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Identifier
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1971-07_AcademicPlanning_1D16_01_01
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Title
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Another Pass at Academic Organization and the Curriculum at TESC
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Date
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10 November 1969
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Creator
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Joseph Shoben
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extracted text
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THE EVERGREEN STATE COLLEGE
November 10, 1969
ME M O R A N D UM
To:
President Charles Mccann and Vice Presidents David Barry and Dean
Clabaugh
From:
Joseph Shoben
Subject:
Another pass at academic organization and the curriculum at TESC
Much of Evergreen's enormous attractiveness and excitement lies primarily, it seems
to me, in three notions, all of which have been expressed in either the Arrowhead
speech on institutional climate or the minutes of the meetings of the Advisory
Committee as well as in conversations that have appeared to be far from casual. All
of these ideas recognize squarely the urgent need for new points of departure in
American higher education and for more effective forms of intellectual service to
American young p2ople. Perhaps the most fundamental of these perceptions is that we
cannot successfullv change parts of the current "system," expecting to alter the
whole at a later date; Evergreen's implied commitment is to a basically different
conception of undergraduate education, not simply to a repackaging of the last half
century's patterns and contents. Second, TESC seems corporately aware of contemporary society's demands for liberated generalists, for sensitized citizens who have
learned how to learn and who understand that man's most distinctive trait is not an
ability to solve problems but a capacity to formulate them. It is largely for this
reason that the College has been wary of domination by graduate-school interests and
of vocationalism (which are, in some essential ways, very much the same thing). And
finally, there is tte view that Evergreen is not for everybody--that, although it is
far from elitist in temper and al though it deliberately rejects the belief in the
sanctity of SAT scores or QPA's, it understands the failure of service-station approaches to higher education, the perils of the multiversity model, and the efforts
by a variety of institutions to be all things to all people with baccalaureate aspirations. The intent of the place, as I've understood it, has been to determine
what it can do in a distinctively contributory way, to do it well (which includes
recruiting the students and the faculty for whom this mission is likely to be a generally congenial one), and to keep alive the question of how exportable both the
goals and the methods may prove to be. Uniqueness is not an institutional aim, and
our articulate hope is to have some meaningful and positive impact on educational
thought and practice in the United States.
As our too brief lead time shortens, all of us , of course, are pressed by a sense of
desperation, and the temptation to do what we know best how to do becomes a powerful one. Because all of us are inescapably the heirs of the very traditions of
which we are critical, we risk, despite the best collective will in the world, succumbing to these pressures; and if we do, we could readily wash all our dreams of
realizing these humat1.ely exciting ideas down the academic drain. If we organize
ourselves according to conventional disciplinary concepts, even though that organization is . patched by substituting divisions for departments and loosened by emphasizing independent study over standard "courses," then we at the very least make room
for invasion by the values of the graduate school--specialization, professionalism,
and technical expertise rather than personal development, undogmatic citizenship,
and in informed respect for the intellect in coping humanely with the contemporary
-2world's grinaing problems. If we seek as faculty members, especially at critical
levels of academic leadership, only those men and women with the usual professori3l
bona fides, then it seems highly probable that they will, sooner or later (and
probably sooner), put that kind of background to work along quite predictable
lines. Moreover, our salary schedule implies that our power of attraction is
likely to be low in relation to a Yale or a Minnesota, a Kenyon or a Kansas State;
therefore, our efforts to play a conventional game are likely to lead us into
playing it in a rather undistinguished manner. And if we rely on the presence of
Mt. Rainier and Puget Sound to make up salary differentials, then we are liable to
get people who are a bit more committed .to mountains and sea water than to making
a new educational conception come constructively alive. Finally, if our curriculum takes the form of work, regardless of how it may be. -advertised and wrapped, in
the disciplines of natural science, social science, and· the humanities, then, once
we have a discipline-oriented faculty aboard, the potency of professional socialization and the weight of academic convention provide ample ground for betting
that we will move rapidly toward departmentalization and the values of departmentalism. The only probable forces acting against such a trend will be the disruptive ones of radical militance and the Dionysian rejection of the intellect that
currently attract large numbers of students and a small proportion of professors.
What is offered here is one possible alternative to a disciplinary basis for our
academic organization. It rests on several postulates, all of which are open to
criticism and which may or may not be closely geared to the invigorating ideas
that lie close to the heart of Evergreen's emerging self-concept as I understand
it. The aim here is simply that of attempting to make clearer and more articulate what we are and are not willing to attempt, to widen in some degree our
range of perceived alternatives for defining the framework into which we want to
invite similarly committed men to help in our further planning, and to throw a
set of recommendations into our hopper for whatever consideration they may merit.
