Two letters from Professor Groves are included on this page:
A few sections of a personal nature have been edited out.Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2002 16:55:37 -0800 Let me make clear that I'm not speaking ex cathedra here--these are my own thoughts and do not represent the position of the humanities and social sciences department. The members of that department are gearing up for a program review that will take place in 2004-2005, and with your permission I will distribute your memorandum to the department for discussion as we begin to assess the curriculum we oversee. That said, let me turn to the ideas in your proposal. You suggest that the humanities and social sciences curriculum should be refashioned so that it has a required and substantial STS component, STS being, in your words, "the college's raison d'etre." This refashioning would result in a curriculum similar to the current one in some ways, but rather different in others. The distribution would consist of three courses, one in each of three areas (Social Sciences, excluding STS; Humanities; and Arts and Literature). A concentration would entail four courses (one of which, I presume, could double-count as a distribution course). Humanities 1 and 2 would be reconfigured, the former as a "tracked" course out of which some students might pass, the latter as an introductory STS course. The seminar/senior experience requirement would remain unchanged. The departmental requirement would be reduced from five courses to four. You would add two new requirements: first, an STS elective chosen from the Claremont STS course roster; second, a senior-level ethics seminar, co-taught with a faculty member from a major-granting department, that is topically linked to senior research (whether in clinic or on a thesis). As I noted above, this proposal contains some interesting ideas. Indeed, the members of the department have debated most of them over the past decade as part of the ongoing process of supervising, maintaining, and occasionally revising the humanities and social sciences curriculum. I disagree, however, with the major thrust of your proposal--that we should shift the humanities and social sciences curriculum decisively toward STS--for a number of intellectual and practical reasons. You ground your argument about STS in a historical vision of the college that is inaccurate. The founders of the college embraced not a narrow definition of social impact, but rather a wide-ranging view that focused more attention than you do on the notion of society and its concomitant phenomenon, culture. In his history of the college, Joe Platt notes that he and the original trustees sketched a program that "required all students to have two years of basic science, mathematics, English, and history, leaving concentration in specific fields until the junior and senior years. More electives in the humanities and social sciences would be available at the upper class level as well" (59). The first faculty appointments in humanities were in English, and those professors taught not only pragmatic courses--then as now, writing skills were emphasized--but also upper division offerings in their areas of specialization. Clearly the president and the trustees had a sense that such courses contributed to the institutional mission. Indeed, the original mission statement calls specifically for an education that leaves students "well versed" in the humanities and social sciences, not merely in a focused area of those disciplines. This historical note leads me to my major objection to your proposal. Why should we privilege STS over other ways of understanding the target of the mission statement? Society is not a simple or easily understood entity. It is, rather, a complex abstraction made up of myriad cultural practices. Some of those practices can be described through the disciplines represented by STS, but most typically cannot. In enriching our understanding of society--which I would argue we must do before we can make much progress in understanding our relationship to it--we must confront the wider study of humanity. Do we not learn about human cultures and their role in shaping societies when we read novels, contemplate artworks, listen to musical compositions, meditate on history, probe the human psyche, consider economic behaviors, or discuss issues of race, gender, historical trends, cultural differences, and aesthetic production in the classroom? I believe we do, and that is why I value our current distribution requirements. You argue, however, that students may not take this distribution seriously, that the sampling we envision leads only to a superficial exposure to the humanities and social sciences. I would counter that the individual student is the one responsible for seriousness and to some extent superficiality. Any course in the humanities and social sciences, in that it models an approach to understanding human culture, can lead to a growing understanding of society, but of course this growth demands the intellectual dedication of the person being educated (this demand holds just as true in mathematics, the sciences, or engineering). Thinking about a student's responsibilities within her or his own education leads me to another of my major objections to your proposal, an objection that I suspect a large majority of HMC students would share. The program you envision--even though it adds an extra elective slot--would be much more restrictive than our current curriculum. Students now may use the distribution to explore numerous areas of interest--music and literature, say, and philosophy and religious studies, and anthropology and psychology. Within the structure of the distribution, they have a great deal of electivity about what courses they will use to explore the human situation. Your proposal would narrow the possibilities for exploration fairly drastically by requiring students to take a Humanities 2 course with an STS basis (thereby removing a rare choice from the first-year program), mandating the selection of an STS course from a fairly narrow list, and "forcing" (to adapt a verb from your first paragraph) students into a particularized ethics course in their senior year when they might want to spend that slot on an elective of greater intellectual interest to them. The restrictive and prescriptive character of your proposal is something we moved away from when we overhauled our curriculum in 1993, and moving backward on this issue would be a mistake. Our students are adults. They need to make choices about their own education as part of that education. They need to plot an idiosyncratic path for understanding society and the ways in which they are implicated in it. Some of those choices may be poor ones, of course, or they may be made for reasons unrelated to intellectual dedication. Still, with the amount of advising attention we give students in this department, most students will make good choices about the shape of their humanities and social sciences program. Let me note that the process of choice is a traditional part of a liberal arts education. In fact, I would argue that choice is precisely the liberating component of such an education. A related point: the department annually offers a large number of STS courses, and we will continue to staff the department with STS scholars. Currently, counting the Hixon-Riggs Professor, about 30% of our faculty has an STS background. Students have, and will continue to have, a wide variety of departmental STS courses to choose from. In an e-mail