<p>Do ALL the Ivy Leagues have a liberal arts curriculum at the undergraduate level?</p>
<p>Do any other top 20 universities (excluding LAC's) also follow a liberal arts curriculum at the UG level?</p>
<p>Usually Tech or some State schools do not. (caltech, MIT, etc)</p>
<p>Most Unis do have LA curriculum though</p>
<p>Well, they all do, but I presume you mean are all of them exclusively liberal arts-centered? Penn and Cornell are not - each has a College of Arts & Sciences along with renowned pre-professional schools - but for the most part, the others are strongly liberal arts-based. Harvard, for example, teaches undergrad Econ but not Business, Music composition but not Music performance, and nothing remotely like the Hotel School or Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell.</p>
<p>UChicago has really no pre-professional programs (business, engineering, education, etc.), and some would say few applied anything programs.</p>
<p>What’s your definition of liberal arts education? Most people applying to schools don’t really understand what that encompasses. Most of the top universities, excluding tech schools, at least pay lip service to the fact that they’re supplying a liberal arts education to their students.</p>
<p>Like Modest said almost every school will advertise their “LAC” like curriculum, but as far as which ivies most closely resemble your “typical LAC” (again many generalizations here) I’d say Dartmouth first (part of the reason why I chose it) followed by Brown (which is a bit unconventional, but seems to offer the education in a more self-determined format)</p>
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Really? Brown is an excellent liberal arts university, to be sure, but it’s a bit of a stretch to say it has a “liberal arts curriculum at the UG level” – because it has no set curriculum. Theoretically it would be quite possible for someone to graduate from Brown with a singularly lopsided education. </p>
<p>In fact, I would say that Columbia with its Core is perhaps the Ivy that first comes to mind.</p>
<p>^ well amherst is definitely a “LAC” and has no required courses.</p>
<p>IB-- that’s a very interesting definition of liberal arts.</p>
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Your point being? “Liberals art college” and “liberal arts curriculum” are not necessarily the same thing.</p>
<p>modest- It is somewhat of an odd definition, perhaps. I realize that most Brown graduates have as well-rounded an education as Chicago or Columbia students. When examining curricula, however, I think Chicago and Columbia would favor liberal arts simply because they <em>require</em> students to be well-rounded (even if Brown allows more flexibility for such exploration).</p>
<p>For years, Chicago did not even have a Computer Science major. At other schools, too, CS started in the Math department. Not sure in what year Chicago moved it out, but I bet it was long after many others did (and not simply because they did not have enough faculty or courses to support the separation).</p>
<p>The lack of pre-professional and applied programs is a deliberate choice there. Chicago takes a very self-conscious stand in favor of “liberal education”. Professors there talk quite a bit about what that means to the school. Core requirements are one part of the package. Another: Grappling with big life questions of general interest (“what is justice?”), arising from close readings of primary source materials (especially “Great Books”), in small discussion groups. </p>
<p>As a mission statement for liberal education, I like this one:
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The aim of liberal education is to create persons who have the ability and the disposition to try to reach agreements on matters of fact, theory, and actions through rational discussions.<a href=“Source:%20%5Burl=http://www.ditext.com/libed/libed.html]Philosophy%20of%20Liberal%20Education[/url]”>/quote</a></p>
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<p>The assumption that requiring courses favors the liberal arts is an interesting conclusion. It’s one that’s not supported by the last 40 years of the open curriculum at Brown and the open curriculum elsewhere as found by the studies conducted by the Teagle Group. For what it’s worth, “well-rounded” =/= liberal arts.</p>
<p>tk-- if you want to talk about schools which is self-conscious about liberal arts, you’ll find the list is far longer than UChicago.</p>
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<p>I’m sure that’s true. Brown has its approach, Chicago has another, St. John’s College has a stricter variation on the Chicago “core” approach, other schools have their approaches based on distribution requirements, and so forth. </p>
<p>I’m not familiar with the Teagle Group studies. They might make for interesting reading. I’d like to know how they frame the question of whether requiring courses favors the liberal arts, and how you arrive at testable propositions that can lead to scientific findings.</p>
<p>At the heart of the Chicago approach (or the St. John’s approach) is a premise that some kinds of knowledge are more worth having than others, and that all educated people ought to share that knowledge. This premise has the character of a philosophical first principle, not an empirically testable observation. It is a premise that has been widely assailed in the past 40 years or so, among other reasons for being Euro-Centric and male-dominated. They kept teaching to the same 100 Great Books (or Mortimer Adler’s precisely 101 Great Ideas); these were all written by Dead White Males, ergo the approach is very parochial. Better to open the curriculum to a broader, freer market of ideas. That’s how I understand the essence of the debate, anyway.</p>
<p>The Open Curriculum is only partly framed on that debate. You’re right that their premise is that some kinds of knowledge are required by educated people, however, that’s not what liberal arts means. Let’s look at the AACU definition:
