Five years ago, a group of us at Bentley University came to a sobering realization: Our core curriculum was older than most of our students. We had made incremental changes but had not attempted a major reform since the late 1990s. It was clear — particularly in light of increased regional competition for a shrinking number of high-school graduates — that we had to get moving.
The job proved much more challenging, and took much longer, than anyone anticipated. It spanned five task forces, two college presidents, two provosts, a racial reckoning, and a global pandemic. And it forced us to think seriously about the kind of institution we were and the kind we wanted to be. In the end, we succeeded, and the experience proved immensely gratifying. But that outcome was never assured and — on more than one occasion — the whole enterprise almost came to an abrupt halt.
Our story is essentially about change amid disruption. And it has implications — well beyond the type of courses that students should be required to take — that will be familiar to anyone who has mulled the fate of higher education lately. Beset by rising costs, public distrust, and demographic declines in many areas, our industry is likely to remain in this precarious state for the foreseeable future. Curriculum reform will be a key tool for ensuring every institution’s long-term relevance and success.
So if you are rethinking your gen-ed requirements, or even just mulling programmatic changes, here are seven hard-earned lessons — things we did that you should and shouldn’t do — to help you meet the many challenges that await you in curriculum reform.
Lesson 1: Start with the end in mind. Curriculum changes spring from many sources — new enrollment patterns, market demands, student interests, and alumni feedback. At Bentley, we began with the assumption that our 25-year-old core was too large and outdated. On that much we agreed, but very little beyond it.
In fact, it quickly became apparent that while some people wanted to build a more transdisciplinary curriculum, others wanted to give students space for second majors. Some wanted more business courses, others fewer. Most of us were concerned about what the next few decades held in store for higher education and wanted the core to be responsive to changing circumstances.
You cannot do everything everyone wants. But if you can focus on a short list of things that most people want, that will help you establish guiding principles and stick to them. Early in our curriculum-reform process, we settled on five new learning goals that helped us make hard decisions thereafter. Later we agreed on the priority of two key principles: (1) Shrink the core to give students more room to explore and leave space for “false starts,” and (2) remove unnecessary curricular and policy barriers to transfer students. Such decisions went a long way toward keeping our discussions on track and building a functional consensus.
Whatever your reasons for embarking on this journey, you will need to articulate them early and often. People will never stop asking: “Wait, why are we doing this again?” — especially when they start contemplating what they might lose. Make sure you have a ready answer, that it appeals to a broad spectrum of stakeholders, and that it reminds people of the need for reform. Your explanation may very well evolve, as ours did, as you gather more information and talk to more people. Either way, you will regularly need to supply a coherent and compelling rationale for why you are undertaking this enormous, disruptive change.
Lesson 2: Determine who’s in charge and what the plan is. Where will responsibility for curriculum reform reside? How will that responsibility be managed over time? Faculty members will expect to play a major role. That makes sense given that they usually determine the content of particular courses, their sequencing, and the modes of assessment.
Academe’s attachment to committees and task forces is well documented, and on that count, our curriculum review was no exception:
- Our Faculty Senate first commissioned a task force of faculty and staff members who explained why curriculum reform was needed, performed a comparative analysis, and developed the new learning goals.
- A second task force extracted 15 learning objectives from those goals, inspired by the “value rubrics” of the American Association of Colleges and Universities.
- A third engaged in preliminary design work and solicited pilot course proposals.
- A fourth developed a complete core redesign.
- And a fifth implemented it.
No one anticipated that process. Certainly not five task forces.
Uncertainty about authority and approval processes caused a number of headaches during the early years of our curriculum reform. Our efforts became more coherent and gained legitimacy as we gained more experience. However, two other factors also helped us get better organized: (1) We enlisted a project manager (more details on this below) to oversee the curriculum review, and (2) we secured detailed instructions for each task force from the Faculty Senate.
Suffice it to say: The earlier you can determine how responsibility for curriculum reform will be apportioned — who will approve what and when — the easier it will be for everyone.
Lesson 3: More people are vital to curriculum change than you might think. As you formulate your plan and its rationales, solicit as much comment from as many people across your institution as possible. Also survey recent curricular updates at other colleges. As Alexandra W. Logue, a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, put it in her 2018 Chronicle essay on curriculum reform: “Put a premium on data.”
One useful exercise we completed midway through the process was to write a comprehensive interim report. It detailed student preferences, institutional strengths and weaknesses, employment trends, pilot course results, transfer patterns, accreditation requirements, and curricula at peer institutions, as well as the constraints of our university’s physical plant, endowment, brand, faculty, and staff.
That effort enabled us to answer pressing questions: Will our reform jeopardize accreditation? What do cores at similar institutions look like? It also showed everyone on the campus just how many competing priorities there were, which injected more realism into our conversations.
Regularly amended and expanded as we obtained new information, the interim report became critical for making informed decisions and explaining why we were doing some things but not others. Of particular benefit was the information we had obtained from admissions, advising, career services, institutional research, and the registrar’s office. Academic advisers and admissions staff members have a keen sense of the choices that students make and the skills they need to succeed. The registrar and office of institutional research can supply you with data on how students are using your current core while enrollment managers can tell you who applies, where they come from, and who your peer institutions are.
You will almost certainly forget to query some folks. We initially missed alumni and Bentley’s transfer-student team. But aim to be thorough because you need insights from many, many sources. Any committee contains only a fraction of the expertise it needs. You want to know early if your design is based on a faulty premise (“our introductory writing course is not working,” when it’s actually serving students well) or an infeasible idea (“every student should complete a capstone project,” when you don’t have enough professors to make it effective).
