Friday, December 2nd | 10:30 am - 12:20 pm
The Board Room, Stanford Humanities Center
Abstract:
Departments often determine over half the courses that students can study in college. How did control of the curriculum come to be parceled out in this manner? In this paper, I question the standard narrative that the evolution of the classic American college into a modern research university inevitably transformed undergraduate education along the way. In fact, the first PhD-granting graduate programs were introduced at schools that would long remain attached to a fixed college curriculum (Yale, Princeton). What’s more, Eliot’s famed elective system -- long assumed to be an American adaptation of German Lernfreiheit -- proved unsuccessful as a curricular principle. But it did accomplish one important result: when the concentration/major system caught on as the preferred alternative to electives, the departments took control of a curriculum mostly abandoned by the college of faculty. In conclusion, I ponder whether the status quo is the inevitable conclusion of American higher ed, or whether other institutional models (such as the College at the University of Chicago) can offer alternative models for combining the teaching and research missions of the university.Bio:
Dan Edelstein is the William H. Bonsall Professor of French, and Professor of Political Science and History (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He also is the Christensen Faculty Director of Stanford Introductory Studies at Stanford, where he directs the new Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE) requirement for all first-year students. He is currently working on an intellectual history of revolution, tentatively entitled The Revolution Next Time (Princeton, forthcoming).