AYA - Assembly

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

Dean Richard Brodhead and members of the Committee on Yale College Education conducted a "town meeting" with delegates and guests at the Assembly to consider alumni feedback on the curriculum review process. Committee members present were David Mount '03, humanities and the arts group, Ian Shapiro '83 PhD, '87 JD, Chair of Political Science and serving in the social/international studies group, and Laura Oh '03, biomedical education. Dean Brodhead recounted that last spring, the committee held similar town meetings at the colleges to let students voice their thoughts.

Having consulted the "current users" of the Yale College curriculum, Dean Brodhead indicated, the committee now wished to hear from the "former users." Dean Brodhead began the meeting by asking the delegates what they thought would be the right kinds of questions to be asking about an undergraduate education.

In answer to alumni comments and questoins about incorporating both writing and speaking into Yale classes, Professor Shapiro described Yale's formation of "centers for learning." There is currently a "center for language study" that coordinates resources for the more than fifty languages taught at Yale. The focus of the CLS is not only on providing technological resources, but on ensuring that these resources are well-supported and efficiently integrated into the overall language learning experience. Yale would like to create similar centers for areas such as quantitative reasoning, and writing. Perhaps public speaking could somehow be included in this scheme of thought.

A recurrent question revolved around electives and requirements. How much or little should Yale require? Dean Brodhead began by addressing Professor Brown's view that the university should do away with most electives. While glad that delegates had been exposed to a different point of view, his own view is that electives are essential to a student's education. Although some may think that electives are trivial courses, electives provide initiations into varied disciplines that students may decide to continue to pursue here or later in life. Professor Shapiro added that increasing requirements creates a situation where students are taking classes only to check off a box on their lists.

Some alumni noted that better advising was an issue that had come up often in discussions over the weekend. Professor Shapiro responded that the committee was in fact looking closely at the role of advisors. He mentioned that it was not a matter of giving students more advising, but more coherent advising. Dean Brodhead pointed out the unfortunate irony that the students with the most initiative often work most successfully to obtain the best advice for deriving the most benefit from the College. Students who need advising most tend to those with less initiative or less inclination to strike up advising relationships.

In answer to questions regarding increasing directed research, Professor Shapiro talked about the work Yale has done to increase one on one research between undergraduates and faculty members as based on the Stanford model. Yale is trying to get more grants and access for undergraduates for more collaborative and directed research with faculty. In the recent past, there has been more and more mentored research at Yale and the committee is looking at ways to increase and enhance it.

Dean Brodhead addressed the issue of pre-med and engineering students having rigid schedules that precluded them from taking a wider variety of courses. Short of persuading all medical schools to change their requirements, Yale College is trying to offer many of the pre-med classes in the summer to allow students more freedom in class selection during the regular school year.

One delegate stated that in his view, education was a means to improve the world and posed the question of whether the University should require a course in good citizenship. Dean Brodhead noted in response that requiring individuals to take a course in ethics does not make them ethical. The education that students receive at Yale intrinsically involves learning how to be part of a community. In addition, eighty percent of Yale students volunteer in some capacity in New Haven. The job of the university is to teach students to think for themselves, to foster ethical reasoning, and to learn tolerance.

Dean Brodhead brought the session to a close by discussing the implementation of the review's findings. Stanford did a similar review of its undergraduate curriculum a few years ago, then launched a billion dollar fund drive for undergraduate education to support it. The Committee at Yale hopes that not every proposal it makes will require additional funding. However, there may be a need for the University to increase its spending to make the undergraduate education at Yale the best it can be.