Concerned students and faculty members met Tuesday to try to find common ground on the common curriculum and its goals.
During a town hall meeting in Bobet Hall on Sept. 25, the Common Curriculum Task Force heard from several faculty members and students who voiced their opinions on the common curriculum.
The meeting’s discussion centered around a draft document the task force released on Sept. 11 called “Goals and Outcomes of a Liberal Education at Loyola University.”
The document outlines the aims of the common curriculum and invites open discussion of the curriculum’s goals, as well as the curriculum itself.
The draft lists four goals of a liberal education: learning basic skills, understanding the world in which we live, gaining knowledge of a specific field or discipline and fostering a sense of personal identity. The document also breaks each one down into specifics. These bulleted points further elaborate on the four individual main goals. The draft describes itself as “a work in progress, not a settled conclusion,” with the intent of trying to incite campus-wide discussion.
Some, however, felt that the document was too overreaching.
The Rev. Stephen Rowntree, S.J., said, “It just strikes me that this is way too ambitious, way too ambitious.”
Some faculty members also suggested that fewer common curriculum hours should be required, saying students were uninterested in their classes because they don’t relate to their majors.
Assistant English professor John Sebastian cited his own experience with student apathy.
“People just don’t want to be in class, it’s a miserable experience all around. I have been asked, more times than I care to think about, and I’m really frustrated at this point in time, ‘What’s going to be on the test?’ because the perception is, ‘This is a hoop that I need to leap through,'” he said.
Students in the crowd suggested that a service requirement be added to the common curriculum, and that service to the community was an important aspect of a Jesuit education. That philosophy of education should involve both “thinking critically” and “acting justly,” they said.
Spanish junior Kathleen Warner said, “I would think that it was part of the Jesuit mission to have a service requirement. I mean, there’s always the concern that people’s hearts may not be in it, but the truth is sometimes people’s hearts are not in common curriculum courses … If you want to have the component of thinking critically and acting justly, you have to have that service component.”
A faculty member suggested that instead of adding to the common curriculum, the service requirement could instead be tacked on to individual majors as a degree requirement.
The document itself reads, “It has been a very long time since such a focused discussion has taken place on our campus, so many of the current faculty (and all of the students) have not participated in such conversations. The time is therefore ripe for discussion across colleges and disciplines.”
Andrew Poland can be reached at [email protected].
