1971-07_Administration_1A35_01_09.pdf

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Part of Memo from Joseph Shoben to Mervyn Cadwallader on Planned Curriculum

extracted text

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THE EVERGREEN STATE COLLEGE
September 11, 1970
MEMORANDUM
To:

Dean Mervyn Cadwallader

From:

Joseph Shoben

Subject:

Our planned curriculum

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Much impressed by your pre·s entation of our curricular plans at the Trustees'
retreat, I've been dying to talk with you about the program. I'm dying even
more, however, to get away on a bit of a holiday; and my typewriter seems
more agreeable to late-hour times of communion than do people with lives of
their own to lead. As a result, I'm setting down these reflections, hoping
that they will serve as a basis for a discussion that is only deferred, not
lost. (Besides, we're overdue for that session of twisting the cosmos's tail:
I want to sound you out on Hardy as a novelist of ecological themes. He and
Paul Ehrlich would have adored each other!)
As for the curricular structure that you laid out for us in Tacoma, I find it
exciting, possessed of great intellectual appeal, and wonderfully free of the
dominance of the disciplines. In many ways, it is precisely the kind of
thing that I, socialized as I have been, would thoroughly enjoy, either as a
student or as a faculty member. The model is, of course, Joe Tussman's; and
you may be interested to know that a year ago, just before coming to Olympia
and just after read i ng Experiment at Berkeley, I wrote to Charles, urging
that this academic option be seriously considered as ~ of the alternative
programs of study available at Evergreen.
Having made this point with enthusiasm and in all sincerity, let me get on to
some concerns .
First the program as you outlined it is i ndeed a Tussman derivitive -- if
not pure and undefi led, then modified by only some interesting but minor
impurities and de fil ements. It is worth noting that the dropout rate in
Tussman's own program at Berkeley runs about 55 percent from a highly selfselected population. True, the pressures and the s ources of erosion at the
University of California are considerable and almos t surely more than they
are likely to be around Evergreen. Still, thi s fact, taken together with some
of Tussman's own objective worries about his enterprise, should give us a bit
of pause. As deeply attractive as this option is, it is very probable that
it is suitable for only a fraction -- perhaps a large one but still a fraction
of the undergraduates whom we must serve. Does our proposed arrangement give
us the scope and diversity necessary to permit our accomplishing our mission?
Does it define the only way in which we are going to help students learn how
to learn?