Assembly LXI: The Undergraduate Curriculum at Yale
Thursday, October 24 - Saturday, October 26, 2002
Assembly Chair Marc B. Lockhart '84
Alumni "Homework"

Your Ideal Yale College Curriculum: An Exercise

For this Assembly we have constructed an exercise that you should complete before you arrive, and that we will ask you about during the Assembly itself. We will send you the materials for the exercise with your Assembly confirmation packet once we receive your registration form.

As Yale undertakes the first overall curriculum review in more than thirty years, one underlying question that must be considered is this: What would the ideal Yale College curriculum look like?

As you can imagine, there are probably as many answers to that question as there are alumni of Yale. Nonetheless, might there be underlying principles that support individual curriculum choices? And could these principles be used to create a framework upon which students could build a four-year course of study that provides them with the intellectual resources they need to succeed in the future?

So we turn to you, and ask you to formulate what you think would be your ideal Yale College academic program, knowing what you know now. That is, in light of your own undergraduate education and your life experience to date, we are asking you to engage in the speculative exercise of choosing what you wish you had studied as an undergraduate. Furthermore, we are asking you to choose your curriculum not with a particular career choice or vocation in mind, but based upon what you believe would have best served you throughout your life as a whole.

To complete your "homework" before coming to the Assembly, we will provide you with the current year's Yale College Programs of Study, also known as the "Blue Book." In addition, we will include instructions, a sheet where you can record your course selections, and a sheet where you can explain your reasons for those selections.

While we recognize that some portion of your course selections will be distinct to you personally (i.e., you have recently discovered a love of African art and wish you had taken a class on the subject while you were an undergraduate), we also assume that you hold certain beliefs about what kinds of classes you should have taken as an undergraduate student.

So, after selecting your major and your complete class schedule, the second part of the exercise is to explain as best you can why you chose what you did. What was the philosophy or the set of guiding principles that led you to choose those 36 courses from among thousands of alternative choices? You might also want to let us know why you think those principles would or should be important to the next generations of Yale students.

As you will see from the preliminary program, we will be holding an Assembly session on the morning of Friday, October 25, where delegates and guests will meet with a number of Yale College Residential College and Administrative Deans to do small-group participatory breakout sessions based on this exercise. So register now and sharpen those pencils! We will send you the materials you need to get to work on what we hope will be a very interesting way of participating in the review of Yale's undergraduate curriculum.