In a September 16 email addressed to the Stanford community, President Marc Tessier-Lavigne unveiled two proposals, designed by teams of Stanford faculty, on the “Future of the Major” and the “First-Year Shared Intellectual Experience”. The changes suggested by these proposals, if accepted, would among other things expand the freshman curriculum to a year-long core, reduce disparities in unit requirements of majors, and transform the academic experiences of current and future Stanford undergraduates. Stanford Politics sat down with two of the leading faculty members behind the proposals: R. Lanier Anderson, Senior Associate Dean for the Humanities and Arts, and co-chair of the majors design team; and Dan Edelstein, William H. Bonsall Professor of French, Professor of History (by courtesy), and co-chair of the first-year design team.
Source: Stanford University
What follows is a transcript of the interview, edited for length and clarity.
Stanford Politics: The three themes of the First-Year proposal are liberal education, ethics and citizenship, and the global perspective. What do you think “liberal education” means, and has Stanford adequately delivered such an education so far?
Dan Edelstein: I think it is both a practice and a philosophy. As a practice, it is what we do currently at Stanford, in the sense that unlike colleges in Europe or Asia, students are not encouraged to declare a major immediately. They are encouraged and even obligated to expand their fields of study through breadth requirements, other requirements like language or writing, and the major is just one piece of what we think of as their entire undergraduate education. There is also a philosophy of liberal education, which is reflected in this practice but which has probably been lost sight of a little bit, nationally and here at Stanford. The philosophy has to do with the purpose of this education: to train students to become well rounded citizens who can go on and do any number of careers. It’s also designed to promote the values of critical thinking and to ensure that students have transferable skills in a variety of areas.
Lanier Anderson: Students today are understandably nervous about the greater instability of the climate, landscape that they face relative to what their parents faced. Part of that instability stems from the fact that people who graduate from university now and the future will probably face greater number of career shifts, and the broader minded they are, the better they’ll be in navigating those shifts.
Then it’s very important for us to help students see immediately when they get to Stanford that what they really need to do is train their whole mind and engage a broader array of their capacities and learn and think in different ways about the problems they face. It’s really important that [students]also specialize in something, because one of the deep capacities people need is the capacity to think deeply about a particular subject. But we want students to think about their majors as providing an example of a depth experience, so they build the capacity to think in a deep way and about something they know a good bit about, and not a body of knowledge that will provide their insurance guarantee against all future insecurity because all those bodies of knowledge will be rapidly changing. We want them to think about the major as a particular educational device within the broad project of liberal education instead of a substitute for a liberal education.
SP: The reports use the phrase “a crisis in liberal education.” Could you describe some of the trends you’ve seen, on campus or in the larger world of higher education?
LA: There are different data points that are indicators that there might be such a crisis. Faculty, current students, alumni, staff members, other friends of the university and the public –everybody was invited to submit proposals, and there were a large number of proposals that expressed grave concern that the university had lost its way on this particular question and that we needed to revitalize the project of liberal education. The worry was that students’ educations at Stanford had become too specialized and too instrumental.
Another marker is that in the first year survey many students participated in, students were asked, “Is it really important to you that Stanford provide you with ‘blank’”, a whole list of things, and one of the choices was “a broad liberal education.” The number of students that pick that choice has gone down. Last year it was 60 percent. But if you asked them, “Is it important that the education fires your intellectual passions, that it makes you curious, that you study a broad range of subjects, that you develop a bunch of different skills, that you broaden your perspective, and that you’re exposed to alternative viewpoints not your own,” between 90 to 91 percent think that that’s very important. Yet these are all key elements of a broad-level education.
And so this signaled to us that we’re not doing a good enough job explaining to students what a broad liberal education is and what its educational purposes are. And so we have a crisis in our own educational practice in the sense that we’re not doing a good enough job orienting students toward the kind of education that we’re actually offering them.
The broader national trend is that a lot of other institutions have moved somewhat away from the American style of liberal education. Not our peer institutions operating in the sort of elite space within research, but a lot of other institutions that are training the mass of students in higher education have moved toward a more instrumental approach to education where many of the degrees offered are more or less explicitly oriented toward particular vocational outcomes. And we think that that’s not the best rap for our students. We should double down on the other strategy.
One more example of a statistic that we found concerning is that students who have their main starting interest in the social sciences and humanities report at a much higher rate that they feel out of place here. We think that’s not OK. It’s not OK for anyone to feel out of place here on the basis of their intellectual interests. And we want to make sure that students are getting the message that there is this cornucopia of amazingly bountiful wide range of things from the School of Earth Sciences and the School of Engineering all the way through the of the vast domain of humanities and sciences, and all of those things are really important to study and open to study.
SP: We’ve talked about liberal education but for the other two themes, could you briefly describe what they mean and why you think they are important to teach undergrads? And under what format?
DA : The reason we focused on these three ideas and put them in the order we did is that they’re really connected in profound ways. They’re all about citizenship and, as Lanier mentioned, even the idea of a liberal education is really the kind of education that we need more of in democratic society. I think it’s very true that having a global perspective is one of the key ways that you can deprovincialize yourself and gain the kind of multiple perspectives on values and questions that we expect of liberally educated students. It’s also a way of showing students all the really important exciting and also terrifying issues that are confronting us today and when they graduate from Stanford have this global dimension.
