(May, 2001)

In the last two years, APC has examined reports submitted by departments and programs that offer courses satisfying general education requirements and held open meetings with chairs, directors, and faculty participating in general education. The committee has issued nine reports on the status of each of UNCA's general education components. Collectively, these reviews point to several interrelated issues concerning the overall condition of general education at UNCA. APC identified three significant problems that UNCA must address if it is interested in giving general education a central role in achieving its mission.

1. Because UNCA has not articulated the role general education plays in a student's experience, there is no shared idea of what a core course of study entails.

Senate Document 3684 neither provides a rationale for general education nor specifies what the unified core is to accomplish. The document does justify individual requirements, but does not explain why general education itself is a valuable enterprise. Without such a guiding philosophy, it is impossible to determine the value of any of the individual requirements, assess what they contribute to a student's UNCA experience, or determine the level of resources that should be devoted to them. Because general education consumes more resources than most majors, it is particularly important that it have a vision.

UNCA's liberal arts curriculum has three basic components: general education, the major course of study, and electives. Of these, only the major has a clearly defined purpose and departments are regularly reviewed and evaluated in accordance with those goals. General education should be held to equally strict, if not stricter standards. Without a guiding philosophy, this cannot be done.

APC concludes that the failure to define a purpose for general education has four specific consequences.

(a) General education at UNCA has become the sum of what individual departments and programs have chosen to do within their own narrow sectors.

Each department or program tends to define general education as the way they do it. The Humanities program, for example, defines general education as substantive knowledge. The Arts, Health and Fitness, and several of the laboratory natural science classes, on the other hand, make experience an essential component, while most of the social sciences and the library define it as understanding methodology. Such a mix may be desirable, but the proper combination for general education has not been formally articulated.

APC found such variation in emphasis and purpose among courses satisfying the same requirement that it is impossible to determine what students are expected to know after satisfying it. Among other things, this makes it difficult to integrate general education with the major because departments cannot rely on the core courses to be responsible for any one set of skills or knowledge base. Without a guiding principle, for instance, it is not possible to determine whether general education or the major departments are responsible for developing basic communication skills such as computer literacy and the ability to write and speak clearly. APC's review of Library Research 102, for example, raised fundamental issues regarding information literacy. While it is clear that students must possess the technical skills necessary to access information and the critical abilities to determine its validity, it is not clear whether primary responsibility for equipping them with these proficiencies rests with the major or general education. Again, such a decision cannot be made unless UNCA develops a useful guiding principle as to what constitutes core study.

(b) With each department free to define the purpose and function of general education as it pertains to its own courses, considerable variation in grading and expectations characterizes courses satisfying different requirements.

Grades in the general education natural science, social science, and math courses, for example, tend to be consistent with or lower than grades administered in similar courses that do not satisfy general education requirements. Grades in Health Fitness 120 and 154, Arts, and Humanities, however, are notably higher than the university average while Library Research and the Health and Fitness activity courses are graded satisfactory/unsatisfactory. Without clear guiding principles, faculty have no way to determine whether general education courses should be held to the same standards as courses in departmental majors.

(c) There are no principles available to determine how general education can be adjusted to accommodate new ideas and issues.

Senate Document 3684 is outdated. Its objectives are vague and some of its rationales are meaningless given contemporary developments. Without a concept of a core, however, there are no readily available guidelines as to how to modernize the general education curriculum. A clear illustration involves issues of diversity. The Chancellor's 1999-2000 Task Force recommended many ways to incorporate diversity into the curriculum. General education should be the center of any such institutional effort. Without a central philosophy, however, efforts within general education to address diversity remain isolated, uncoordinated, and insufficient.

The articulation agreement between North Carolina's University system and the community colleges specifies certain courses for which UNCA must give transfer credit. There is a suspicion that in some cases, such as the Humanities, the Arts, Health and Fitness, and the integrated sciences, transfer credit is routinely given for courses which do not capture the spirit of the requirement. Without clearly defining what that spirit is, however, general education for transfer students is reduced to an artificial counting of credits. To retain at least some control over the general education experience of transfer students, the university, for example, has changed the numerical designation of the third Humanities course from 224 to 324. Without a vision as to what constitutes a general education core, UNCA is in no position to negotiate reforms and rectify problems created by the agreement.

2. General education is the only important aspect of a student's experience at UNCA that does not have a coordinating mechanism.

The university has no institutionally sanctioned group responsible for coordinating general education. SD 3684 charges APC with periodic review of courses but the committee lacks the resources and continuity essential for careful monitoring. This has two important consequences. First, individual departments and programs make isolated decisions about general education courses. Mathematics, the Library, Language, Foreign Language, Health and Fitness, and some of the social and natural science departments have implemented changes which have informally amended SD 3684. While APC generally finds these changes to be warranted and beneficial, they were still decided in isolation and no effort was made to determine how the changes might affect other requirements or the expectations of general education.

Second, without a coordinating mechanism, there is no institutional base for experimenting with and putting into place new initiatives. Ideas such as Writing Across the Curriculum and First-Year Experience have enormous implications for general education, but efforts to integrate them with core study have been incremental and haphazard. There has also been considerable discussion of the advantages of spreading general education courses more evenly across a student's stay at UNCA rather than concentrating them at the one-hundred level as they are now. Only a faculty driven entity coordinating general education would have the institutional base to see that such changes are thoroughly discussed and implemented most efficiently.

3. While there seems to be a consensus that general education is important, APC discovered only weak support for it in practice.

The lack of support is indicated by two related trends. First, there is an alarming reluctance on the part of faculty to teach general education courses, particularly interdisciplinary ones. Language 101 and 102, all four Humanities courses, and Arts 310, for example, employ too many non-tenure track faculty. This appears to be a multifaceted problem which raises questions about both the culture at UNCA and the campus' reward structure. If a liberal arts culture prevailed here, there would seem to be no shortage of faculty desiring to teach such courses. Redesigning or refocusing the curriculum and more careful attention to recruiting are just two changes which might help create the appropriate attitude. In the absence of fundamental cultural changes, manipulating the reward structure by adjusting the credit hour formula or increasing the financial benefits of participating in the general education program might generate greater faculty commitment.

Adjusting rewards requires that the university reverse a second trend, a declining resource commitment to general education. The university must decide whether it is committed to a general education program and whether it is willing to finance that commitment. Two examples where financial restrictions have caused problems for general education courses are Arts 310 and the natural sciences. Arts 310 was originally designed around performances by regional and national artists. However, budget cuts have undermined this aspect of the course forcing the program to rely on local artists, many of whom are not compensated for their contributions. In the natural sciences, aging equipment, the lack of funds for equipment repair, and inadequate laboratory space threaten the ability of departments to deliver laboratory-based courses for all students. The lack of a university-wide policy addressing these resource problems could soon affect the ability of many departments to contribute to general education.