Arts & Sciences curriculum under review

This article gives the impression that the curriculum review committee chair Mark Rollins favors only minor changes in the Cluster System (he is paraphrased but not directly quoted). The other options, including the total scrapping of the system, will be given only a token hearing. If the article accurately represents Rollins’ views, I believe he should step down as chair of this committee. I hope its decisions have not already been made. I hope the committee will listen not only to students, but to faculty and advisors who have had to work with the current system, which seems to have been set up to favor certain large Departments and Programs, e.g. PNP, Anthropology, and Women and Gender Studies (although my students in the latter two Programs seem not to be well served by it).The 2005 graduate notes that his/her cohort had the impression that nobody in the faculty or administration understood the system, although it is really quite easy for anyone to understand, with a little effort. This is my impression as well. I think this is because the Discover Curriculum has always been controversial and divisive for the faculty. In my first or second year teaching here, I was told be a colleague that it would probably collapse in a few years, because it had already failed at other schools. One colleague refused to participate in “Cluster’s Last Stand,” effectively boycotting the system, probably to the detriment of students and colleagues. At an advisor’s meeting, one colleague asked the rhetorical question, “Are we allowed to criticize the curriculum in our advising meetings?” (the answer should be, “no, you are not; when wearing your advisor’s hat, you must never trash talk the curriculum, your colleagues, and their classes; always strive to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, while listening to your students’ concerns). I think the system was stillborn right from the beginning, and was never given a chance. I think the student’s perception that neither the faculty nor the rank and file assistant deans understood it is correct. I think this is because most of them were never committed to it, and would rather have been doing something other than advising students about clusters. For that reason, scrapping it should definitely be on the table, especially because many suspect that it, along with the rest of the Discover Curriculum, is a power grab by a certain faction.That having been said, perhaps Stephen Hmiel is right, and the system can be made to work. Right now, it works better for some students than others. How can we make it work for everyone? Why not let the more pre-professionally oriented disciplines, such as PNP, and the science programs have their own curriculum committees to design appropriately rigorous clusters? Why not let everyone else, especially teachers and students in the non-hierarchically organized humanities and social sciences, construct their own clusters, at will? This would be the norm, not the exception, and there should be no flaming hoops to jump through. Every student and his or her advisor would be a curriculum committee of two. Students will of course be free to choose their own advisors, as they will be free to choose, and design, their own courses. Let students take what interests them. Let faculty and advisors be free to teach what interests them. Let’s offer more teaching opportunities to administrators, many of whom are highly talented scholars and teachers who are misemployed and unhappy. Let’s offer them “teaching sabbatical,” as contract adjunct lecturers, at WashU or other colleges (or even ESL and GED teaching) with better pay and full benefits including health insurance, and the right of return to their administrative jobs. Let’s have a tenure track for college teaching and/or community service, in the the individual’s order of preference. Let’s have autonomy for the college and evening college, with more freedom for everyone, and less centralized bureaucracy. Let’s keep autonomous Departments for PhD training, and adopt a divisional system for bachelor’s and master’s education. All this is familiar to any graduate of The University of Chicago, or other colleges set up on the Hutchins model. I do not favor slavish imitation of Chicago, however. I think we should respect our professional schools (e.g. Engineering, Business, Architecture) and preserve their autonomy.I think the University College should be an independent school, affording more opportunities for teachers in all schools (not just Arts and Sciences) to serve the people of St Louis, and empowered to hire and grant tenure. I support the extension of University College tuition benefits to service workers. I hope all our faculty, including our star researchers, will take teaching sabbatical from time to time, working as contract adjunct lecturers at WashU and other local colleges. I support more opportunities for cross-enrollment all across the Bi-State region (in line with a little-noticed...

Another note to my comments below: almost every senior I have talked to has encountered some problem with the Cluster System. The exceptions seem to be mostly science majors. I don't know why, and I hope somebody will look into this.

From my faculty perspective, however, I have come to regard the system as a total failure. Although it was designed to encourage collaboration between faculty, in my experience it has had the opposite effect, exacerbating academic turf warfare, and appealing to all the control freaks in the University. None of this has any place in the College, although it may be more appropriate in the graduate schools.

Why does a curriculum have to be designed from the top down, by committee? Shouldn't we ALL be on that committee? Shouldn't we ALL be empowered to form our own committees?

Lecturer Dr. Jerome Bauer
--you know who I am, where I come from, and where I live...

PS. I apologize if the comment below was sent more than once, due to a technical glitch. I hope the moderator will delete duplicate comments.

A footnote to my post below: why not give all the administrators more opportunities to teach? Many of them served as contract adjunct lecturers for many years before settling on academic administration as their second career choice. If the cumbersome system now in place were streamlined, I believe much talent could be freed for college teaching. Perhaps "Recent Grad" would have been able to find someone to teach "British Lit from an African-American Jewish Perspective," as a tutorial or cooperative course.

Please support Lecturer's Policy reform, not only for "Elite" Lecturers who may qualify as "Professor of the Practice," but ESPECIALLY for the academic pariah caste, the contract adjunct lecturers, who are STILL paid less to teach a class than a TA is paid to assist...

Lecturer Dr. Jerome Bauer
(who has never posted anonymously or pseudonymously to StudLife, and will never do so...)

Why not just eliminate that stupid 3rd class and have students take just 2 classes that compliment one another.
Also, it's not the clusters that's the problem so much as the lack of intriguing, creative classes and competent, passionate professors. For me, every year was 'British Lit in the 1700s,' 'British Lit 1800s.' How about British Lit from an African-American Jewish perspective? Seriously.