When Revising a Curriculum, Strategy May Trump Pedagogy

How Duke pulled off an overhaul while Rice saw its plans collapse

By ALISON SCHNEIDER

Curriculum reform often sparks more back-biting than back-patting. Coalitions form. Turf wars erupt. Lofty debate degenerates into low-stakes bickering. But there was little of that at Duke University last month.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education issue dated February 19, 1999

When it came time to vote on Duke's new general-education requirements -- the first major overhaul of the university's curriculum in more than a decade -- the challenges were few, the exchanges polite. Everything went like clockwork, even the timing: The vote was called 20 minutes ahead of schedule. And the proposal passed by a two-thirds majority.

It was a particularly sweet victory for a university where the rigor of the curriculum did not seem to equal the rising quality of students who have flocked to Duke in the last 15 years. And it couldn't have happened at a better time, given the bad publicity swirling around Duke's English department, long a minefield of personal feuds and ideological divisions.

By all accounts, political savvy and deft public relations had a lot to do with Duke's curricular coup. Even critics who thought the proposal was more about style than substance acknowledge that it was a smoothly run operation.

It was another picture entirely at Rice University. A new undergraduate curriculum there, which took two and a half years to craft, was hacked to death last November by disgruntled faculty members. Suspicious professors dismissed the proposal as a "postmodern plot."

Rice's president remains philosophical about the defeat. "Changing a curriculum has all the physical and psychological problems of moving a graveyard," Malcolm Gillis says.

He should know. Twelve years ago, he built the curriculum that Duke just dismantled. "These things are political with a little p," says Mr. Gillis, Duke's former dean of arts and sciences. "You can't always get all that you want."

Ironically, Rice and Duke wanted almost exactly the same thing. Each university felt that its curriculum was hit-or-miss in approach, lacking coherence, consistency, and a sense of identity.

Students at both institutions had to take a set number of classes in various subject areas, but at Rice, there are only a couple of specific "foundation" courses that all undergraduates have to fulfill.

At Duke, the curriculum had the consumer-friendly feel of a Burger King commercial: "Have it your way" was the underlying theme. Students had to take courses in at least five out of six subject areas, but there were no specific classes or concepts that undergraduates had to explore, and students were free to opt out of all courses in an entire subject area.

Opt out they did. Some 50 per cent of Duke students regularly avoided all contact with foreign languages, mathematics, or science.

"I was frankly appalled at the number of loopholes that existed in our curricular system that allowed students to escape completely unprepared to live in the world of the 21st century," says William H. Chafe, Duke's dean of the faculty of arts and sciences.

So Duke, like Rice, set out to find a curriculum that would prepare students for a new world -- one in which scientific literacy is a necessity, increasing globalization a reality. Both universities wanted to combine seeming opposites: breadth and depth, structure and choice, skills and subject areas, interdisciplinarity and departmental divisions.

It's not rocket science, but it can get complicated.

Dubbed "Curriculum 2000," Duke's new requirements are laid out in a hodgepodge of columns and boxes, known as the "matrix."

Under the plan, students can kiss the opting-out option goodbye. All of them must take three courses in each of the four "areas of knowledge" -- arts and literatures, civilizations, natural sciences and mathematics, and social sciences.

Students at Duke must also take two courses in each of two "modes of inquiry" -- interpretive and aesthetic approaches; and quantitative, inductive, and deductive reasoning. They have to take two courses in each of three "focused inquiries" -- cross-cultural issues; ethics; and science, technology, and society. And there are "competency" requirements, too: three writing classes; two research experiences, one of them in the major; and a foreign-language requirement, ranging from one to three courses, depending on the student's proficiency.

A course can satisfy more than one requirement. So a class in, say, health economics arguably could fulfill not only a social-science requirement, but also the science, technology, and society requirement, and, if it's loaded with math, the quantitative, inductive, and deductive reasoning category as well.

As for the meaning behind the matrix, "it frames what students do," says Angela M. O'Rand, head of the Arts and Sciences Council, a 60-member faculty group. "They're not picking a course just to fulfill a distributional purpose, but to fulfill an intellectual one."

Sound appealing? Rice thought so. Like Duke, it pushed for a curriculum heavy on rigor, one that would call for classes in quantitative reasoning, writing, and oral presentation. Foreign-language requirements were added, as were freshman seminars.

