Learning To Make A Difference
New Directions for the SUNY Cortland School of Arts and Sciences
The Problem
The School of Arts and Science at SUNY Cortland has
for more than ten years been suffering a decline in enrollment, or at
best breaking even. Either way, at present the enrollment in arts and
sciences, approximately 35% of the total enrollment in the college, is
too low for the health of the school or the college. There are several
reasons for this situation:
- There is a decreasing interest nation wide in the traditional arts and sciences disciplines and majors;
- At Cortland in particular, the reputation of the arts and sciences is overshadowed by the college's strong and deserved reputation around the state in other areas, specifically teacher education and physical education;
- Cortland's School of Arts and Sciences is one of many similar schools in the state, and there is little to make us stand out to prospective students.
The School of Arts and Sciences, and the college as a whole, will be far healthier if we can attract not only more students but also more qualified and interested students to our programs. There is little if anything we can do about the general cultural trends that work against interest in liberal learning. Similarly, there is nothing we can do directly about the strong reputation the college has for other programs, nor would we want to. There is, however, something we can do about defining ourselves as a school, and redirecting our mission, in such a way that we begin to stand out to prospective students.
The Solution
"A liberal education is the highest form of
university education." These words are as true today as they were over
100 years ago when John Henry Cardinal Newman wrote them. The
disciplines and areas of inquiry that we now call the arts and sciences
are the expression of the highest achievements of humankind throughout
its history. They contain our problems and solutions, our aspirations
and our fears. The world has changed a good deal since Cardinal Newman
wrote, but it has not changed so much that the arts and sciences, and
the liberal learning they enable, have lost their centrality for higher
education.
But there are still questions to be asked about the
arts and sciences, especially by those of us who aspire to live, work,
and teach within them. Most important among them is "to what end do we
teach the liberal arts, and to what end do we expect students to study
them?" The answer to the first question will vary from individual to
individual. For many of us the answer is simply that we derive our
greatest satisfaction from what feels to us to be the intrinsic
worthiness of our disciplines, and from conducting research in and
teaching our fields, when we can do so successfully. At the same time,
there are also many for whom the answer has to do with the consequences
of our work. The meaning and the significance of the arts and sciences
is a result of the use to which our inquiry, knowledge and teaching is
put. The results we look for can vary, from solving specific problems,
to opening up new areas of application, to contributing to the
resolution of pressing social problems, to seeing our students succeed
in areas they choose to pursue. It has always been true, Aristotle
notwithstanding, that among the most significant features of liberal
learning is the fact that it has consequences, it makes a difference.
That liberal learning matters beyond itself and
beyond the simple enjoyment of engaging in it is the point of departure
for our clarification of the mission of SUNY Cortland's School of Arts
and Sciences. The traditional idea that liberal learning is a good in
itself, though satisfying enough for many of us individually, is no
longer an adequate context for the role of a liberal arts college, or
of a school of arts and sciences. Fortunately, the health and value of
the liberal arts does not rest solely or even primarily on its
intrinsic worthiness. In a time when higher education is available to
the majority of the population, and when universities aspire to draw as
many students as possible into the riches of university education,
liberal learning requires a different understanding. It is a mistake to
assume that our choice is between a traditional approach to the liberal
arts on the one hand or a trade education on the other. This is a false
dichotomy, and its inadequacy is pointed to by the fact that a third
alternative is available to us, one that combines the best features of
the two traditional options. The alternative is to approach liberal
learning by stressing its applicability to the world, its problems, and
to our individual lives.
This approach is the alternative that the School of
Arts and Sciences is looking to embrace. Our purpose is not to abandon
liberal learning, but to put it to work in lived contexts, to answer
current questions, whether they be how an individual student will get
along after graduation or how larger social problems can be solved.
This is an engaged liberal arts, and it is to this understanding of a
liberal education that the School of Arts and Sciences is looking to
turn. The language is a bit tricky because it is easy to misunderstand
what our new identity means. One can speak of the "applied" liberal
arts, but that still has something of a trade school connotation, and
that is unacceptable. The "engaged" liberal arts is better, but in some
circles that has a political connotation that is not accurate either.
Perhaps, rather than look for a single adjective, it is better to say
simply that our new focus is on a democratic conception of liberal
learning, democratic in the sense that it looks to insert itself
directly and consciously into the lived contexts of the society and
into our students' lives and their futures. Ours is a liberal education
that works for our students. It will make a difference in their lives,
and with it they can enter their adult lives fully prepared to make a
difference in their communities and the society as a whole.
This approach to liberal learning is appropriate for
us for several reasons. First, with it we can speak to the interests of
prospective students better than we are able to now. Second, it will
provide Cortland's School of Arts and Sciences a unique identity and
enable it to stand out among the many liberal arts schools and colleges
in the state. Third, and this is perhaps the most relevant point, it
describes something that in many respects we have been doing in the
School of Arts and Sciences for many years.
In our program and other curricular development, in
much of our research and scholarship, and in some of our major grants,
the focus in the School of Arts and Sciences has been in five primary
areas:
- Civic Responsibility
- Environmental Responsibility
- International Education
- Professional Education
- Social Justice
There are many examples of major programs, minors and concentrations, curricular developments, scholarship and grants that fall into one or another of these categories:
Civic Responsibility:
Center for Aging and Human Services
Human Services
Social Gerontology
Public Policy and Public Administration
Service Learning
Internships in Local Agencies
Community Outreach Partnership Center
Environmental Responsibility:
Environmental Studies
Water Resources Management
Environmental Science Concentrations
Geographic Information Systems
Title III Activities
GE 7: Science, Technology and
Human Afrs.
