The Distribution -- Staffing

CLA Document

For the first two years of the program, students must satisfy only one of the two requirements. This will provide time to ensure adequate staffing and to assess the nature of enrollment demands. At the end of this period, the Common Learning Coordinator and the Curriculum Committee will determine whether staffing is adequate to permit the full two course requirement to go forward.

Rationale

The world approaches the next century with a number of grave challenges ahead. In Foundations for the Future, some of these challenges are articulated:

The world of the 21st century is one in which the long-standing human and social problems of war, poverty, and family violence persist.... Our world is increasingly a technological and scientifically sophisticated one. ...The very technological and scientific advancement that has saved lives and enhanced our daily living; has added to unprecedented environmental problems. ... The decreasing size of our world also helps to define the education in which we must engage. ... Finally, all of the above dimensions of our shrinking world are intensified by their increasing rate of change. [emphasis in original]

If our students are to be prepared intellectually to meet these challenges, they must draw on the entire spectrum of human thought, embracing the wisdom of other times and other places. Thus, we see the Disciplinary Breadth requirement as an integral part of education for the 21st century that is rooted in a sense of history and global human experience. At the same time, we believe that there is substantial educational merit to a requirement that would focus students' attention specifically on two dimensions of the changing world. We have termed these themes "Perspectives on the Natural and Fabricated Worlds" and "Perspectives on Human Diversity."

Through courses addressing these perspectives, students will come to appreciate that the very terms with which we name and understand the new challenges of the 21 st century have a history and global contexts, and are located in multiple traditions of intellectual inquiry. Such courses will expose students to a variety of ideas, natural phenomena, texts, performances, or works of art, and engage them in creative expression of their own in response to these themes. Some courses could provide students with insights and reflection on the motivations, behaviors, and construction of meaning of human beings, both as individuals and as groups. Others could offer analysis of social, political, and economic institutions and their interrelationship with human needs and aspirations. Still other courses could introduce students to the benefits and limitations of scientific and technical concepts and techniques with which we must increasingly familiarize ourselves in order simply to keep pace with the demands of life and work in the coming century.

The two sets of courses have several dimensions in common. First, we anticipate that many will be interdisciplinary in nature or else will bring to bear several approaches within a single discipline. The challenges we face are complex, and the intellectual energy we bring to them must be informed by many different approaches. Second, both requirements engage students in studying the ways in which human beings have come to see and act on their surroundings, both physical and social. Finally, both sets of courses will challenge students to define and criticize the boundaries that human beings construct between themselves and the other, both human others and the natural and physical world.