The idea that we go from the individual to communities up to to the globe. How it will be delivered each quarter is different and the structure of instruction is different in each quarter. In Fall quarter, students would have a choice between an Education of Self-Fashioning seminar or another class called Education for Freedom, which would be a lecture plus seminar class. And in some ways it would look a bit like a Thinking Matters course on the topic of liberal education, but it would be much larger and also a way of unpacking some of NSO (New Student Orientation). So we recommend folding the three books into this. In Winter quarter the citizenship course would be seminar based, with a shared core of texts that all students would discuss. There might be a couple of plenary activities but they wouldn’t be lectures. There would be room for faculty to bring in material that they have particular interest in or that they think is important. We can also do a lot of interesting programming in the dorms working with the RFs and having students writing about these topics at the same time. So, we’re really seeing this seminar in some ways as the cornerstone of the whole first year program.
Finally, in Spring quarter we would give students a bit more choice. We’re hoping to have between 20-25 classes that they could choose from, mostly lecture plus section style classes. And then we also are going to count a lot on other extracurricular programming. We’re working with SGS (Stanford Global Studies), with Stanford Arts, to make this the global quarter, so even if you’re taking classes that are quite different one from another, you still have something in common with other students in that you’re thinking about topics or places that go beyond the United States.
SP: How would current programs like SLE and ITALIC work under this proposal?
DA: We are recommending that SLE and ITALIC to be left alone and we will work with the instructors of those programs to see to what extent we can integrate some of the themes of the three quarters so that they’re also touching on them. Our preliminary conversations with the directors of those programs have been very encouraging. ESF currently does satisfy the writing requirements. We did not recommend any further changes to this in part because I think there’s going to be a study of writing at Stanford, so it is a bit premature to prejudge what is to be done in that area.
SP: The second proposal recommends setting a cap on the number of units a major is allowed to require students (60 to 95). What issues have you identified with Stanford’s current major system, and how does the proposal address them?
LA: When we looked at the collection of Stanford majors, several of our majors are at the edge of being accessible to certain of our students. There are two main drivers for this. One is increasing variability in the frequency of preparation of the students. We’re admitting a much more variable group of students from different kinds of schools within the United States and many more international students than we used to admit. So their preparation is not all the same, and getting more variable than it used to be. The second thing is the relentless growth of specialized knowledge in every single field. As long as people have any idea in your mind that the goal of the major is to produce somebody who knows everything that needs to be known by a professional in that field, then you’re on an unstoppable ratchet to an inaccessible major.
We found when we looked at the system of majors that we have, it’s a striking outlier compared to our peers. Most other universities have majors that look very much alike in terms of the basic size and the demands that they put on student effort. They tend to require about the same number of courses as each other and tend to have some basic internal structural features, e.g. a nice way in through introductory courses and a way of introducing the students to the main areas or ways of thinking or mental disciplines that that field involves. And then a way of building depth in a particular area. And finally a kind of integrating experience at the end where you put things together.
For a lot of other semester schools, a major is about 12 courses. It’s about a third to a third and a half of the overall student effort. If you look at our majors, they range from 55 units (less than a third) to 135 units, which is way more than two thirds if you count the prerequisites that students need in order to get into these majors. But if we’re worried about accessibility that’s the way we have to cap.
So we’re still proposing a pretty decently wide range of unit counts but we want them to be closer together than they were. And we’re proposing this basic four part structure to departments as a way of helping departments think through what should be in there and how it should be structured so that students have an easier time finding their pathway through the major.
SP: Could you explain the capstone project?
LA: We want to preserve Stanford’s legacy of freedom even though we’re also saying that everybody should do a certain thing. There’s been a lot of writing in the educational literature about how big an impact robust capstone projects have for students. They tend to be the most memorable thing about students’ undergraduate education and they tend to help the student put together different parts of their college experience, see how they connect to each other, and how they connect to the main learning goals that they had for themselves or that their major had for them in the course of their undergraduate education. Because of that, this is a highly recommended educational practice in the literature, and we were impressed by that.
There are other universities that have a robust capital requirement with good results. The most salient example is Princeton, which has a senior thesis requirement. That comes out, for example, when you have conversations with colleagues in the engineering department, they love admitting students from Princeton because they are great writers, and they are great writers because they had to write a senior thesis.
The honors thesis has emerged at Stanford as a very uniquely high test, high powered experience for students, and we don’t want to mess with that. We want to be able to preserve that as an especially intense academic experience for the minority of students who do that. The experience of our colleagues in the school of engineering shows that quite robust and project-based capstone experiences are intense experiences that achieve most of the broadly construed educational goals that students wanted from a capstone experience. Some of our biggest and most high demand departments like CS and Product Design have a capstone requirement, and they get every single one of their majors through that requirement.
So a very telling fact in the mind of our committee was that most of the engineering school used to be accredited by this excellent organization called ABET. It was part of the ABET requirements that you had to have a capstone, so they all had capstones. Now there are only two accredited programs left in the School of Engineering, but all of the programs that left the accreditation kept the capstone because the faculty saw that their students were getting great experiences out of capstone work. That really convinced the people on my committee who were not in the engineering school that we should try this for everybody. Every Stanford student deserves this experience.
Public policy is a great example of a program where they have a robust capstone experience, delivered through seminars that are built around a problem or a project with an external client. A faculty member divides students up and they deliver a report for this client that solves the client’s policy problems. Different people work in teams on different aspects of the policy problem and then research the background, and then they have to put it together in the final report. That’s a great experience for those students. I think they’re called the practicum seminars on public policy. So we think there can be quite a diversity of capstone experiences and that every major should on one hand ensure that every student in the major has a capstone experience, and on the other decide which things count as capsules for that major.
Wilson Liang, a sophomore, is a staff writer for Stanford Politics.