Internships in Local Agencies
PCB Research (Psychology and Chemistry)
International Education:
Center for International Education
International Studies
International Relations
Applied Anthropology
Tourism and Development
Project for Eastern and Central Europe
Dragon Planet
Professional Education:
Adolescence Education
Engineering
New Media
Graphic Design
Professional Writing
Musical Theater
Journalism
Pre-Law and Pre-Med
Internships
Social Justice:
Social Philosophy
Center for Multicultural and Gender Studies
Criminology
Law and Justice
GE 2: Prejudice and Discrimination
Each of these endeavors is an example of the liberal arts engaged with
individual and social prospects, and they represent models of the kind
of activities that will be emphasized in the School of Arts and
Sciences.
A word is in order about the role of traditional
disciplinary departments in this environment. First, it is important to
notice that each of these activities occurs within the auspices of a
department or interdisciplinary center. Furthermore, the richness of
each of these programs requires contributions from many of the more
traditional liberal arts areas. Our goal is not to eliminate or
de-emphasize the traditional liberal arts disciplines, but rather to
insert them into a more engaged context. Departments will continue to
be as important as they now are, taking account of the point that
interdisciplinary programs are becoming increasingly important and
attractive to our students. However, the departments will need to focus
energy and resources in new ways and in new directions.
The Implications
The new approach to the liberal arts is both descriptive and prescriptive. It provides a description of the direction in which many of our programs, grants and curricular developments have been tending in recent years. It also has prescriptive implications for us in the sense that it provides the context in which program development, resource allocation and hiring will occur. We will look to develop new programs, and if and when appropriate recast existing programs, with the goal in mind of further "engaging" the liberal arts. When new resources are available, and where resource reallocation is possible and defensible, money will follow those programs and departments where there is an emphasis on putting the liberal arts to work outside the university's walls. Furthermore, our hiring practices will be affected, in the sense that we will look to hire colleagues who share our conception of the liberal arts and who are in a position to contribute to it through their disciplines and the interdisciplinary applications of their specialties.
Cortland "First" Program
The curricular centerpiece of the new focus in the
School of Arts and Sciences will be the Cortland First Program. This is
a program that will consist of learning communities designed for first
year students, either pre-majors or those who have already chosen a
major in the School of Arts and Sciences. The model is the Tech First
program that was taught in the Fall 2000 term to a group of 28 first
year, pre-major students. Like other learning communities, Tech First
consisted of a set of interrelated courses, some of which met standard
first year requirements while others were designed for the program. A
student cohort enrolled in the courses together, and the instructors
worked together to ensure that the curriculum and pedagogy of the
interrelated courses were mutually reinforcing. Tech First was by all
accounts a success, and it can serve as a model for additional learning
community opportunities for all first year students.
Though we will have to approach its development
slowly, we envision the Cortland First Program to consist of any number
of learning communities each fall semester. The following list is only
a sample of the many thematic possibilities
- Tech First
- Arts First
- Writing First
- People First
- Environment First
- Justice First
- World First
- Community First
The advantages of the Cortland First Program learning communities are many:
- There is a good deal of public evidence that learning communities, when properly handled, contribute to student learning and to retention;
- We can build not only on the Tech First experience, but also on the experience we will gain through the learning communities funded over the next several years by Title III;
- Cortland's First Program will be unique in the SUNY system, and outside it for that matter. It will give our programs visibility, and it will give students interested in these fields a reason to choose Cortland over the alternatives. Once they come here, it will be our responsibility to provide them the education they deserve.
Resources
Most of the activities necessary to make the new mission of the School of Arts and Sciences meaningful have no special resource demands. We will pursue new program development as we always have, and hiring will presumably proceed as necessary and appropriate. The primary exception to this is the Cortland First Program. In order to offer a number of first year learning communities it will be necessary to undertake the faculty development that will allow faculty to participate successfully. It will also be necessary in some cases to release faculty members from courses they might ordinarily teach in order to make it possible for them to teach a learning community course. This is not always necessary. For example, a CPN course is necessary for first year students and so needs to be a component of a learning community, yet it imposes no new resource needs. Nevertheless there are cases in which it will be necessary to allow departments to use adjunct resources to teach a standard course while the instructor who would normally be doing it will be involved in a First Program.
Public Promotion of the New Arts and Sciences
We believe that the redefined mission of the School of Arts and Sciences, coupled with such curricular innovations as the Cortland First Program, can attract a good deal of positive attention to Cortland in general and the School of Arts and Sciences in particular. For this to occur it will imperative that the college's public relations and admissions offices make a special effort to bring these developments to the public's attention. Those of us teaching, studying and administering in the school can provide the vision and the programs, and we can do the work of educating the students, but we are not in a position to do the public relations work necessary to change the public perception of us. We stand ready to help, but we can not do it alone. It must become an initiative of the institution.
Summary
The phrase "Learning to Make a Difference"
encapsulates the vision intended to guide our school's activities and
it will be the thematic focus for projecting our school's identity to
the public. The innovative Cortland First Program will be the
centerpiece mechanism for realizing the School of Arts and Sciences'
vision in the education of our students from the beginning of their
time with us. And the many scholarly activities related to social
justice, civic responsibility, environmental responsibility,
international education and professional education that we have been
doing well for many years will be more coherently presented as a
strength of SUNY Cortland and its School of Arts and Sciences.
John Ryder
Dean of Arts and Sciences
January 22, 2001