Dear Commons Community,

Nicholas Lemann, professor of journalism and dean emeritus at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, has an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education today promoting a new methods-based core curriculum.  He seeks to move away from an elective, Canon based system to one that emphasizes skills development.  He proposes eight one-semester courses as follows:

Information Acquisition

Google is a life-changing tool that we all use, but it doesn’t overlap perfectly with one of the core methodological skills of college students, which is locating usable information. To do that well, one has to know something about the sociology of knowledge — that is, who creates information, under what conditions, subject to what distorting pressures. It is pretty easy to cure students of the idea that everything they encounter online, or elsewhere, is true; a more challenging and important task is communicating a basic typology of information (academic, documentary, journalistic, governmental, crowdsourced, and so on) along with the idea that information isn’t cleanly divided into true and false, but is instead created through constant contention and revision. Some of the purpose of this course would be to give students a basic user’s guide to higher-education study: how to use libraries and online databases, how to distinguish among a multiplicity of sources, especially online, and how to perform a basic literature review. The kind of assignments that might go with this course would ask students to write a basic summary of what’s known about a subject, or to adjudicate between two widespread conflicting claims.

Cause and Effect

This is something like a course in the basics of the scientific method, aimed at people who aren’t necessarily going into science. The core thinking process entails stating what question you’re trying to answer, then establishing a hypothesis as to what the answer might be, then finding a way to test the hypothesis by gathering material that would settle its degree of trustworthiness. The title of the course refers to the idea that causation is a key concept in almost all fields of inquiry, which is too often used sloppily or instinctively, with unfortunate results. One could teach this course using primarily scientific examples, but that isn’t strictly necessary; for years, I have been teaching a version of it to journalists, using news stories as the main material. What might explain, for example, why violent crime has decreased so much more in New York City than in Chicago? What’s important is conveying the idea that making inferences is a skill, and that a series of thinking techniques is powerfully helpful in performing it.

Interpretation

The focus here is on close reading of texts, a fundamental academic skill that students may have missed in high school, that they will need to succeed in college, and that will also prove to be both practically helpful and emotionally enriching as they go through life. There are a number of ways to teach it from different disciplines, which could fruitfully be combined in the course: literary reading, analytic reading, and so on. Therefore this course could have elements of an English class, or a social-science class, or a class in law or religious studies. The main idea is to learn to read for meaning, for subtlety, for contradiction and ambiguity, and for connection to other texts. Some of the same skills could potentially be applied to material from film or drama. Assignments in this course would be traditional analytic papers, whether on the full meaning of a biblical passage or the governing principles embedded in the U.S. Constitution.

Numeracy

I am persuaded by the broad argument that the political scientist Andrew Hacker makes (talking about elementary and secondary school rather than college) in The Math Myth and Other STEM Delusions (The New Press, 2015). For purposes of general education, not the specific education of people going into fields that require mathematics, colleges should require undergraduates to take a course that familiarizes them with the quantitative world. It is deeply present in just about everything, including not-obviously-scientific realms like politics and government. This need not be a math course per se. Hacker suggests pulling examples out of everyday life that illustrate the broad applicability of being able to think confidently about numbers — poll results, sports statistics, stock-market indicators, government economic data (these examples are mine, not Hacker’s). The idea is to make students understand how numbers are generated, how to compare quantities from different realms, and some of the basic concepts underlying probability and statistics.

Perspective

Most people, including students entering college, believe that the world as it appears to them and the people around them is the world as it is. It is crucial, and not easy, to teach people that they actually have a particular perspective, which inescapably has its limits — and then to help them understand that other people experience the world profoundly differently, which ought to be understood rather than dismissed. This project is central to a number of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, literature, psychology, and even the client-oriented aspects of professional education, any of which might be brought in. Courses on diversity or understanding other cultures would have some overlap with what I am proposing, but I worry that those sometimes take the edge off the complexity and difficulty of the subject by communicating the idea that through tolerance, respect, and understanding, a person can successfully adopt a benign, universal perspective that can honor all other perspectives. That’s appealing, but it’s important not to let students believe that their own viewpoint can ever escape being limited in important ways, or that fundamental conflicts between perspectives can ever be entirely avoided.

The Language of Form

The course title is a slightly modified version of a term that the digital humanist Johanna Drucker uses in Graphesis: Vis­ual Forms of Knowledge Production (Harvard University Press, 2014). She focuses on how we increasingly get our information in the form of visual displays rather than texts or numbers. She explores mainly a deep understanding of charts and graphs, which are ubiquitous in the life of every educated person, but the method could be extended to the third dimension so that questions of how space and volume are arranged could also be considered. This course would have elements of design, architecture, planning, art, and even ecology. I want to distinguish it, though, from “design thinking,” as promoted at the Stanford d.school and elsewhere, which understands design not as encompassing everything visual and volumetric, but as more specifically about the process of making things. This should be a course in intelligently seeing and producing visual information, not in prototyping products and training people to plan and iterate projects in teams, which is useful but less universal than what I have in mind.

Thinking in Time

This, to some extent, is a course on the historical method, but it’s meant to do more than teach people to do historical research per se. To most students arriving at college, the past often seems safer than it actually was, outcomes more inevitable than they were, and operative assumptions closer to the ones we use today. Historical thinking is a powerful way of opening people’s minds to unfamiliar possibilities and ways of thinking, a process central to a liberal education. It can make students see that everything could have turned out differently, that individual people always operate within social, economic, and cultural contexts. One could teach such a course by focusing on a period in history, but that wouldn’t be strictly necessary, and the primary aim would not be to teach students the procession of significant events in a particular time and place. Similarly, it would be a good idea to study original historical documents in this course, but that’s a means to an end, not the end itself.

Argument

Back in the 19th century, when undergraduate core curricula were the rule rather than the exception, practically everybody had to take a course in rhetoric or oratory. The requirement often had roots in the colleges’ original mission of training ministers, and it usually vanished with the advent of the elective system. This course would aim to revive the tradition by teaching students how to make a compelling and analytically sound argument, both written and spoken (and probably also, inevitably, in PowerPoint). It is an endeavor with centuries of interesting thought behind it, so one can imagine the course drawing on philosophy, law, theology, even drama — with the opportunity to consider exemplary arguments from the past. It should be obvious that the assignments would ask students to practice the skills the course is teaching them, in writing and in performance.

Lemann concludes by stating that “what these courses have in common is a primary commitment to teaching the rigorous (and also properly humble) pursuit of knowledge. They therefore go against the grain of assumptions that are widely held in higher education today, including that entering students don’t need such a high level of direction, and that the idea that one can be taught to get closer to the truth of a situation is too problematic to justify a tight embrace. They put methods above subject-matter knowledge in the highest place of honor, and they treat the way material is taught as subsidiary to what is taught.”

This is an interesting proposal and one that I would love to see debated in college curriculum committees and faculty senates.

Tony