According to lore, the academic terms “major” and “minor” first appeared in 1877, in a Johns Hopkins University course catalog. By the middle of the 20th century, the specialized major had become standard practice at almost every American college. Sophomore year: Agonized conversations with parents, and then the declaration of a major. Junior and senior years: Upper-level course work. Graduation day: A diploma that certified your skills in psychology, or physics, or, as the old joke goes, underwater basket weaving.
Remarkably little about this system has changed during the last 60 years. Bachelor’s degrees, regardless of the field of study, are almost all based on four years in the classroom. A handful of new majors are beginning to emerge on college campuses, and interdisciplinary programs like women’s studies and environmental science have found a niche, but the basic constellation of college majors has been highly stable.
At community colleges and in graduate schools, new specialized degrees come and go all the time in response to market demands, scientific innovations, and emerging social problems. Baccalaureate majors are much more firmly fixed. (According to federal statistics, the top 10 bachelor’s-level fields of study in 2006-7 were the same as those of 1980-81, albeit in a different order.)
Is that constancy a sign of health or a sign of stagnation? It is not hard to find people who argue the latter.
“Telling students how to put their educations together is a thing of the past,” says Mark C. Taylor, a professor of religion at Columbia University. Last April, Mr. Taylor published a much-debated New York Times essay in which he called for radically interdisciplinary education. (He suggested that a problem-based major in “Water,” for example, could synthesize knowledge from the humanities, sociology, and the natural sciences.)
“The model of the university that we have today was literally designed by Immanuel Kant,” Mr. Taylor says. “It’s a mass-production model. But technology is allowing us to move toward customized education, which is something completely different.”
Mr. Taylor is not the only prophet of radical curricular change who has recently found an audience. Robert M. Zemsky, chairman of the University of Pennsylvania’s Learning Alliance for Higher Education, has been promoting a three-year baccalaureate, which in his vision would often be coupled with a specialized one- or two-year master’s degree. (That model is becoming standard in the European Union.)
Like Mr. Taylor, Mr. Zemsky would like to see more courses of study that are built around specific problems, rather than the traditional disciplines.
“In the sciences, these silos that we call the disciplines are actually in the way of making progress on climate change,” he says. “Or think about nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is something that takes place in a biological medium. It also deals with quantum theory because that’s how you navigate inside the small space. And you need organic chemistry because that’s the way the signals are sent. So you can start with a set of problems, and then assemble the knowledge bases that are needed to deal with those problems.”
In his new book, Making Reform Work: The Case for Transforming American Higher Education (Rutgers University Press), Mr. Zemsky stresses that an undergraduate degree should certify specific skills—and that students should be given flexible options for acquiring those skills.
For example, if a baccalaureate program for physician’s assistants requires its graduates to be proficient in Spanish, Mr. Zemsky would not force students to take formal Spanish classes. “I would say, You’re not getting out of here without learning Spanish,” Mr. Zemsky says. “Let us show you three or four ways you can learn Spanish. You choose what’s best for you. It could be summer immersion. It could be an online course. We should want to test students for competencies, and not simply give them credit for seat time.”
But other scholars argue that the traditional college major is still a valuable framework, and that it has been more supple than critics like Mr. Taylor and Mr. Zemsky allow.
Newton H. Copp, a professor of biology in the joint science department of the Claremont Colleges, says college majors have been admirably flexible instruments, bending but not breaking as knowledge has evolved.
The biology major, for example, covers much different material today than it did when Mr. Copp studied during the Nixon administration. “I was an undergraduate 40 years ago, and when I think about that program—you could recognize it today, but boy, the resemblance is pretty thin,” he says. Biology majors now take courses in molecular biology, systems biology, and biochemistry that scarcely existed three decades ago.
James C. Garland, a former president of Miami University, in Ohio, agrees. “The English department of 50 years ago bears practically no relationship to the English department of today,” he says. “The Western canon has been de-emphasized, and the approach to rhetoric and composition is very different. So the fact that the majors have the same labels doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re the same majors.”
Because of their ability to adapt internally, Mr. Garland believes that traditional college majors are here to stay. Radically interdisciplinary models like Mr. Taylor’s, he says, would be a profound mistake.
“In many disciplines, the core concepts take years to master,” Mr. Garland says. “And you just can’t get that in a cross-disciplinary major. What you get is a taste of ideas in different areas. … It’s kind of fashionable now to talk about students inventing their own cross-disciplinary majors, but to be blunt, I don’t think students know enough to do that. Giving them too much freedom is just likely to end up with students who are not adequately educated for the future.”
Whatever their views of the merits of radical curricular change, most people don’t expect it to happen. The structure of tenure and promotion is so entrenched that traditional departments are not likely to cede their ground without a fight.
James J. Duderstadt, who was president of the University of Michigan from 1988 to 1996 and is now a professor of science and engineering there, says that he senses a generational shift and that many younger faculty members he meets are open to interdisciplinary work. But they have strong incentives to hew to established disciplines and to the departments that hired them. “Promotion policy isn’t aligned with this work,” he says. “Because people are stovepiped by their disciplines, it’s hard to get a dialogue going.”
Still, there are glimmers of change. In 2007, 10 large research universities created a Consortium on Fostering Interdisciplinary Inquiry. Duke University, which is a member of that group, has been praised for altering its tenure-and-promotion policies to support scholars who work in more than one field. Mr. Zemsky, meanwhile, says he is encouraged by Arizona State University’s recent emphasis on cross-disciplinary research centers and its tentative proposals for three-year baccalaureates.
And Susan Albertine, a senior director at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, points to experiments at the College of New Jersey (where she was previously a dean) and the University of Washington’s Bothell campus, where students have been encouraged to design their own majors.
“With this explosion of knowledge that we’ve had over the last century,” Ms. Albertine says, “it’s not wise to think that you can just package it and hand it to students. They’ve got to be able to navigate on their own through an incredibly rich landscape of knowledge.”
Mr. Taylor believes the financial crisis will force drastic changes upon colleges. But Julie Thompson Klein, a professor of humanities at Wayne State University who shares Mr. Taylor’s enthusiasm for interdisciplinary programs, isn’t so sure.
“When times get tight, people don’t always think imaginatively,” Ms. Klein says. “There are two ways that people are thinking about the financial crisis. Do you go back into that old language that says, You’ve got to save the disciplines? Or do you start to rethink?” On that score, Ms. Klein is only partly hopeful. (“I guess it’s the Detroit in me,” she says.)
And W. Robert Connor, president of the Teagle Foundation, which recently published a series of reports on the health of various undergraduate majors, also doubts that Mr. Taylor and Mr. Zemsky’s visions will come to pass, given the basic structure of the American university.
“We’ll see the evolution of older fields,” Mr. Connor says. “But I don’t see any momentum at this point for saying, Let’s get rid of departments of math, physics, chemistry, and go on to a whole new system. That just doesn’t seem to me in the cards.”
