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 Muyumba
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Walton Muyumba
Associate instructor, Department of English, IUB
Creating a set of required courses for freshman at Indiana University Bloomington will reaffirm this university's commitment to liberal arts education.
This plan, however, cannot come from a "quick-fix" committee, and it shouldn't be implemented without deep feedback from professors and associate instructors.
As an AI in the English department, I teach at ground zero--W131 English Composition, the only required freshman course and the only required writing course for all IU students. With no other specific requirements, it is possible to graduate from IU having read or written very little.
But even before freshman registration, a deficiency of reading, writing and thinking skills exists among students. The problem stems from no single state educational policy. Students from New Jersey and California, from Florida and Oregon, all come to IU with inabilities that cannot be solved or corrected with one required course.
Granted, universities and colleges should still educate, but should we be making up for the failings of the previous 12 years?
The real battle IU's administration is involved in may be with itself. IU has become more "user-friendly" and "incorporated," fulfilling the consumerist desires of its student/shoppers--apartment-style living in dorms, the ability to drop classes up until the final weeks of a semester, bubble sheet evaluation forms ensuring customer satisfaction. At the same time, though, the administration recognizes that students are matriculating from IU without the critical skills that belay strong liberal arts training.
How can the university wed its corporate mentality to its educational mission?
This is a hard question to answer. Consumer-driven culture shuns reading, historical knowledge and any logic other than the logic of capitalism. These problems certainly are not IU's alone, but I see them concentrated in the minds of and on the bodies of freshmen when they arrive on campus.
Many students are giving and bright. More often than not, the cultural studies foundation I teach as part of composition works to open them to the possibilities of a liberal arts education and their own intellectual deficiencies. But the sprinkling effect of one required class surely cannot be sustained over the remainder of their years in Bloomington.A better situation would extend requirements to include one or two classes every year to continually reaffirm the liberal arts mission. These should be courses that cannot be slept through, "C'd" through or otherwise easily ignored.
And qualifying standards in the School of Education should continue to become more stringent and strict. Why not help to produce better elementary, middle and high school teachers and curriculums for a better pool of prospective students?
My hope is that IU graduates move into the workforce motivated to use their diplomas as symbols of an intellectually well rounded and solid undergraduate education rather than as oversized ATM cards. The IU administration will be best served by taking time to institute requirements that teach students to be culturally literate and philosophically sound thinkers.
To my knowledge, these abilities do not detract from procuring gainful employment.
Editor's note: Read IUB Chancellor Kenneth R.R. Gros Louis' "Proposal for General Education" at this Web site:
http://www.indiana.edu/~blcampus/proposal.htm
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