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The first postulate on which the present proposal rests is not likely to evoke
much argument: Evergreen's academic organization should, flexibly but definitel.y,
reflect its co·n ceptions of genuinely educative experience for undergraduates and
its curricular commitments. If we believe that the liberated generalist emerges
from a study of the disciplines and that the disciplinary divisions of knowledge
are therefore the proper curricular units of learning, then a departmental organizatio11al structure is obviously sensible. In our discussions so far, we have
steered clear of this kind of traditionalism; and one idea that we have examined
relatively positively is that undergraduate education is in trouble in large part
because it has confused the strategies of formal and technical scholarship,
which are preeminently disciplinary in their character, with the strategies of
education, which must be much more closely attuned to the processes of human
development, to students' learning styles, and to the backgrounds and the motivational structures that students bring with them to the educational experience.
From this first postulate, an important problem emerges: What are our conceptions
of productive undergraduate education and of the curricular opportunities appropriate to it?
The -second postulate represents one response to that question. The curriculum
at Evergreen should be marked by relevance. In this context, "curriculum" refers
to the content of what is to be learned, and "relevance" has four basic dimensions.
First is the dimension of meaning in relation to the major social issues that the
modern world and its inhabitants face. Second is the dimension of personhood-the problems of a developing self in a highly unstable society and the difficulties of finding and creating a core of secure individuality in a community that is
increasingly crowded and that is marked by more and more intrusions of noise, of
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information, and other people. Third, there is the dimension of man-nature relationships, having to do with the changing concepts of the natural environment
and of man in interaction with it, the ways in which that environment has been _
altered with human consequences of considerable moment, and the implications for
man of the strategies by which he copes with the natural world. Finally, there
is the dimension of expression--the effectiveness with which a person can articulate his own experience, understand others, and enter into communicative interchanges.
The third postulate is that Evergreen's predominant (but not sole) educational
emphasis is on the intellectual development of students:,· That is, the commitment to relevance is disciplined by a commitment to the life of the mind.
Educationally, ethically, and even politically, this statement means that, whenever choices must be made, the College will be guided by Apollo rather than by
Dionysius, that although it recognizes and honors the noncognitive components of
personal development and respects men's passions, its primary business is with
the roles played by knowledge, reason, and taste in both individual growth and
the endless search for more humane forms of civilized corporate life. From the
standpoint of its curriculum and its educational responsibilities then, the
College is neither family, commune, mental hospital, nor revolutionary fortress.
Although it will make every effort to serve human needs, to provide the widest
possible latitude for personal growth including the opportunity for failures
upon which growth sometimes depends, and to create and maintain an environment
in which a great diversity of life-styles can flourish, its attempts in these
directions are clearly and deliberately subordinate and instrumental to the furthering of intellectual goals. In so stressing the intellect, TESC intends
nothing pretentious and, a priori, nothing narrowly exclusive; all that is meant
is a fundamental stress on the cultivation of thought and informed rationality
as distinctive and useful human characteristics.
Fourth, to be educative, the curriculum should im·:Jlve little content that can be
taught but a great deal that affords opportunities for learning. Outside t_he
special domains of technical and professional training, there is ample room to
doubt both the meaning and the effectiveness of what is called teaching, and there
is already some disposition here at the College to break down, in the interest of
education, the traditional model of masters and apprentices. More positively,
Evergreen seems to put a premium on the idea of a community of learners, of people
working together on problems and issues of common significance in which some
individuals are more widely experienced, better informed, and more constructively
provocative but in which all are concerned with a quest for new ways of formulating
problems and for new answers. This image contrasts sharply with the model of
journeymen and apprentices with the former initiating the latter into the special
mysteries of their academic guilds. Teachers, like books, films, and recordings,
become resources for learning; and the job .of . teachers becomes that of managing
the conditions of learning--their own as well as their students'.
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Fifth, each unit of learning at Evergreen should expose a student in a substantivel·y ·
integrated fashion to materials and processes that engage and challenge his aesthetic response, his logical and information-processing capacities, his normative
judgments, and his sense of himself as a member of the only species that binds time,
that is both determined by ascquires flexibility from the past and that has
expectancies of the future. There is a rough equivalency here (although only a
rough one) in the propositio
at all units of learning should include, unified
by the substantive problem on which the student is working, materials
that are
artistic, scientific, moral and valuational, and historical, but this translation
-4c ,a n be at least as mis leading as it may be clarifyi~
The aim is to help the
stud.e nt (of whatever age or nominal statuSi) develop as a whole learner concerned
with a compl-ex of issues that to him are puzzling and important. It is not,
except in the most incidental of ways, to facilitate his discrimination of art,
science, philosophy, and history as ways to knowing or as specialized approaches
to knowledge. Honoring that kind of discrimination and that form of specialization, we can appropriately leave these enterprises to graduate schools and the
apparatus of the academic professions--which are quite strong enough at the moment
without Evergreen.
