various adjustments during its 20-year tenure, but the original recommendations required students to take 32 semester-long courses; two-year sequences in science, history and humanities in their freshman and sophomore years; and various foreign language and laboratory courses. Many of the courses in the New Curriculum were “staffed courses,” meaning that seven or eight faculty members would collaborate to teach one single course.
The committee also made non-curricular recommendations, including the proposal to abolish fraternities, which would not be realized for nearly 40 more years.
Former Professor of Philosophy Gail Kennedy, who chaired the committee that drew up the recommendations of 1945, summarized the New Curriculum’s goals: “If a liberal education is to be comprehensive, it should be organized in such a way as to unify the most fundamental cultural interest of the society in which we live. The curriculum, we believe, should be organized around three basic foci of interest: the mathematical, physical and biological sciences, history and the social sciences, and literature and the fine arts.” It was with this in mind that the New Curriculum took shape. According to Pritchard, this Western-centered Curriculum worked at the College because it was still a homogenous school that enrolled primarily middle-class white males. Without the variety of backgrounds that the College currently enjoys, there was no true need for an Open Curriculum that would satisfy the diverse interests of today’s student body.
However, in the 1960s, an “era of diversity” began to develop and, according to Pritchard, “there was increasing grumbling about the fact that [courses] were required,” not only by the students but by a faculty that did not want to teach press-ganged students. Pritchard taught several courses in the New Curriculum and remembers grading 120 papers a week for several years. Nineteen sixty-six marked the overhaul of the New Curriculum and the process of modification that led to the induction of the Open Curriculum that required an Introduction to Liberal Studies Course (team-taught, interdisciplinary courses analogous to the First-Year Seminars of today), practically identical to the current curriculum. Starr characterized the ILS as “the modified [curriculum] that dribbled down to the present transparent fig leaf in the ensuing decades.”
The feeling prevails among academics that only academic stagnation and lack of progress can come from a static curriculum. However, for the time being, it seems, students do not need to fear for their Open Curriculum that affords them the opportunity to explore broadly, but deeply.
“The spirit of the Open Curriculum is not just about saying no to requirements,” stated Marx, “It is about being informed about the choices that we do make and expecting students to take that responsibility with the advice of faculty. I think the current effort is simply: how can we ensure that students’ choices are made in the most informed way?”