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A Fresh Look at the College
President Levin has asked the Committee on Yale College Education to find out how to better integrate the university and the undergraduate experience.
April 2002
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
“Being 300 years old concentrates the mind.” So says president Richard Levin ’74PhD in explaining why he has chosen this particular moment to launch a major review of education in Yale College. Levin says that anticipating the anniversary helped him, the fellows of the Yale Corporation, and College dean Richard Brodhead to focus on the state of undergraduate education in the midst of other ambitious ventures, including $500 million in new science facilities and a cluster of initiatives to make Yale more internationally minded.
“President Levin spent his first five years fixing things, and the last four building things,” says Brodhead, who is chairing the review. “A big issue now is to make sure the new initiatives yield their maximum educational payoff. We’re spending a half billion on science facilities, but by itself this will have no guaranteed impact on undergraduate education. To get the benefit of these investments, we need to visualize new facilities as creating new learning opportunities.”
That question is behind Levin’s charge to the Committee on Yale College Education (CYCE), a group of faculty, students, and recent alumni appointed last fall to lead the review. Meeting as a whole and in four different working groups, the committee will spend the next year gathering information and opinions, sharing ideas, and finally issuing a report in the spring of 2003.
In addition to the question how to integrate undergraduate education into the new University-wide initiatives, the committee will also consider how students in the College can take advantage of resources in the wider University community—the graduate and professional schools, the arts institutions and libraries—in more systematic ways. The four working groups will look at these questions in four different areas: biomedical education, science education for non-science majors, social sciences and international studies, and arts and humanities. While the committee and its working groups will have the latitude to focus on the questions that most concern them, the assignment has most to do with the academic aspects of the College—not with the social and emotional support systems for which the College is widely admired.
Commissioning such a review is a time-honored tradition in American education. Yale’s 1828 faculty report on its curriculum—which defended the idea of a liberal education amid a growing vocational trend among colleges—or Harvard’s 1945 report “General Education in a Free Society”—which championed the idea of a core curriculum in the face of an ever-freer elective system—were vastly influential in their day and represent milestones in higher education. What is unusual about this review, says Brodhead, is its timing.
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“We’d like to stand back and ask what better ideas there might be.”
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“Usually when these reviews take place, it’s at a time of crisis and wrenching national transformation,” says Brodhead, “or, in the absence of an external crisis, when something is recognized not to be going well at the institution.” But Yale’s review comes at a time when the College is perceived to be thriving. “This is not ‘What’s wrong with Yale College and how can we fix it?’” says Levin. “It’s ‘How can we be even more innovative?’”
It’s been 30 years since there was a review of the College,” says Brodhead. “We'd like to stand back and ask what better ideas there might be. Sometimes your very success can blind you to other things you could be doing.”
That is not to say that the battle for the brightest undergraduate minds is not a factor. “Our initial thinking about this challenge was in part driven by competitive pressures,” says Levin. The Corporation made the state of the College the subject of its annual long-term planning session in the fall of 2000, just after Yale had suffered a modest one-year dip in applications (The past two years have seen increases.) The session led to more conversations last year among senior administrators and Corporation fellows, and finally the idea was hatched to build a review around the question of how to make the most of the College’s location within a great research University. Levin announced the review at the Tercentennial Convocation in October and released further details in November. (The President’s charge to the committee, and the names of the committee members, can be found at the Committee’s public website, www.yale.edu/yce)
“No one has asked how other aspects of a university are being utilized to supplement and enrich undergraduate education,” says economics professor Donald Brown, who is on the CYCE’s steering committee and is a veteran of Stanford’s 1994 Commission on Undergraduate Education. “It’s that question that makes this enterprise different from other reviews.”
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Opportunities are most often created by proactive students. |
To be sure, many Yale undergraduates already have a great deal of contact with Yale’s graduate and professional schools and other institutions—most often as students in graduate-level courses. Undergraduates also curate exhibits at the Art Gallery and conduct scientific research at the graduate level, and some use libraries and collections for advanced research in the humanities. But such opportunities are most often created by unusually proactive students, and the Committee wants to see if such serendipitous connections can be made more commonplace. “Yale doesn’t present obstacles to a student who wants to go exploring,” says Brodhead, “but we'd like to make it easier for all students to find the opportunities that the most adventurous students find. The things that are available ought to be accessible.”