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Sixth, to insure the meaningfulness of learning units fo~ individual students,
they should be embodied in learning contracts between the student and suitable
faculty members, constrained by the available goodness of fit between the terms
of the contract and the resources of TESC for their fulfillment. The acceptability
of a contract--an indication of what the student wants to study and an agreement
with respect to how that study is to be executed--is in large part a function of
whether the College can provide the books, the other documents (whether printed or
otherwise), the access to relevant people and sources of experience, and the
availability of faculty members organized in a manner cogent to the enterprise
that are all essential to its productivity. In creating the broadest possible
bounds within which students can exercise individual initiative and personal
responsibility in defining the parameters of their education, Evergreen's professors and administrative officers must simultaneously structure themselves in the
light of that student-oriented objective and in a way that reflects their own
intellectual concerns and values. If there is too much conflict between these
two requirements, or if the organization of the academic venture is at variance
with them, then the notion of highly individualized learning contracts within
programmatic limits set by faculty interests is likely to come a cropper, and the
rhetoric of individualization is liable to prove frustratingly empty .
(
Seventh, the level of study represented by any particular learning contract should
be estimated on the basis of a student's previous background, his relevant abilities,
and his aspirations. Deliberately excluded is the question of whether the student
is freshman or senior, lower division or upper division, undergraduate or graduate .
The issue is one of whether he is tackling an intellectual problem that is of human
significance in a way that for him is likely to facilitate his development as a
learner. By the same token, the student has the privilege of staying within the
same domain (called below--only for want of more imagination--a "program") of
contracts throughout his tenure at the College or of moving over a wide range of
substantive interests. In any case, proper accord (Could that term be Evergreen's
equivalent for "credit"?) should always be given to what a student has previously
learned, whether through formal channels or informal, whether in shcool or out;
and the basic standard of evaluation should be growth from an individual baseline
rather than an approximation to some external norm the objectivity of which is
very much in doubt and the applicability of which is, given the diversity of
student bodies, even less supportable. As a consequence of such arrangements,
Evergreen graduates will not have achieved a common level of intellectual perform- ·
ance, just as they will not, except incidentally, have acquired a common set of
learnings. The point, of course, is that the same can be said factually about the
graduates of more traditional institutions, and the advantage is that each student
at the College will have demonstrated some growth in his own functional capacity
to define and to cope with intellectual problems that he looks upon as important.
-5These seven postulates are not necessarily exhaustive, and there is no pretense
here of their being fully developed. They seem sufficient, however, to suggest
(a) some of the content of the learning experiences that Evergreen mus.t provide
to fulfill its potentialities and (b) at least one of the forms of academic organization that would be appropriate to its aspirations. What follows is a proposed skeleton of an organizational arrangement that embodies these educational
ideas with some illustrative "programs"--substantive areas of inquiry--that could
profitably and excitingly be associated with it. The focus of the argument is on
the structure. If we cormnit ourselves to this kind of conception of our academic
effort and find the proper leadership for the "Divisions" that are offered for
consideration here, then we are likely to recruit a facu~ty that will implement
the principles implied by the postulates and that will work out its own congenial
and effective modes of address to the specific programs that will define TESC's
curriculum. In turn, that curriculum, it will be recalled, S\mply marks the
boundaries within which learning contracts can be written; it does not imply
courses, sequences, or levels.
The essential core of this proposal is four Divisions, each headed by a dean or
a director. Each Division would generate progr2IT1s, probably with each program
led by a chairman, to which several faculty members would contribute. - Professors,
whose appointments would be divisional, could and probably should be involved
in more than one program. Programs would be conceived as thematic fields of
study within which learning contracts could be written. The specific terms of
each contract would be worked out between each student and one or more faculty
members in the program relevant to his interests. Three of the four Divisions are
conceptually parallel to each other: One is concerned with programs in the realm
of man's relationship to his natural environment; the second focuses on man's
relationship to his societies, and the third is concerned with the relationship
of man, the reflexive and reflective animal, to himself. The fourth Division is
quite different; its function is to provide programs that facilitate a student's
growth in expression and communication. It should operate both in a clinical
fashion, helping students to overcome what they regard as deficiencies in their
expressive and communicative abilities, and developmentally, helping students to
achieve some facility in new modes of expression.
