Rationale -- Background
CLA Document
The curriculum that Bucknell's College of Arts and Sciences adopted for B.A. degree students in 1970 has been changed materially by formal Faculty action only once in the past 22 years, with the addition of the University Writing Requirement in 1983.2 It has continued to evolve in informal ways, however, as individual faculty members, departments, and programs have ceaselessly enlivened their courses, majors, and interdepartmental programs through innovations at all levels. The faculty of the several B.S. degree programs and that of the B.Mus. have likewise engaged in a continuing process of renewal, their attention directed largely to the courses that constitute the various majors and their corequisites. Their distribution requirements, which reflect or, in some cases, are identical to those of the B.A. program, also remain largely unchanged.
The B.A. degree program, which with its distributional requirements and guidelines has played a leading role in determining the curriculum outside the major for all students in the College, has been widely perceived as having lost the sense of purpose and coherence with which it was instituted in 1970. Serious needs have arisen: to explain to ourselves more clearly what elements of the curriculum are and should be common to all of our students; to become more familiar with the informal changes that have occurred across the curriculum over the past two decades and to learn in what ways they do and do not cohere with one another; in essence, to carry out the overall evaluation of the 1970 curriculum that has never taken place. In 1987, all these curricular needs met up with an even more pressing need imposed by external factors. Prospective students in a dwindling pool and individuals and groups eager to help the University through some difficult times have been making insistent demands for an explanation of what our curriculum is fundamentally about.
In 1987 the Faculty of the College entered this process of self-reflection by voting into existence the GEC, whose charge was, to summarize: (1) to review current course and program offerings, particularly those centering on the freshman year, and the final proposal of the previous curriculum task force (the C-Team) together with the minutes of the Curriculum Committee dealing with that proposal; (2) to draft a mission statement for the Curriculum Committee to approve as a start to work on a general education proposal and the courses or programs that might be envisioned in one; (3) no later than the beginning of the 1990-91 Spring Semester, to issue a final report and proposal for general education in the College of Arts and Sciences at Bucknell, for whose implementation the approval of the Curriculum Committee and College Faculty would be necessary. At that time it was assumed that there would be a general education program that was set off from the rest of the curriculum in substance as well as in structure.
Consequently, after the Mission Statement it drafted was approved, the GEC sought out the productive curricular innovations that have appeared in the curriculum and the strengths of our students as well as the deficiencies that faculty members and others could identify in the curriculum and our students. Starting from this point, and continuing through reference to curricular reform efforts under way at other institutions, to the vast and constantly expanding literature on the subject of general education, and to the experience and wisdom of a wide range of members of Bucknell's faculty, staff, and student body, the GEC first developed the notion of a common small seminar for all first-year students, the "Foundation Seminar," and with it the idea of a "Capstone Experience" for integrative work at the end of a student's undergraduate years. These experiences for first-year and senior students became more feasible with the acceptance by the Faculty and the Board of Trustees in Fall 1990 of a proposal by the Committees on Staff Planning and Planning and Budget to add 25 new positions over a five-year period. One-third of the additional 1.1'B's were to support interdisciplinary activities, particularly small first-year and senior seminars.
The GEC then began to tackle the thornier problem of the distributional requirements. These efforts resulted, in Spring 1991 (missing the deadline imposed in the charge by a few months), in a draft of a three-part GE Program. In order to continue without a hiatus progress toward a proposal for the Curriculum Committee to consider, the Curriculum Committee asked the remaining members of the GEC to continue to facilitate the refining of this proposal. The discussions of the draft proposal that members of the GEC held with all departments elicited questions, criticisms, and suggestions which have contributed significantly to the current version.
The GEC has not been acting in a vacuum, however. Two other major ventures having curricular implications have taken place concurrently and influenced our deliberations. In 1990, a group of faculty members and administrators convened by Vice President Shinn developed a draft of a document, Foundations for the Future, which, after a long process of revision on the basis of input from across the campus, was adopted by a unanimous vote of the University Faculty in 1991. Like the GEC proposal, this document recognized the implicit curricular reform already taking place across the University and sought to channel these efforts towards a curriculum that would best achieve Bucknell's mission in the years to come. One of the four strategic goals adopted in Foundations was that general education should not be set off or marginalized from the rest of the curriculum, but that certain Common Learning Objectives should be evident both within and outside of the major. This proposal aims to make explicit the values and Common Learning Objectives of Foundations for the Future throughout the curriculum.
More recently, the January Program Advisory Committee worked on a proposal to revive the January Program as a vehicle for curricular innovation as well as to meet the criticisms it has received. Their proposal recommended a Winter Study program, but was not accepted by the University Faculty.
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2. Several important faculty initiatives were undertaken during the period from 1974 to 1982 to reform Bucknell's general education curriculum in the College of Arts and Sciences. In spite of significant effort on the part of the members of the designing committees, general education proposals presented for approval in 1976 and 1980 were not passed by the Faculty.
