To the Editor:
Recently I received the following communication from a colleague who is working with our organization on an interdisciplinary liberal-arts course-and-curriculum development project within the sphere of general education:
There is no problem with a great books history course, but you need to realize that official interdisciplinarity, in terms of course title, is likely out in favor of seamless transferability. Secondly, the way the credentialing winds are blowing, I may end up without the proper credentials to teach a course listed as a history course. I am happy to continue to work on the project, if you approve, but it may be that I cannot be the instructor of record for the course.
The writer is a credentialed philosopher. Whether for a trans-institutional project, for an accreditation site visit, or for simple course development, I have increasingly been told stories by faculty members working in the liberal arts of accrediting agencies’ and transfer agreements’ insisting (a) that instructors in a discipline teach a course in that discipline, and (b) that courses reflect accepted disciplines.
Needless to say, this threatens to freeze established conventions of the undergraduate curriculum, reducing innovation to “disciplinary advancement” or simply “disciplinary offerings.” Pushed just a little bit, these conditions may come to restrict cross-disciplinary inquiry and co-teaching. They support the kind of campus arguments that seek to colonize subject matters, courses, and even texts for one department or discipline—particularly in general education, which is not a recognized discipline. Finally, these conditions threaten to attack historically honorable and well-developed liberal-arts curricula that are not based in current disciplinary distinctions.
This is a very serious problem that presidents, provosts, and faculty members who are concerned with innovation and liberal-arts education need to address, inquire into, and, probably, rectify. Driven by simplistic notions of accountability in accreditation (literally, an institution or agency can count professors with credentials matched to courses, reducing the need for analytic examination or understanding of the nature and proof of an education) and by economic demands for transferability among institutions, the issue has the same import for the distinctiveness of institutions (and creativity by faculty) that concerns over federal standards of accreditation for higher education institutions had during the Spellings era.
In short, institutional authority and autonomy to craft, offer, and defend interdisciplinary forms of liberal-arts education are potentially at stake. The idea of an educating, teaching faculty acting as a whole, not as a total distributed into disciplinary courses, is at stake here, too. After all, if the rules of the game are developing such that interdisciplinarity cannot be defended, then how will an interdisciplinary, undergraduate liberal-arts education, taught by many highly educated professors teaching “outside” their discipline but well within long-established liberal-arts traditions, ever be offered?
J. Scott Lee
Executive Director
Association for Core Texts and Courses
ACTC Liberal Arts Institute
Saint Mary’s College of California
Moraga, Calif.