Standing On Shoulders

I am not an organized person. I wish I were but there it is...I am not an organized person. It's not that I haven't tried; I've had lists in leather bound journals, lists on computers, lists in computer databases and in software specifically designed to keep track of personal possessions. But they never work out for me.

On the other hand, I am not like the Collyer Brothers. I do have file cabinets and boxes where, if I look long enough and patiently enough I usually find what I need. Right now, for example, I have lost an obituary of my great-grandfather. It would help if I could remember whether it had been sent to me as a postal letter or it had been sent as an email attachment. I have an email database going back to the late 1990 so it will be there if I received it as an email and if I can figure out the search word I need to get a hit. If it was sent via postal mail, then I should be looking through the papers on most of the flat surfaces in my computer room. I've done both but it hasn't revealed its whereabouts.

I have a retired colleague who should be given a national prize for organization. In 1971, he and his family left Texas to take a job at the brand new Stockton. The contents of his house had been loaded onto a commercial moving van while he and his family drove to New Jersey by car. They got here a couple of days before the moving van so were living off the floor of their new home.

A day or so after they arrived here, a man knocked on their door, identified himself as a claims adjuster for the moving company and informed them that on the trip from Texas the moving van had caught fire and burned to the ground! All of their household goods were gone. He then explained that he could replace the cost of the lost furniture on an average family of my colleague's former home and family size.

My colleague asked what the insurance company would need to reimburse exactly what was lost? The reply was: accurate lists of every object, its condition preferably with a photograph as well as original sales slips for major appliances as well as the dates of purchase. My colleague went into another room and returned with a large cardboard box; he opened it and produced folders for each room of his house in Texas with photos of each item along with sales slips for most of them.
The adjustor was astounded; he reported that he had never seen such set of documents and promptly covered the loss in full.

I also suspect that my colleague could provide any assignment, test or writing topics for any class that he had ever taught. He is, without question, the most organized person I know.

All this is preface to the fact that my wife handed me a stack of mimeographed pages today; she had found them in an old file cabinet she was emptying. I quickly glanced through them realizing immediately that they were from the chairman of the English Department where I had my first full-time teaching job in 1965 - 1967. As I worked through the stack I saw agendas of English Department meetings, proposals for and Honors program, curricular redesigns and, best of all, a four page document entitled Some Comments on General Education -- 3 October 1964

The date is important because it is some months BEFORE I had accepted a teaching position at Millikin University. The date is six years before the founding of Stockton and my involvement as the first Dean of General Studies.

I quickly read the four pages and realized that what I held in my hands was an document antecedent to the thinking about general education that had so occupied me for 15 months between July 1970 and September 1971 when the College opened.

I have mentioned here recently what the influence of Wes Tilley was on me when he was my first Chairman at Millikin in 1965 and, subsequently, here at Stockton when he was the first VP of Academic Affairs. He mentored me in all sorts of ways -- pedagogically, politically, culturally -- as a new, young, almost Ph.D. teacher.

One of the primary topics of our almost constant discussions was general education. The idea of General Studies at Stockton was a compilation of Wes Tilley's ideas (precisely expressed in the 1964 document) and my very early ideas about how to make the whole thing work.

The germs of what we eventually created at Stockton vis-a-vis General Studies are in the 1964 document. It is those four pages I want to outline here.

The document contains nine "comments" suggesting a basic general education theory as well as practice for a college (specifically Millikin but meant also for wider communities). It covers the need for choice, advising principles, instructor effectiveness and the design of inter-disciplinary courses. The center of the argument discusses the content of inter-disciplinary courses and how a teacher would, necessarily, teach in such courses. Needless to say, teaching in an inter-disciplinary course was, Tilley argues, radically different from teaching in a major/disciplinary course.

The specifics.

At the heart of everything Wes Tilley thought about was "choice". He devoutly believed that without choice not much learning took place. His writings at Stockton -- the Academic Working Papers, Goals at Stockton (both of these have been discussed and analyzed extensively here), and other memos -- consistently argue for providing choice, challenging choice, encouraging choice and learning through choice.

In this document, Comment 1 states: Students usually profit more from academic requirements if, within the requirements, they are permitted to make some choices for themselves. I hope we can offer every freshman first a choice between disciplinary and inter-disciplinary courses; second, some choices among courses of either kind.

Numbering this 1 clearly shows the centrality of the idea.

Students, he argues, cannot make good and informed choices unless they have guidance -- from an advisor. Thus, his second comment states: In advising a student, it is helpful to keep in mind that he may have no clear idea of the nature of an inter-disciplinary course. He should be discouraged from choosing such a course merely because he does not like the disciplinary courses that he would otherwise be required to take, The students who seem to do best in inter-disciplinary courses are (1) the more intelligent, and (2) those with the wider range of interests. Those who do best in disciplinary courses are (1) older students, and (2) those with the more clearly defined goals and predilections.
 
While we might find Tilley's insistence that intelligent students do better in inter-disciplinary courses troubling, he would most likely counter that it takes a particular and broad view of the self and the world to appreciate the range of ideas in an truly inter-disciplinary course.

If students need choice, instructors need to teach what they are interested in. Tilley states in the third comment: Instructors are most effective when they teach the kinds of courses they like to teach. It would be essential to a sound program of general education that it permit each faculty member to teach disciplinary or inter-disciplinary courses as he preferred.

