By most measures I use to judge the success of the courses I teach, the “Common Intellectual Experience” is a dismal failure. An alarming admission—personally, since I teach in the program every year, and institutionally, because the course is our flagship, epitomizing our high-quality liberal-arts brand. Not to mention that I am serving as one of the course’s elected faculty coordinators. If it’s broken, I should be among those fixing it.
The two-semester, chronologically ordered big-ideas course, required of all first-year students, is built around open-ended questions, the first of which is: “What does it mean to be human?” The course is designed and taught by faculty members from every department, and the syllabus is uniform across all sections—that’s the “common” part. I am reminded of Hamlet’s pun, “Ay, madam, it is common,” anticipating readers’ awareness that trendy freshman-foundation courses are everywhere, and wondering what’s so flagshippy about ours.
I don’t know.
I do know we get good press for it, students come here for it, and parents love the idea of it. So do I. That’s why my failures have been so distressing, causing me to question my competence as a teacher and our vision as a faculty. But what I want to share, for the sake of those who are also wrestling to make this kind of course meaningful, is how I have made peace with myself and with the course, which we call CIE.
First, I need to acknowledge that the course, as we, the faculty, conceived it in 1997, and have been adjusting it ever since, cannot possibly fulfill all of the hopes we have pinned on it. With “What does it mean to be human?” as the starting point, there is no shortage of strong opinions about directions and emphases. It’s like the U.S. Congress trying to reach a budget consensus. The members have differing ideologies; regional and special interests push their priorities; and when the dust settles, the only thing everyone agrees on is that they’ve overspent.
A faculty can’t pass a special resolution to increase the number of weeks in a semester, however. The space in the syllabus is finite. Philosophers want philosophy; scientists stress science. Pressing social issues? The environment? The traditionally underrepresented—women, non-Western, LGBT, the differently abled? What about dance, theater, art, music, new media?
That’s just content. How about process? Writing is fundamental, of course. We did away with freshman composition for this thing. But then we also said it’s a discussion-based class. And don’t forget information literacy.
In the end, we arrive at a syllabus that is overstuffed, a list of learning goals that is overlong, and a course design that no one is really happy with.
Our Descartes scholar recently made a plea that Discourse on the Method be removed from the CIE syllabus. He contended that we are doing more damage than good trying to cover it in one or two weeks. I am sympathetic. I am relieved that my biologist friends don’t see the hash I can make out of a week’s worth of Darwin.
One gets painfully used to reading student papers calling Job a good Christian or Ngugi wa Thiong’o a great African-American novelist. Saying that Abelard and Heloise lived happily ever after. That Darwin was a follower of Darwinism. Or that the Bhagavad Gita “literally made my head explode.” On my worst days I stagger from the classroom bludgeoned by what just passed for class discussion—the hair-raising misreadings, the insularity of opinion, the indifference to context, the seeming preponderance of opinion that the entire dizzying history of human art, reason, and belief can be reduced to two truisms: that you should stand up for what you believe in, and that everything happens for a reason.
So haven’t I just made a compelling case, if not to dump the foundations course altogether, then at least to give up on full faculty ownership? Shouldn’t we just hand it over to one of the departments that has always considered it terra irredenta anyway? Or divide it among several of them, and lose the common syllabus? Or should I—as a few others have done—simply try to opt out of teaching it?
No. No to all of the above.
When I said that I had made my peace with Common Intellectual Experience, I meant that I have come to accept the challenge of setting the bar way higher than I or my students could ever reach, with all the frustration and failure that entails. I embrace falling short. I avow that a little learning is not a dangerous thing, so long as it gives glimpses of the height of art, where alps on alps do arise, breathtakingly. So, no, my friend, let’s keep the Discourse—and CIE.
Why? First, the works themselves. My training in literature did not include most of what we’ve shoehorned into the Common Intellectual Experience. Strong-willed people made a compelling case for the works’ vital connection to what it means to be human. If not for this course, my students and I might have gone our whole lives never having read Galileo—a terrible thought.
Second, my colleagues. Through all the syllabus battles, the contention over priorities, the allegations of unconscionable omissions, a true camaraderie and respect has emerged. Common Intellectual Experience has been instrumental in creating a culture of integration and symbiosis, a real feeling of community bound together by devotion to liberal arts writ large. I work, and joke, with biochemists and mathematicians, economists and media scholars, dancers and French professors. The sense of family extends to our students, who see it in us, and who count on it among themselves.
Third, the students. Those endearing, exasperating, procrastinating, striving students. So what if they don’t always realize what they’re getting? Learning seldom occurs in epiphanic starbursts. It’s a slow burn, and the most quixotic and frustrating young people often turn into the most interesting adults. A frequent and charming complaint from seniors at Ursinus is that CIE is wasted on first-years. “I wish I could take that course now,” they say, “now that I know a little something.” One of them, Dominick, is meeting with me twice weekly to work on his honors thesis. The other day, out of the blue, he said, “I was looking at the papers I wrote for you back in CIE. I’ve never seen such a pretentious load of crap. How could you stand to read them?”
“Beats me,” I said. “They were excruciating.”
He doesn’t need a speech from me telling him it was the freedom to fail—or I should say to flail, and flail gloriously—that has a lot to do with his having the audacity now to apply Lacanian theory to the novels of Italo Calvino. I may need that speech, though, next time I’m teaching CIE. Failure is the gateway to wisdom. It’s a lesson I have to teach myself again and again.