The four Divisions are listed below with a set of purely illustrative programs
assigned to each:
Division of Expressive and Communicative Studies
Writing, speech, and reading
Foreign languages
Mathematics
Studio arts
Division of Programs in Man-Environment Relationships
Man in balance of nature
Technology and environmental transformation
Natural resources and public policy
.The technology and politics of space exploration
Human strategies for coping with the environment
Cormnunity health: External and internal environments
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Division of Man-Society Relationships
Population growth and its consequences
Peac.e and war
Poverty and affluence
The governing of men
Race relations and racial conflict
Social planning and personal freedom
The dynamics of urban cultures
Division of Programs in Man-Self Relationships
Conceptions of · human nature
Identity and alien a tion
Moral choice and moral dilemmas
Self-realization and self-deception
Imagin1 tion and extralogical experience
The creative process
Aesthetic experience
Because this propos a l is presented for discussion and critical evaluatio~, there
is no point in trying here to explain its ramifications at any length. A very
fe ~
inders and b amp l es wi
suffice. A crucial point, of course, is t he o;
e )
made in the fifth postulate: Each learning contract within a program in the
three conceptually parallel Divisions should engage a student's aesthetic response,
his logical and information-processing capacities, his normative judgments, and _.,,.
his time perspectives
~ form -an illustrative contract out of thin air, one can
thinko f a s filden , working in the progr am on strategies for coping with the environment, exposing hims~lf to these obligations: (1) he reads a novel likeC. P. Snow's The Search, a work like Reinchenbach's Experience and Prediction
a criticism of science like Barzun's Science: The Glorious Entertainment, and
a history like Singer's From Mag ic to Science or Mason's Main Currents in
Scientific Thought; (2) he visits amuseum of natural history or of science and
industry, evaluates the exhibits on the basis of what he learns from them about
the natural environment in which he lives, interviews the curator with respect to
what the institution's purposes are and ¼hat problems are encountered in trying
to fulfill those purposes, and perhaps prepares a design for a museum that will 1
better enlarge its visitors' understanding of the natural world; (3) he spends a
brief period--a day to a working week--with a natural scientist, watching him
practice his profession and asking how his activities are likely to shed more light
on the character of the natural environment, about the human benefits that result
from such work, and about the satisfactions that the scientist himself derives
from his day-to-day involvements; (4) having discussed his readings and his experience with the faculty member with whom he is working and with other students who
may have similar interests, he prepares a paper, ;using such other materials as
may prove necessary, on the way that science shap .es men's concepts of their environment and raises such questions as he is able to generate about the aesthetic, moral,
and political significance of that process. In the criticism of his paper, his
faculty associate pays p articular attention to the accuracy of his understanding
of scientific ide a s and information and, where appropri a te, sets him the task of
correcting any misconceptions he may have.
If the student wants to pursue this
line of inquiry, he · can easily move up to more sophisticated materials and to
more complex kinds of questions that dem and, among other things, a more technical
and precise comprehension of, say, chemical or geological .concepts. In contracts
that relate to programs in race relations and racial conflict or in imagination
and extralogical experi ence, it is even easier to construct off-the-cuff le arning
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uni"ts that, assuming initial interest on the part of the student, engage him as a
whole learner.
In the Division of Expressive and Communicative Studies, the programs are a bit
different. On the one hand, if diagnostic tests suggest that a student is reading
slowly and if he wants to improve himself on this score, he can devote one (or
more) of his "learning units" (in Evergreen phraseology) to clinical work in the
upgrading of reading skills. On the other hand, if he chooses to acquire facility
in a foreign language, he can find in the Division the resources by which he can
totally immerse himself (the terms are now berlitz's) in the linguistic community
of his election, work with a tutor on developing only a:~eading comprehension of
the selected language, or join a small group, led by a native speaker, in the
development of this new proficiency. The rate of learning and the level of
accomplishment to be attained are up to the student; the College simply makes the
required resources available, grants him credit, and evaluates him on the basis
of his growth to the point of his discontinuing language study. In both mathematics and such studio arts as ceramics or oil painting, similar principles apply:
The emphasis is nonprofessional, and the rate of learning and level of achievement
are left up to the student; the goal sought is that of helping him either to say
something or to understand something of importance to him in a more sophisticated
way.
Although it would not be difficult to illustrate in considerable detail some of
the hypothetical programs listed here, my primary purpose is simply that of indicating one form of organization that would permit a closer realization at TESC of
the educational dreams that grow out of our shared criticisms of conventional
undergraduate ~ urricula. It is only to concretize and to stimulate fu~ther our
consideration of alternatives to traditional patterns of academic organization
that this plan is submitted. I hope we can soon continue our hunt for a pattern
that will give Evergreen a vigorous and fruitful start in all probability, there
is none within the reach of eithe1 discovery or cr~ation that will do more than
that.
EJS :mw
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Source
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The Evergreen State College President's Office Records, Academic Planning Records, 1971-07
