Hell, as depicted in Dante Alighieri's epic poem the Inferno,
is a multilevel maze-like place. It's not easily navigated without
expert direction. Which is probably why Dante has a guide, the
Roman poet Virgil, conduct him through the underworld.
In a similar way, the 19 sophomores enrolled
in Section 22 of the College of Arts and Letters Core course this
past winter didn't have to glean the dense layers of meaning in
the landmark Italian work alone. Their guide: a woman with a calm,
knowing demeanor and a Ph.D. in American literature.
On a snowy January afternoon Ruthann Johansen, longtime Core
instructor and the associate director of the Core program, sits
at one end of a group of beige Formica-top tables trying to coax
insights from the mostly hesitant 19- and 20-year-olds seated
around the perimeter. From time to time she dispenses clues about
the poem's metaphors to get the discussion going. Those wild animals
Dante finds blocking his path, after losing his way, at the start
of the poem? They aren't just a leopard, a lion and a she-wolf;
they're embodiments of lust, pride and greed.
Which means they aren't merely blocking his way back up a hill.
They're impeding his ability to lead a righteous life.
Dante literally has to go through Hell because he can't get past
his sins or blindness. Don't we all.
That's one of the ideas behind Core, using great works to get
students thinking about the big issues in life. The year-long,
seminar-style course has been a requirement for sophomores enrolled
in the Arts and Letters college for 25 years, ever since it succeeded
a required great-books seminar launched in the 1950s. But that
long tradition is about to end.
Core is being replaced next fall by the College Seminar, actually
an assortment of course choices. Unlike Core, in which every class
worked from the same syllabus and, ideally, students remained
together with the same professor the entire year (the only such
course in the University), the College Seminar will last a single
semester. Instructors will build their own courses around their
academic specialties, such as English, history, philosophy, theater,
psychology, foreign language or music. Every section will still
be expected to explore the breadth of the liberal arts (social
sciences, humanities and fine arts) in some fashion. But it will
no longer be the uniform experience some envisioned linking A&L
graduates across generations.
The demise of Core comes after several years of sometimes emotional
debate among students, faculty and administrators in the Arts
and Letters college. By all accounts it ended up being a group
decision. But the meaning of Core's discontinuation has sparked
the kind of divergent interpretation usually reserved for works
like the Inferno.
Some see eliminating the course as abandoning the ideal of preparing
students for a life of the mind, a case of dumping pure intellectual
inquiry in favor of career preparation. One veteran faculty member
called the change "an unmitigated disaster." That charge will
likely resonate those with A&L alumni who look back on Core
as a life-changing intellectual awakening.
Others believe Core's demise reflects negatively on the University
having placed a greater emphasis on research and scholarship.
They think faculty recruited more on the basis of their prowess
in those activities are unwilling or unable to teach an old-fashioned
general-education course like Core because it means stepping outside
their narrow area of expertise.
On the other side are those delighted to see Core pass into
history. These include many students of recent years who have
been less than satisfied with the experience.
In the view of some administrators, practicalities doomed the
program. They say there simply weren't enough qualified instructors
to lead the dozens of small seminars required to accommodate all
A&L sophomores and still staff all the introductory and advanced
courses in each department. Some also thought Core did students
a disservice by having faculty leading discussions of important
works who weren't experts on the material.
There is one point on which critics and supporters of the change
seem to agree: The quality of instruction in Core had become inconsistent.
Surveys and interviews suggest that, in recent years especially,
about equal numbers of students loved Core as hated it. The difference
usually came down to who was teaching their section.
"In general, I did not enjoy Core," says junior Marie-Christine
Luijckx, majoring in economics and psychology. "The different
sections of the class were inconsistent. . . . Some teachers required
more homework, others graded harder, and in the end it just came
down to if you were lucky or not."
* * *
Arts and Letters Dean Mark Roche says a stable and experienced
corps of Core instructors helped the course flourish from its
creation in 1979 until the early 1990s.
At that point the college decided to reduce faculty teaching
loads to encourage more research and scholarship. Before then,
professors had been required to teach three courses fall semester
and three in the spring, or "3 and 3" in academic parlance. The
college began a shift to a "2 and 2" workload to bring Notre Dame
closer in line with peer research institutions. The all-year commitment
of Core went from constituting one-third of a participating faculty
member's teaching load to half of it.
In the years that followed the size of the A&L faculty grew
but not enough to offset the lightened teaching loads. The labor
squeeze worsened in the mid-'90s when the University's Academic
Council resolved that all students, regardless of major, be required
to take at least three seminars (small-group classes heavy on
reading and discussion). The Arts and Letters college teaches
almost all such courses.
