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AYA Fall Assembly: Second Chance
How many times have you thought “If I had it to do over again.” about your Bright College Years? Delegates at this fall’s AYA Assembly were given a Blue Book and told to give it a try.
December 2002
by Mark Alden Branch ’86

Some things never change, including Eli procrastination. After the Thursday night dinner in Commons for this fall’s Association of Yale Alumni Assembly, a number of delegates confessed that they had to go back to their hotels and get to work. The next morning, they were to meet in small groups to discuss the four-year courses of study they had devised for themselves using the current Yale College Programs of Study (better known as the Blue Book). But even though they had been mailed the Book and the assignment weeks before, many of them still had not managed to get it done.

Dean Richard Brodhead said he couldn’t blame them. If real-life students had to come up with a four-year plan all at once, he said, “people would never go to college. They would just have breakdowns and join the Marines instead.”

But as difficult—and as artificial—as it was, the exercise had a point. As the College is in the midst of a year-and-a-half-long review of its curriculum by a 42-member Committee on Yale College Education (see April), the delegates were being challenged to think about what a Yale College education ought to be. The assignment helped frame the Assembly’s discussion of the College review, as did panels and a “Town Hall meeting” featuring members of the committee, who both solicited the thoughts of alumni and offered some clues to what the committee may recommend in its final report, which is due next spring.

The review was first announced by President Richard Levin in his Tercentennial address last October. Citing major investments the University is making in the sciences and other areas, Levin said that “although we are justly proud of the quality of undergraduate education at Yale, we must not let this moment pass without considering how undergraduates might share in the benefits of these University-wide investments.”

A month later, Levin fleshed out the details when he announced the names of the committee members and gave them their charge. The committee, chaired by Brodhead, includes faculty, students, and recent alumni. Levin asked them to consider how to make sure undergraduates can make the most of Yale’s new programs and facilities—not to mention existing resources such as the libraries, research centers, graduate and professional schools, and museums.

Levin appointed four working groups to look at these questions as they relate to four different areas: biomedical education, science education for non-science majors, social sciences and international studies, and arts and humanities. Since then, the working groups have read, talked, listened, and debated about ways to accomplish their goals. Brodhead has held “town meetings” in the residential colleges to hear student voices, and graduating seniors last spring filled out an extensive survey about their time at Yale for the committee.

In a pair of panel discussions featuring committee members, it emerged that one question occupying the committee’s time is how much of a Yale education ought to be prescribed or regulated. Are the current distributional requirements effective? Would allowing students to minor in a subject be a good thing?

Brodhead said that the days when people could agree on what specific course of study constitutes a liberal education are over. “In Yale’s earliest days, everyone took the same courses and there were no electives,” he said. “But now there are too many things worth knowing for that to work.” Brodhead’s skepticism about a more prescriptive course seemed to be shared by the other committee members who spoke, with the exception of keynote speaker Donald Brown (see sidebar).

Alumni who took part in the Blue Book exercise found that even meeting the current requirements was a challenge, as was choosing from among some 2,000 courses. Panelists pointed out that students have an easier time of it, since they have access to more information about courses than the one-paragraph descriptions in the Blue Book. Many professors post syllabi and links to reading even before shopping period begins, and the online Blue Book can be searched by professor, time, or keyword, making it simpler to find a course on a subject of interest without knowing what department it is in.

Still, planning a course of study from scratch can be challenging for an 18-year-old, and Brodhead said that the most common complaint of last year’s graduating seniors was that the academic advising system is inadequate. Just what can be done about this is unclear. One alumnus at the Town Hall meeting suggested that a staff of full-time advisers might work better than relying on faculty whose knowledge of offerings outside their own departments is limited.

As the committee is still far from preparing its final report, the panelists only hinted at what it might recommend. Among the most interesting ideas mentioned was to establish teaching centers in writing and quantitative reasoning modeled after the Center for Language Study (CLS), which provides support in methods and materials for the legions of foreign-language instructors in the College. Such centers could help make teaching in these areas—regardless of department—more consistent in quality, panelists said.

As for the Blue Book exercise, most alumni said they found themselves picking a course of study similar to what they had chosen years ago, although some gravitated to newer courses not available in their day, including newly relevant courses in subjects such as globalization, environmental studies, or Near Eastern languages. “The whole exercise made me very jealous,” said William Nightingale '53, who chose to major in English again but replaced his ROTC courses with history, art history, and psychology. “I found the breadth of courses to be staggering.”  

Modest Proposal

In the keynote address of the Assembly, economics professor Donald Brown put forth his own idea for restructuring the undergraduate course of study. Brown was on the committee that reviewed undergraduate education at Stanford in 1994, and he was named to the Committee on Yale College Education last year, although he says he is no longer an active member and that his proposal does not reflect the committee’s thinking.

Brown argues that allowing students to devote up to a third of their courses to electives is “an abrogation of our responsibility.” Along with rearranging the distributional groups and requiring courses each year in science, writing, and either quantitative reasoning or critical reading, he proposes eliminating electives and requiring every student to choose two majors. “In my years as an adviser, the best students I have known have been double majors,” he says.

After two years as a fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center, Brown is convinced that “critical reading,” the kind of close analysis done by literary scholars, is as important a skill as quantitative reasoning. He prescribes that students take one course each year that teaches either skill. He jettisons the foreign language requirement, saying that a science requirement makes more sense for the 21st century. He stresses that the four science courses need not be laboratory science, offering as an example a history course called “Before and After Darwin.”

Brown’s plan replaces the current four distributional groups with these five “modes of analysis”:

Arts

Humanities (includes languages and literature)

Mathematical Sciences (includes computer science and statistics)

Natural Sciences

Social Sciences (includes history)

Students would move through a sequence of increasing depth and decreasing breadth over four years, choosing courses from the five groups in the following manner:

Freshman year
two courses, in progressive sequence, in each mode of analysis.

Sophomore year
at least two courses in each of four modes of analysis.

Junior year
at least four courses in each of two fields of concentration.

Senior year
same as junior year, plus a year-long senior project in one area of concentration.

Brown’s proposal was received coolly at the Assembly, where panelists from the Committee indicated a reluctance to use new requirements to effect curricular reform. “I’m anti-requirements,” said committee member Ian Shapiro. “I think we need to integrate things we want students to do into the curriculum.”

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