several days ago, Professor Beckman covered the other point I had intended to address in this response. Given his well-articulated thoughts, I won't belabor that point here, except to say that I agree with him that the mission in its entirety is something that the college as a whole must address. Assuming that the mission falls primarily within the domain of the humanities and social sciences department virtually guarantees its marginalization. The points I've outlined so far constitute my major concerns with the curriculum you've crafted. I have, however, numerous minor concerns, a few of which are important in imagining how your curriculum might actually work. Let me briefly describe several of these concerns. Your proposal duplicates in some ways elements of the curriculum that are already being developed--not just the IE program itself, but certain courses like STS 114, a course that parallels clinic and functions rather like the ethics course you envision. Rather than a wholesale curricular revision, the results of which are unpredictable, I prefer building slowly on the experiments we already have in place. Your proposal doesn't consider staffing very fully. Given the current configuration of the department, it would be virtually impossible to make the plan work. Moreover, it would be exceptionally taxing for our STS faculty members: they would need to teach not only Humanities 2 (and perhaps multiple sections of it), but also offer a larger number of STS courses to serve the influx of students due to the new requirements. (Our STS colleagues at the other colleges would also be faced with this increased demand--a situation bound to cause tension between the colleges.) The HMC STS faculty would need to staff or help staff the ethics course. They would probably rarely get a chance to teach in their areas of specialization (e.g. history and anthropology). Moreover, moving so many of our courses into STS would undermine our ability to offer an adequate number of concentration and distribution courses. Regarding Humanities 1, we used to track students into different sections of Humanities 1 based on a placement exam. This placement produced a huge number of disgruntled students, which resulted in sections with very low morale. Moreover, by removing those students with good writing skills from the classroom, the remaining students lost helpful peer-editing partners and models for their own writing. Your suggestion of allowing students to place out of Humanities 1 through some sort of testing mechanism misses the point that all students can improve their writing, but only if they continually practice it. Because we (meaning the faculty as a whole) want our students to improve as writers, we require every student to take Humanities 1. (A minor point: a number of years ago in several of my Humanities 1 classes, I tracked students who received a "5" on the AP English exam. The AP score turned out to be an extremely unreliable predictor of performance and final grade.) About Humanities 2, you write that it "does not appear to have any specific purpose." Were that true, you can rest assured that I would never teach the course again--my time is very valuable to me. In fact, Humanities 2 is a carefully considered follow-on to Humanities 1 that furthers writing instruction and links it to basic research methods in the humanities and social sciences. Again, the assumption of the department is that students need to write intensively to improve that skill. Let me stop here. While I cannot support your proposal, I certainly appreciate the time and energy that you put into writing it. Again, the above are merely my responses; if you give me permission to circulate your memo, perhaps you'll find a more receptive ear among my departmental colleagues. Thanks for your concern about and dedication to the college. Best wishes, Jeff Groves ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 05 Sep 2003 16:08:50 -0700 As I noted in my response last October, I'm impressed by the amount of work you've put into the proposal, and many of your ideas merit further discussion. To that end, I will call the department's attention to the proposal on your web site. My own sense (and again, I'm not speaking for the department here) is that, while some parts of the proposal have changed, many of the objections I described earlier remain. The main ones: To my mind, you're reading the college mission statement selectively. You fasten on social impact, but you don't do much with well-versedness in humsoc or the question of leadership. The HMC faculty is currently engaged in a discussion about the whole mission statement, a discussion that assumes the mission is the province of the college, not just or even primarily of H/SS. I find that a productive avenue. To the extent that the mission is tied to H/SS, it is possible to separate it and the kinds of analysis that H/SS offers from the majority of courses that students take at the college. This sense of "separate spheres" is well engrained here and detracts from the mission, and I believe that college action rather than merely departmental change is the way to combat it. The senior ethics course remains for me a difficult thing to conceive. Why ethics? (See my paragraph on this score in my earlier response.) What would be the impact of team-teaching the course, not just on H/SS but on the major departments? What courses will go away so that this one might come into existence? If it's a discussion class, that means sections of 20 or smaller, so we wouldn't be talking about six sections, but more like 10 given the size of the Engineering and CS departments. That's 10 courses that need to be subtracted from the offerings of H/SS, which will make it almost impossible for us to meet the "well-versed" requirement of the mission. And what about student choice? (Again, see what I wrote last time on this score.) If we severely reduce the distribution requirement, we also undercut the "well-versed" requirement. The concentration is usually easy for students--it's almost like elective credit. You, I believe, did music as a concentration, and I suspect that you brought an interest in that field with you when you arrived as a frosh. But the point of well-versedness, it seems to me, is to challenge students to move beyond their likes, beyond what is familiar to them, and ask them to take seriously a variety of ways of creating and sustaining knowledge across the spectrum of the humanities and social sciences. I don't see that happening with only three courses. The H/SS curriculum is not perfect, nor will it ever be. Any curriculum represents a series of limits and choices within those limits that, for some who move through the curriculum, will appear as arbitrary. That they are not so is something that H/SS needs to do a better job of educating students about. Moreover, the curriculum does change occasionally. We had a major shift in 1993, and I suspect that our ongoing program review will lead to further significant changes. As our discussions develop, certain ideas in your proposal may well prove to have legs. Again, I'll be sure to share your URL with the department so that they can review your revised proposal for themselves. These are some shots from the hip. I think I expressed myself better and more fully in the response last fall. I'll send an e-mail sometime soon to encourage the other members of the department to look at your site. I appreciate your commitment to the college, and thanks for asking for my thoughts. Best, Jeff.Return to the proposal home page.