ERIC Number: EJ1095198
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2014
Pages: N/A
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0024-1822
EISSN: N/A
Challenge and Response: Integrity and AAC&U's Reform Initiatives, 1985-1994
Schneider, Carol Geary
Liberal Education, v100 n4 Fall 2014
Ten years ago, AAC&U (then AAC) issued a landmark report, "Integrity in the College Curriculum: A Report to the Academic Community". Anticipating the academy's sternest external critics by nearly a decade, "Integrity" offered a sweeping and incisive critique of curricular practice throughout higher education. "As for what passes as a college curriculum," said "Integrity's" authors in an often-quoted passage, "almost anything goes. We have reached a point at which we are more confident about the length of a college education than its content and purpose... The curriculum has given way to a marketplace philosophy: it is a supermarket where students are shoppers and professors are merchants of learning." Despite the tone set by many such quotable phrases, "Integrity's" authors intended to be constructive as well as critical. Challenging the cafeteria ethos that by 1985 largely governed curricular and student decision making, they framed a broad agenda for educational change, an agenda applicable both to individual campuses and to the work of AAC&U as a whole. Higher education's academic leaders, argued "Integrity", must work to: (1) "revive... faculty [responsibility] as a whole for the curriculum as a whole"; (2) foster for every student, whatever the choice of major, a "minimum required curriculum [of] intellectual, aesthetic, and philosophic experiences... methods and processes, modes of access to understanding and judgment, that should inform all study"; (3) restructure college majors to foster study-in-depth, interdisciplinary learning, and overdue attention to the inherent limitations of any disciplinary framework; (4) assess in new ways both program effectiveness and the quality of student learning; and (5) broaden and deepen graduate students' and faculty members' preparation for the profession of college teaching. Altogether, AAC&U has, over the past ten years, led more than two dozen funded projects involving several hundred institutions and thousands of faculty members in efforts to translate Integrity's recommendations into practice across higher education. As "Integrity's" ten-year anniversary approaches, it is time to review these various centers of educational initiative. This article asks: (1) What has been accomplished through all this attention to curriculum, teaching, and learning? (2) What are the various sites of activity, and how do they connect with one another? (3) After a decade of sustained attention to it's recommendations, how would "Integrity" be written today? (4) What remains to be addressed? [This article was originally published in "Liberal Education" in the summer of 1994, when the author was executive vice president of the association.]
Descriptors: College Curriculum, Educational Change, Integrity, Higher Education, College Faculty, College Students, Educational Methods, Evaluation Methods, Educational Quality, College Instruction, Teacher Responsibility, Majors (Students), Educational Improvement, Liberal Arts
Association of American Colleges and Universities. 1818 R Street NW, Washington, DC 20009. Tel: 800-297-3775; Tel: 202-387-3760; Fax: 202-265-9532; e-mail: pub_desk@aacu.org; Web site: http://www.aacu.org/publications/index.cfm
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A