Whitney Humanities Center director Maria Rosa Menocal, who chairs the working group on the arts and humanities, says that “there’s already a whole series of ties” between undergraduates and institutions outside the College, “but they’re often difficult and problematic.” She says the goal the Committee is working toward is “a globalization inside Yale.”
This idea is consistent with the growing number of projects that cross departmental and school boundaries at Yale. The Law School and the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, for example, collaborate in the operation of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, and such connections are ever more frequent.
Menocal’s group is beginning by talking to the directors and staff of so-called “outlying institutions” in the arts and humanities, from the Art Gallery to the School of Music to the Beinecke Library. Brodhead says he also wants the group to consider the role of performance—music, drama, and dance—in a liberal education. “Performance is a big feature of Yale culture,” he says. “A lot of it falls into a kind of border area between curricular and extracurricular pursuits.” (The demand for performance space on campus, recently accommodated by the new “Off-Broadway” theater and a renovated space for theater studies at 53 Wall Street, helps to demonstrate the ever-growing importance of drama in and out of the classroom.)
Menocal says her group, because it doesn’t have as much of a problem to solve, is also taking on some of the “reading and thinking about big questions” for the review. The committee is compiling a list of reading that includes Jaroslav Pelikan’s The Idea of the University and Alvin Kernan’s memoir In Plato’s Cave.
The biomedical working group, chaired by psychology professor Peter Salovey, will look at how Yale’s strength in biology, medicine, and public health can be exploited by undergraduates. “In particular,” wrote Levin in his charge, “the Committee will ask how science students can be afforded the most stimulating opportunities to participate in front-line research. It will also ask how the implications of contemporary discoveries can be fully and searchingly explored in Yale College courses.”
Prospective students now ask frequently if they will be able to do research in the sciences at Yale, according to director of undergraduate admissions Margit Dahl. Yale offers such opportunities (which are detailed for prospective students at www.yale.edu/yser), but the biomedical working group will see how they can be offered more systematically.
In the last decade, undergraduate interest in the social sciences and international affairs has risen sharply. The number of political science majors has doubled, and economics has also seen sharp gains. Ian Shapiro, the chair of the political science department and the leader of the social and international studies working group, doesn’t know exactly what is behind the trend, but he says that one reason may be “the fact that international politics has become a lot more interesting and vital subject since the fall of Communism.” Shapiro’s group will consider how this interest can be nurtured through stronger ties to the Law School, the School of Management, and other resources such as the Center for International and Area Studies and the Institute for Social and Policy Studies. His group will also look at the implications of the new high-tech social sciences library on Prospect Street that is now being planned.
If for the most part the CYCE review is about finding new opportunities, there is one area that Levin’s charge identifies as an existing problem (and one that many graduates will recognize): the offerings in the sciences for non-science majors. There is “an ad hoc quality” to such courses, says Levin, who urged the working group led by astronomy professor Charles Bailyn to “envision a comprehensive, powerful plan of science education for non-specialists.”
Even though most undergraduates excelled in math and sciences in high school, those who gravitate to the humanities at Yale are often forced to choose between highly specialized introductory science courses designed for majors or watered-down “gut” courses. “Humanities majors talk about their Group IV requirements as a chore,” says senior Marc Ruben, an American studies major. “That will never change completely, but I think it’s partly a function of what’s being offered.” Ruben says he managed to find four Group IV courses that were neither too taxing nor too condescending, but that “there aren’t enough of them.”
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“You can have courses in economics or courses about economics.” |
“This is a question at every major university,” says Levin. “But there are hundreds of ways to make the fundamentals of science relevant to students and at the same time be rigorous about it.”
Such courses are difficult to create and to teach, though, because there is a tension between imparting the fundamentals of a discipline—how to think like a chemist, or an engineer—and teaching a non-specialist what he or she should know in order to be an informed citizen. As Donald Brown puts it, “You can have courses in economics or courses about economics.” Either way, Brown says, departments are often reluctant to use their resources to create courses for non-majors, since they believe (mistakenly, says Brodhead) that their funding is tied to the number of majors they attract.