Because the resolution carried no allocation of additional funds,
it amounted to an unfunded mandate. The most economical way for
the college to meet that mandate was to hire part-timers. As a
result, by the mid-'90s, fewer than one-fifth of Core course sections
were being taught by regular teaching and research faculty.
Roche didn't think the college's cornerstone course should be
almost the exclusive domain of outsiders, so he began requiring
regular faculty to teach more sections. This year 60 percent of
Core instructors came from the regular teaching and research faculty
(75 percent if you include special professional faculty - mostly
in the fine and performing arts).
But not all came willingly.
Lacking enough volunteers, Roche and his staff have had to place
a "tax" on departments. Each chair of a department is told how
many professors the department must provide to teach Core based
on the department's size and course loads.
Why the paucity of volunteers? Roche says faculty appointed
to chair academic departments in recent years have been laudably
ambitious in wanting to develop new, more intellectually engaging
courses in their disciplines. But they can't offer many of these
if their faculty are tied up teaching Core. Also, faculty members
estimate it takes them three times as long to prepare to teach
Core than a course in their home discipline.
Junior faculty, especially, have tended to shy away from Core.
They know that the added prep time will eat into the hours they
need to conduct research and scholarship. Output in these areas
counts significantly toward tenure decisions. They also know that
students aren't likely to give them high marks for their performance
leading a Core seminar. That's because these younger faculty members
often don't have much experience teaching in their own fields,
let alone something foreign like Core. As with research productivity,
teacher/course evaluations by students count significantly in
promotion decisions.
Another reason faculty have been reluctant to teach Core is
lack of control. Even in introductory courses, individual professors
enjoy some freedom over how to cover the prescribed material.
Not with Core. Each year a committee from the college would decide
which texts would be read and how many class sessions would be
devoted to exploring the course's four themes of nature, society,
self and God.
"We just couldn't please everybody," Johansen says of the text
selections.
In the days of the original, great-books-style Core course (called
Collegiate Seminar, sure to be confused with the next generation
College Seminar), the curriculum focused on great works of the
Western canon, material by such luminaries as Plato, Augustine
and Shakespeare. Because of increased sensitivity about inclusiveness
and a desire to make the course more relevant to modern students,
the reading list evolved to include works from Eastern cultures
and, later, more contemporary works. A staple in recent years
was There Are No Children Here, about youth growing up
in Chicago's housing projects. The author, journalist Alex Kotlowitz,
is now a visiting professor at Notre Dame.
Robert Norton, chair of the Department of German and Russian
Languages and Literatures, says the shift away from the classics
"gave rise to the quip that Core was no longer the class of great
books but pretty good books."
"The whole body of texts had lost its distinctive stamp, so
even the content had sort of become muddled and obscured." the
department chair says. "It was increasingly difficult to get faculty
to teach a course that increasingly fewer people believed in."
Or that they felt qualified to teach.
Universities like Notre Dame that are aiming to boost their
academic standing typically try to do so through an increased
emphasis on research and scholarship by faculty. One way to do
this is to hire professors who already enjoy reputations as star
performers by virtue of their research and scholarly activity.
But such recruits are often experts in specialized areas --
not broad fields like European history but subcategories like
medieval French history. Core demanded its instructors be competent
enough to lead discussions of a universe of topics. During the
past year, for instance, these included evolution, Hinduism, brain
injury, ecology and poverty. And not just books. The course covered
plays, artworks, films.
Many faculty say they didn't mind extending themselves into
realms beyond their comfort zone, but they disagreed with venturing
outside their areas of competency.
Wendy Arons, an assistant professor in the Department of Film,
Television and Theatre, specializes in 18th century German theater,
although she also has experience directing contemporary drama.
She readily acknowledges being more of a specialist than many
professors who taught the liberal arts at Notre Dame in decades
past.
She has taught Core twice. Both times they were experimental
versions of the course -- one on the Making of the Modern Material
World, the other focusing on gender. But the traditional Core
format is not foreign to her. She says she took a course like
it as an undergraduate at Yale, "and it was one of the most valuable
courses I ever took.
"But the reason it was valuable was because I had experts teaching
it."
She says she and other newer faculty believe the material in
Core should have been left to the experts.
"If a student is only going to read Thucydides (a Greek historian,
considered the greatest of antiquity) once in their lives it shouldn't
be with me. . . . I'm not one who thinks a foundation in the Western
canon is a bad thing. I just think there's good way to teach it
and bad way to teach it. And the best way would not be me teaching
it."
Norton, the department chair, says even Core's supporters would
admit that its instructors were sometimes no better prepared to
discuss the material than their students.
"It was a classic example of the blind leading the blind, and
that didn't seem like a very responsible way of going about the
teaching mission of the University."
More