This seems fundamental but only because at Stockton faculty have the freedom to choose which courses they will teach -- especially in the General Studies curriculum. This is not true at other, more traditional institutions where beginning faculty are told what they are to teach. In such institutions, a departmental syllabus is quite common.

Tilley then turns his attention to what an inter-disciplinary course is, how it is structured and what some possible courses might look like.

Here are the next three comments (Numbers 4, 5, 6): It is important to keep in mind, when devising inter-disciplinary courses, that they can more easily combine materials than methods: in a course combining historical, philosophical, and literary works, there is likely to be some sacrifice of two disciplines, so that what emerges will be either a history course with literary and philosophical illustrations, a literature course in which history and philosophy figure as types of literature, or a philosophy course in which literary and historical works are examined for their ideas, (Even when the materials are combined by a committee. the different kinds of courses will be determined by the disciplines of the various instructors.)

5. There has been a tendency in some institutions to try to decide the content of  interdisciplinary courses by committees, as if once the contents were decided, everyone could teach the same course; This procedure handicaps the teacher of an interdisciplinary course so badly, it is hard to see why anyone would support  it, unless he wanted the course not to succeed. It should be recognized that no one teaches well who does not feel able to devise his own courses, or free to change  them as his training, his interests. and the nature of particular classes seem to indicate he should.

6. From these remarks it will be clear that I do not wish to restrict the teacher of an lnter-disciplinary course in any unnecessary way -- and that, further. I do not believe that a teacher should be any less free to determine the nature of an inter-disciplinary course than of a disciplinary one. What form, then, should inter-disciplinary course offerings take at Millikin?

Finally, in the final comment, Tilley argues for an honest “ignorance” on the part of the faculty teaching an inter-disciplinary course. This “ignorance” is a fact because no faculty can master two different disciplines so it is best to admit this up-front and then use the occasion as an opportunity for both the faculty and the students to learn. Here is what Tilley says: Pedagogically, the main difference between inter-disciplinary courses and disciplinary ones is that on inter-disciplinary course, calling as it does upon a variety 
of disciplines, will not permit on instructor to take the role of master-disciplinarian. He must necessarily confess his ignorance of much that pertains to the
 materials under examination and enter into something like a Socratic relationship 
with his students. Teachers who do not wish to teach in this way, or who are
 inclined to regard regular inter-changes between instructor and students as mere conversation, or as “a pooling of ignorance” probably should not teach inter-disciplinary courses. The instructor of an inter-disciplinary course should be chosen, not for his knowledge of, say, the novel, or of Victorian literature, but for his 
general knowledge, his interest in broad questions, and his ability to carry on a 
reasoned dialogue with his students. These remarks do not necessarily prescribe
 “discussion” technique of teaching: they suggest the attitude of a good inter-disciplinary instructor toward his materials and his students. He may talk most of the time or he may not: but when he does talk, he expresses the results, not of specialized training and research, but broad learning and a reasoned examination of the materials in the course.

I want, now, to turn to how these ideas have manifested themselves in Stockton’s approach to general education. Tilley’s comments contain the minimal but central ideas that he – and, then, I – implemented in our General Studies curriculum.

First of all, I was a clear as Tilley is about the need for choice in course selection. It is as central to my thinking as it was to his. I originally placed no restrictions on the selection of GS courses; it was a smorgasbord of possibilities. I did create minimal categories but, primarily, as an administrative means of identifying course content; it was never – at that point – a distribution requirement. These came later.

Choice at Stockton meant – as it meant to Tilley – someone to guide those choices; in our case, that person was the Preceptor. The Preceptor was central to the process of choosing. Her task was to help the student – using Socratic questioning – to identify interests which would lead to informed choice of course.

The third leg of this stool was the instructor. Teaching in the General Studies curriculum was a contractual obligation. Each faculty was to teach two courses per academic year in GS. I assumed at the beginning that the best GS courses would be, somehow, inter-disciplinary.

For example, in the interview process with new candidates, I would ask what courses they might like to teach in GS. Usually, the response would be conservative. Thus, a sociologist almost always replied with a course very much like SOC 101. I would then counter by stating some of the ways a GS course might be created and structured. The example I would give was a course that I have always wanted to teach. I called it “1381”. This course, centered on one year, would include literature (The Canterbury Tales), history (The Peasants Revolt), politics (The Deposing of Richard II), art (Building Westminster Abbey) and any other cultural material I could find that occurred in 1381.

Almost always, the candidate would immediately see that Stockton was no usual place, that we not only desired but required new ideas and that I was eager to hear about any course they had up their sleeves. Indeed, almost all actually had such courses up their sleeves but weren’t sure I would welcome them.

From this point in the conversation, the faculty candidate and I spoke the same tongue and could actually design workable GS courses in my office. These discussions were exhilarating to both of us.

Faculty who could not get outside of their disciplinary box did not get positive references from me. Certain disciplines seemed to be harder to shed than others. As Tilley argues, these faculty should not teach inter-disciplinary courses.

I am amazed that this unimpressive mimeographed document has survived two moves of my family, 50 years of passing time, to end up in an old file cabinet on my front porch. Without it, we would still understand Tilley’s and my initial ideas about General Studies. With it, however, it is clear that this cluster of ideas is much older than what we have and that those ideas are directly traceable to this document.

I stand on shoulders far greater than mine.