The centerpiece of the Rice plan was five interdisciplinary "ways of knowing": approaches to the past, encounters with texts and the arts, engaging science and technology, interpreting human behavior, and methods, analysis, and inquiry.

There's nothing startling about either the Duke or the Rice curriculum. "Institutions no longer organize curricula around subject matters, but around the ways that people gain knowledge," says Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. "They're emphasizing inquiry itself."

At least, some institutions are. But Rice won't be one of them. "The effort to have the Rice faculty consider major conceptual changes in the general-education curriculum is dead for now," says Gerald McKenny, chairman of the religious-studies department and the man in charge of sifting through the curricular wreckage to see what can be salvaged.

As it turns out, much of it can be saved. The foreign-language requirement was approved. The freshman seminars, cross-divisional courses, and communication-intensive classes will go forth in pilot programs over the next few years. Anything that didn't involve a significant change survived.

But for now, "ways of knowing" is dead and buried, and the name itself might have done it in. "It was a red flag for people," says Carol E. Quillen, an associate professor of history at Rice and a proponent of the new curriculum. "It suggested that we were taking an ideological position about the nature of truth, that we were saying that what you know is determined by the perspective that you take, so there's no objective knowledge. We weren't saying that at all."

But many professors -- especially in the sciences, which still reign strong at Rice -- didn't believe them. A finger-pointing e-mail message was circulated, criticizing the curriculum committee for harboring postmodern partisans. "Two members of our committee were chosen to be the dean of science and the dean of engineering," responds William Martin, a professor of sociology and the panel's chairman. "We're hardly a bunch of radicals."

But the committee couldn't shake its renegade reputation. Its members held 75 meetings, met with each department before writing the plan, and talked with people after releasing a draft to gauge reactions. They tinkered with language and added a category to "ways of knowing" -- methods, analysis, and inquiry -- to pacify people in religious studies who felt ignored. Nothing helped.

Perhaps nothing could. Many professors balked at the vagueness of the categories and criticized the "ways of knowing" approach for making false distinctions between the content of a course and the creation of knowledge. "Almost any course at a good university that's content-based has to, of necessity, talk about the way knowledge is found and analyzed," says John Polking, a mathematics professor. His courses certainly do, he adds. "It's a fake issue."

Professors also complained about the speed with which the changes would be made, and questioned the wisdom of requiring courses before they'd been developed. In the end, no one could agree on a single vision of general education. Some wanted to dictate the courses that students would take. Others wanted to leave the choice to the individual.

"I don't want it to sound like a few of us had a golden notion, and a committee of troglodytes spurned it," Mr. Martin says. "But people were very much concerned about, 'What will be the cost to me, my department, and my division? And why should we pay these costs without a demonstration that there would be commensurate gain?'"

Duke, somehow, managed to make the gain seem greater than the cost. To be fair, Rice has some administrative Achilles' heels that Duke does not. For one, Rice is divided into seven schools, while at Duke, there's a faculty of arts and sciences. That doesn't guarantee one big, happy family, but at least everybody's housed under the same roof.

To complicate matters, the entire Rice faculty votes on curricular changes. At Duke, the decision rests in the hands of the 60-member Arts and Sciences Council. What's more, Rice makes its faculty vote twice on a curricular change. The first vote passed by a 3-to-2 margin. But a month later, the plan failed by the same ratio.

"Like all proposals at Rice, this one was hostage to who came to the faculty meeting," Ms. Quillen says.

Apparently, there were a few ringers in the crowd. "Many of the people at the second vote were people we've never seen at a faculty meeting before or since," Mr. Martin says.

But there were no wild cards in the pack at Duke. The Arts and Sciences Council is a known quantity, and the curriculum committee won over key constituencies early in the game. Then, when council members did sit down to vote, they considered the plan as a whole, not piece by piece. That kept the reform from being nickel-and-dimed to death, observers say.

"In the best sense of the word, this succeeded because it was very much a political process," says Mr. Chafe, Duke's dean of arts and sciences. He was an instrumental operator himself. He gave the curriculum committee its initial charge and spoke out strenuously in favor of the proposal. When resistance cropped up, he reassured skeptical professors that Duke would provide the resources needed to turn the plan into reality -- nearly $4-million in the first few years to develop new courses and hire more faculty members, among other costs.