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<p>This is not the best definition I’ve seen, but all too often people associate liberal arts either with general education or with the humanities-- neither definition is true.</p>
<p>A liberal arts education is marked by a process, not by content, and is ruled by the notion that studying broadly will provide students with multiple frameworks within which they can comfortable engage in complex problem solving and critical thinking. The goal is to be able to critically assess various new situations using a vast toolkit. In the case of UChicago and St. John’s, they feel that in order to learn a wide variety of content, one must engage in the process of thinking like disciplinarians in each of these areas and that these liberal arts skills will be obtained. Other universities, like Brown and even those with simply distribution requirements, feel that it’s not what you learn, it’s how you learn it that provides students with these liberal arts skills. Our goal is not a shared content base, rather, it is a shared skill set, and one does not have to be connected to the other.</p>
<p>Brown’s stated Liberal Learning Goals, sent to all students over the summer before their freshman year:
<a href=“http://brown.edu/Administration/Dean_of_the_College/curriculum/downloads/Lib_Learning_Goals.pdf[/url]”>http://brown.edu/Administration/Dean_of_the_College/curriculum/downloads/Lib_Learning_Goals.pdf</a></p>
<p>We are in the process of requiring that all concentrations, as they come up for review, justify their place in the broader context of liberal learning at Brown and address explicitly for students what areas they can expect to grow in within that concentration. We are also stressing the role of courses offered in these concentrations in the general curriculum of all students.</p>
<p>It’s not that I think Brown’s approach is superior, but it’s either extremely close-minded or on the basis of faulty definition that one could perceive the Great Books model as the golden standard or even benchmark in liberal arts education.</p>
<p>Dartmouth is the closest to a LAC of the ivies. It’s truly a LAC disguised as a research U.</p>
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<p>O.K., I found the Teagle site, then downloaded and read through the Brown University white paper (“The Values of the Open Curriculum: An Alternative in Liberal Education”). I assume this is one of the studies ModestMelody cites.</p>
<p>As I read the paper, it neither supports nor refutes an assumption that requiring courses favors the liberal arts. It distinguishes 3 “models” of liberal arts education: the core curriculum model (Chicago, Columbia), the distribution requirements model (Duke, Penn), and the open curriculum model (Brown, and many New England LACs). Then it examines how successfully the open curriculum model achieves its goals by gathering statements from students and faculty. </p>
<p>The premise of an “open curriculum” is that, by granting students the freedom to design their own programs, students will display unusual “motivation, innovation, and self direction … passion for learning … independent learning and creative problem-solving.”
The belief is that this approach, when successful, will produce highly motivated, independent life-long learners. There is no systematic attempt to define what is or is not worth knowing. That can be, largely, a matter for the student to determine with the academic adviser (though different versions of the model address this a little differently). </p>
<p>In contrast, the premise of a “core curriculum” is that there are certain enduring problems of interest to all human beings; that the best approach to these problems is to study and discuss “the best that has been thought and said” in the best works of the best thinkers. The goal is not really to master the content chapter and verse, but to use these works as a spring-board to examine your own ideas and those of your classmates (^^ “to try to reach agreements … through rational discussions”).</p>
<p>The Teagle study I read did not address the issue of whether a core curriculum stifles innovation, motivation, passion for learning, etc. My experience of it was that it did not. However, I can understand the appeal of allowing students freedom and responsibility to create their own programs of study.</p>
<p>Thankyou, ModestMelody, for citing the Teagle work. It is very interesting.</p>
<p>Oh I was not saying that cores stifle those things, so much as that as specifically, “passion for learning … independent learning and creative problem-solving,” and “produc[ing] highly motivated, independent life-long learners,” is precisely the goal of liberal arts education.</p>
<p>The Open Curriculum is designed by examining the goals of a liberal arts education and designing a system in which the structures that exist all exist as a means to directly reach the those goals. There is no in between mediating of what content is the singular, “great” content, and there is no assumption that learning various content will automatically lead to independent learning or a passion for learning, or even well-developed problem solving skills which can be applied to new situations. We don’t assume that doing these things prohibits liberal education, but avoid these problems and instead ask students to practice what we’d like to see once they leave the university while they’re attending the university.</p>
<p>I think of this as an “authentic assessment”, i.e. an assessment which asks the assessed to perform in a way that most closely mimics how the task would be performed in a non-artificial environment. It’s also a “formative assessment”, i.e.students are evaluated throughout the process and given feedback which help to guide future choices rather than being measured solely in a “summative” fashion at the end. That is to say, students who are constructing their own curriculum have the responsibility, opportunity, and natural proclivity to change gears and challenge themselves in previously unconsidered fashions as gaps become apparent throughout their education. This adaptability leads to students making the connections between their coursework in a more comprehensive way (in my experience) and also leads to greater strength when acting independently to pursue knowledge.</p>