To get feedback, you need to ask for it — often and across many venues. Faculty especially will want to know that their input matters. Be proactive. You will likely be accused at some point of not listening; prepare for that in advance by doing far more listening than seems necessary. A collaborative approach can also help get your reforms approved.
Lesson 4: Enlist a project manager. If you’re not sure how to manage all the people, information, and feedback, you probably need a project manager. We certainly did — and wish we’d had one well before the final two years of our reform efforts.
An experienced project manager will clarify your goals, identify who needs to be involved to accomplish them (information technology, registrar, admissions, etc.), orchestrate timelines and workflows, devise a communication plan, and coordinate teams and decision-making across the institution. Bentley is fortunate to have professional senior project managers on staff. If your institution does not, consider hiring a limited-term consultant to perform the function.
A project manager is particularly valuable for the time-sensitive tasks of implementation, giving structure to an otherwise disorienting process. In our case, it meant the difference between success and failure.
Lesson 5: If there are votes, there will be politics. Typically a faculty governance system oversees curricula, which means lots of debates, votes, and competing interests. It is altogether human to fear losing what we have. So brace yourself for when your team’s innovative designs meet the politics of a vote.
As a private business university, about 60 percent of our faculty members are in business departments, and the rest are in “arts and sciences.” That two-part structure ensures both vibrant preprofessional training and liberal learning — but sometimes gives rise to divergent viewpoints. Curriculum reform amplified those tensions.
One course we proposed, “Business and Society,” sat squarely at the crossroads. Some professors in business fields assumed it would be a foundational business course, while some of those in arts and sciences thought the new course would explore the societal context in which businesses operate. Reconciling the disparate views was a regular feature of the process.
Bear in mind: Plenty of faculty colleagues who aren’t directly involved in the reform may be misinformed about it, simply because they are busy people and not as close to the work as you are. Nevertheless, they will opine freely, and you must continue to listen. There is also a decent chance they will take the word of a friend in the next office rather than the 50-page document you painstakingly drafted and repeatedly shared.
Be prepared to explain your proposals in a succinct and compelling way. Do so with as many people and in as many venues as you can. Avoid excessive detail and be clear about what is changing, what is not, why the change is good, and how it affects the particular audience.
Continually honing this elevator pitch also keeps you focused and out of the weeds. It’s all too easy for innovation to give way to expediency when it comes time to vote. Mitigate that by reminding everyone that the curriculum needs to serve students and ensure long-term institutional viability. For us, reiterating the importance of high-impact learning practices, transfer friendliness, and flexibility for students helped bring people around. Of course, you need to have the data to back up such assertions.
Do not surprise people. You will improve your odds of success if you flag any major changes or shifts in direction. Sometimes discretion is required, but once decisions have been made, the campus needs to hear about them in a transparent and timely way. Communicate often with faculty governance, department chairs, academic leadership, and trustees, all of whom are crucial supporters.
Curriculum reform is likely to stress your governance structures in unexpected ways. It certainly did ours. Our senate discussions were occasionally heated, and one Zoom forum devolved into a contentious interdepartmental debate. Among the more fateful decisions our Faculty Senate made was to require a vote of approval of the new curriculum design from two-thirds of the faculty. Sure, that high bar forced us to do a lot of outreach. But on the plus side, that outreach assured skeptics that the reform itself was legitimate and had the support necessary for successful implementation.
Lesson 6: Putting the new curriculum in place is as complicated as drafting it. If you are not yet convinced that colleges and universities are large, complex institutions, implementing a new curriculum should erase any doubt. This is the stage when all of the consulting you have done with the registrar, academic services, and the IT team will pay real dividends. The challenge of putting a new curriculum in place cannot be overstated. In our case, it took a sprawling and dedicated cadre of staff and faculty members a full year to turn a new curriculum design into a living, breathing set of new courses.
The operational tasks are manifold and periodically daunting. We suggest a committee or task force specifically for this phase to:
- oversee the creation of newly approved courses.
- create a plan for how the old curriculum will phase out over time, as each class of students graduates.
- update and communicate policies to align with the new curriculum.
- oversee the massive and complex system updates needed, and much more.
This group can also help craft the message that admissions staff will take to prospective students. By the way, such outreach happens surprisingly early in the curriculum-reform process, especially if your institution markets to high-school juniors. If possible, leave 18 months between approval and rollout.
Lesson 7: Don’t give up. Maybe you will hit on a set of changes and updates that everyone likes right at the outset. Don’t count on it.
An early draft at Bentley contained several high-impact practices and innovations, including capstone projects, a global experience, and a course cluster combining business and liberal-arts courses. It also built requirements around learning objectives rather than specific types of courses. Largely for that reason, the design would have entailed more disruption than our faculty could swallow. It was probably also unworkable. So we went back to the drawing board.
That was not our last change of direction. Persevering through a pandemic, a racial reckoning, and several changes in campus administration required a steadfast commitment from a core group of professors, staff members, and administrators. And lots of time and energy from people across the university.
But it was worth it. We’ve created a curriculum that is up-to-date, adaptable, more customizable for students, and much more transfer friendly. We are now better positioned both to attract a more diverse student population and to ensure their success.
We also developed a mechanism for future curriculum changes. As good as we think this new curriculum is, it is almost certainly flawed in unimagined ways. We recommend introducing a process for regular core updates, and an expectation that the institution will use it. You may also find that faculty members are more likely to vote for a curriculum that is not etched in stone.
Our story is mostly about listening, adapting, and not giving up too easily. Early ideas gave way to new and better ones. The experience can be bruising. But you may end up creating a better learning experience for thousands of young people. We hope you will find that to be as rewarding as we have.