"We didn't just come up with a proposal," says Karla F.C. Holloway, a professor of English and a member of the curriculum committee. "We came up with a marketing strategy."

For months, the committee sequestered itself. Members analyzed core curricula at other institutions and picked apart past reform efforts at home, searching for tactical mistakes. And they spent hours anticipating objections and hammering out their answers. They decided where to bend and where to stand firm.

Last spring, they headed out into the field. They met with directors of undergraduate studies, sat down with department heads, consulted with students. In May, they presented an initial draft of their proposal to the Arts and Sciences Council, gathered opinions, and went back to the drawing board. In the fall, the committee made its pitch. It held four open meetings for faculty members and engaged in plenty of behind-the-scenes maneuvering.

Peter Lange, head of the curriculum committee, was a door-to-door salesman, colleagues say. He pounded the pavement, pressed the flesh, met with anyone who would listen. By the end of the process, he had collected more than 1,000 e-mail messages about Curriculum 2000, and had gone through 23 versions of the matrix.

The panel wouldn't budge on the foreign-language requirement, despite complaints from coaches, who worried that it would turn Duke's strong sports programs into an Ivy League version of athletics.

But the committee was anything but rigid. It dropped the number of required courses from 36 to 34 after students complained, and reworded the ethics requirement to sound less preachy. It reduced the number of courses required in each area of knowledge from four to three, because scientists feared that their majors would be overburdened. And it agreed to phase in the research requirement.

The key change, which took two and a half months to broker, speaks volumes about how the curriculum committee did its business. After humanists started complaining that the matrix gave their intellectual enterprise short shrift, Mr. Lange turned the tables. He invited Walter D. Mignolo, chairman of the Romance-studies department, to draft language proposing a new category. The result: A new mode of inquiry, interpretive and aesthetic approaches, was added.

Even people who opposed the reforms admired the committee's tactics. "It was a 'total quality management' approach to curriculum change," says Stuart Rojstaczer, an associate professor of geology, environment, and engineering.

The approach worked. "What kills a curriculum are little oppositions, all of which don't agree with each other, but all of which agree that there's something wrong with the curriculum," Mr. Lange says. "We had big meetings, small meetings, meetings with three people. I don't think anyone felt that this was rammed down their throats."

Just because the plan passed, however, doesn't mean that it hasn't left some professors with a bad taste in their mouths.

Before Duke forces students to take classes in science or Spanish, maybe it should investigate why they're avoiding them, says Peter Muller, an associate professor of statistics. Proponents of the curricular reform argue that most students skip courses because of their difficulty, not their content, "but I'd like some data, not just conjecture," Mr. Muller argues."It's an irony that we're lamenting that our students avoid quantitative reasoning, yet in our policy document, there's a lack of it."

New requirements aren't the only way to get students to sign up for statistics courses; new teaching styles are another, says Mr. Muller. "If students are avoiding math or languages, maybe there's something that we are doing wrong." Some departmental soul-searching should have preceded wholesale change, he says.

But it's tough to stimulate such debate when most professors don't show up for the discussion. Faculty attendance at the curriculum meetings was dismal at best. "There were more people at the meeting who had worked on the curriculum than in the audience," says Albert F. Eldridge, a political scientist. "It wasn't a defining event of the year for many faculty. It was a distant blip on their intellectual radar."

That's because many professors felt that the new curriculum contained more fat than meat, says Mr. Rojstaczer, the geologist. "Our administration seems to think it's done something substantive in proposing this change, but it's obvious that we've created a curriculum that's merely a rhetorical device. The curriculum is window dressing. It's not that important."

The "inquiry" requirements are "so vague that almost any wine can be poured into those vessels," says Victor Strandberg, an English professor. "I foresee that there will be a lot of fancy footwork with semantics about what constitutes a 'focused inquiry' or a 'mode of inquiry.' We professors will teach courses in the way we always have and will just put different labels on them."

Administrators bristle when asked about the fudge factor. They insist that Duke professors have too much integrity to stoop to gamesmanship and to craftily check off categories that will boost enrollments without retooling content. Besides, they say, there will be oversight.

But Fred Nijhout, a zoologist, says academics have wriggled around curriculum cops before, and will no doubt try again. "It would be the first time if they didn't."