<p>I think that all three models mentioned by the Teagle Group achieve a liberal arts education for certain students, in certain atmospheres, in certain ways, but I’d refute that one is better than the other. I think the products are quite different and the process is quite different. All of them fall under the umbrella definitions of liberal arts education, but as I alluded to in my first post in this thread, how you define liberal arts specifically changes the kind of environment where you’re most likely to find a liberal arts education that fits you.</p>
<p>Just another quick point-- LAC =/= liberal arts education, and I’m sure there are some massive universities that have managed to provide a better liberal arts education than quite a few LACs.</p>
<p>I think this is a rather ridiculous question. Most schools outside of MIT, RPI, and Caltech will be able to offer you a liberal arts education. However, some schools REQUIRE it, while others just offer it for your own choosing.</p>
<p>For example, i will compare two very similar, but ideologically different schools: UofChicago and Johns Hopkins.</p>
<p>The quality of humanities classes at both schools are phenomenal and about evenly matched. However, at the University of Chicago, students are more-or-less forced to undergo a liberal arts education through the Core Curriculum, while at Hopkins, there are distribution requirements, but no specific requirements like the Core.</p>
<p>Both schools have the potential to offer you a liberal arts education. Chicago chooses to enforce it, while Hopkins gives you the freedom of choice.</p>
<p>That’s the major different amongst almost all of the top schools.</p>
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<p>I disagree. I think we are grappling with some rather serious questions.</p>
<p>ModestMelody, you are making some wonderful contributions, but IMHO you are making some false distinctions with respect to the goals of the Brown-style Open Curriculum and the goals of a Great Books or Core Curriculum approach. You wrote,</p>
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<p>The Great Books model emerged in the 1930s, and has been refined over the years, from the work of some rather intelligent and broad-minded people. I don’t think the aims of that model are radically different from the aims of education expressed in “Liberal Learning at Brown”. The important thing in a well-run GB program is, likewise, the process (not content mastery per se). The highest aspiration is not to become George Will’s *Quote Boy<a href=“in%20case%20you%20are%20old%20enough%20to%20remember%20that%20Doonesbury%20character.”>/i</a></p>
<p>The Great Books model does provide a useful benchmark (perhaps not the benchmark) if only because it has been around for a long time, and because it introduces students to indisputably important material. Whenever you introduce an interesting new model, as Brown did 40 years ago, it is very useful to continually ask, in the process of refining it, whether it meets the good objectives of what it replaces. Does it throw out the baby with the bath water? The Teagle study I read grapples with that question. Even after 40 years, the answer is not completely settled. When you give students full freedom to choose, some will choose badly - that’s the nature of freedom - so I think at Brown you are in a delicate balance in trying to encourage wise choices as suggested in “LLAB” while still maintaining complete faith in the student. It is a noble experiment.</p>
<p>I disagree. The Great Books curriculum is no better a benchmark and has no better proof than the Open Curriculum that it’s achieving these same goals you agree they share. You’re right-- the material is important, however, none of the Great Books school has some metric by which they can demonstrate that the processes they desire students to learn and take part in are actually occurring. I actually think Great Books allows colleges to avoid the hard question of how do we demonstrate our learners are actually doing these more abstract learning outcomes versus just displaying competence in content courses. I think that Open Curriculum schools have to more openly grapple with the question of how to measure, define, and refine these liberal learning goals because they cannot fall back on the convenience of saying that we’re certain they’re learning material and we imagine you must do these things to learn that content.</p>
<p>I’m not sure what it means to “choose badly”. Again, the argument I’d make is that while metrics are not easy for these processes, affording students the freedom to construct their curriculum requires students, outside of the framework of individual courses, to engage in precisely the kind of thinking activity we want them to succeed at after college. Students are constantly engaged in critical thinking, problem solving, and uncovering interconnectedness of disciplinary material by formulating their own curriculum.</p>
<p>I agree-- the goal of the GB is not to become Quote Boy, only there is no more evidence for the GB leading to something bigger and better than that than there is for non-GB schools. I shouldn’t have stated that the goal of GB is content. What I meant was that the structure of GB is around content and the metrics for success are content driven, and, therefore, I feel that most GB schools often have even less direct evidence of achieving a liberal arts education because hardly anyone challenges the hegemony of the “Core”. An outside reviewing group asking how do you know your students are achieving a liberal arts education will often end the conversation when they hear a school has an extensive core even though having such a core does not directly lead to having all students achieve liberal arts learning goals.</p>