The allergic reaction many humanities majors experience when they climb Science Hill is but one piece of a broader problem that Charles Bailyn describes. “Now that any grade less than an A-minus is considered a bad grade, students are much less inclined to take risks,” says Bailyn. He points out that the Credit/D/Fail option, which was designed to encourage such risk-taking, is often closed to upper-level courses, discouraging students from following up beyond the introductory level. “We have a crazy situation where the upper-level courses are not credit-fail and intro courses are,” says Bailyn. “Without thinking about it, we’ve ended up with things exactly backwards from what they ought to be.”
Students say that the Credit/D/Fail option has come to be seen as a cop-out or a way to avoid work, rather than an incentive to explore. And the number of courses that students can take Credit/D/Fail has been cut in half in recent years, from eight to four.
The proper use of the Credit/D/Fail option might well come up for consideration before the CYCE. Committee members have also mentioned several other topics not specifically included in Levin’s charge. One is the role of distributional requirements: Are the four existing groups sufficient to ensure a meaningfully broad education? Each group encompasses a number of disciplines, and it is possible to graduate, for example, without ever taking an English course. (One science major recently did, fulfilling his Group I requirements with foreign language courses.) Harvard, by contrast, requires students to choose from specific courses in 11 different areas of study.
Another issue that may come up—as it does regularly in other contexts—is the question of who should teach undergraduates. Donald Brown says that while much of the attention given to this question on campus has focused on the role of graduate students—in part because of the debate over a union for teaching assistants—the more important issue is off-ladder faculty. An increasing number of undergraduate courses and seminars are being taught by lecturers who are hired on a short-term, one-course-at-a-time basis. This leads Brown to worry that “without serious consideration, we’ll have two faculties, a teaching faculty and a research faculty.”
Brodhead cites the academic advising system for freshmen and sophomores as another problem that might benefit from the scrutiny of the committee. Students sometimes complain that the system is inadequate to help them make informed decisions about what courses to take and how to succeed in them. The advisers—faculty and staff members who are fellows of the residential colleges—volunteer their time, and many are not well informed about the College as a whole and do not have a great deal of time to devote to their advisees-sometimes as many as eight per adviser. Committees and task forces have looked at this problem in isolation, says Brodhead, but have not found a solution. “But when you’re looking at the whole warp and woof of the College,” he says, “you might be able to get more people excited about fixing things.”
Additional topics may develop as a result of the extensive conversations and interviews committee members are having with students, faculty, administrators, and alumni. The spring semester is being devoted to such inquiry; in addition to other activities, the Committee was to hold six evening sessions in the residential colleges in late March to solicit student opinion. The Committee will continue to meet into the summer and will pull together a set of recommendations in the fall, issuing a draft report in December. The draft will be discussed and revised next spring with the goal of issuing its final report at the end of the 2002-2003 academic year.
Committee members say they are eager to hear from alumni. “People from my generation would find the Blue Book a remarkably familiar document,” says Charles Bailyn, who graduated from Yale College in 1981. “The most useful comments may come from people who got their degrees in the 1980s and 1990s, who have gone through something close to what we have now.” But Brodhead insists that all alumni are welcome to make their voices heard. “We are extraordinarily receptive to unsolicited opinions and ideas,” he says. The fall Association of Yale Alumni assembly will be devoted to a discussion of the review, and alumni are encouraged to submit their thoughts to the Committee’s Web site, yale.edu/yce/.
Just how far-reaching the committee’s final report will be is anyone’s guess. The famous Yale Report of 1828 was more notable for its resistance to innovation than for its new proposals. The Dahl Report in 1972 included some radical ideas—-students should design their own majors under the close advising of faculty mentors—that were never implemented. Ian Shapiro predicts that the result of this review will be “not some sweeping overhaul, but maybe two or three proposals for incremental innovations.” But Brodhead says he hopes for “some serious programmatic proposals.”
And Levin, for his part, says that the fact that the College is doing well is no reason not to think big. “Committees like this are good at coming up with generalizations, but I hope we also get some very specific suggestions,” he says. “I’ll be surprised and disappointed if our imagination does not exceed our resources.”  |
