The City University of New York may be falling back down the academic ladder.
After a miraculous turnaround following the end of open admissions in 1999, CUNY set a high bar for a public university that serves a broad urban population. But on Thursday, a committee tasked with creating a core curriculum released its final recommendations, which seem to be a grand plan for dumbing things down.
Facing complaints that the system for transferring credits from junior to senior colleges was too complex, the committee opted to go with the lowest common denominator.
According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, students will take their “first 30 credits in two categories. The first would be a 12-credit ‘required core’ composed of six credits in English, and three each in mathematics and science.” So far, so good.
Then there is the second category: “an 18-credit ‘flexible core,’ in which students would take six three-credit classes encompassing five different areas: world cultures and global issues; US experience in its diversity; creative expression; the individual and society; and the scientific world.”
The phrase “flexible core” is typical higher-education speak for “take whatever the heck you want.”
The categories could include anything. A history of ceramics? The Puerto Rican experience in Brooklyn? Einstein and anti-Semitism? Public policy toward school bullying?
I made up all those, but I’m sure the course catalog holds classes even more absurd.
It was heartening to see that some CUNY faculty members were on the right side of this issue, writing to the American Association of University Professors that the administration had circumvented them in watering down the curriculum. They complained of “the refusal of the administration to respect governance by forcing faculty to select a small number of courses from a menu which is not accepted anywhere else (i.e., mixing philosophy, religion and computer science in one category — with one course to be picked therefrom) and by interfering with the academic freedom of faculty to create their own educational packages.”
This is called burying the lead, folks. Here’s the headline: “CUNY students allowed to take religion course to fulfill computer-science requirement.” Or vice versa.
The faculty should have gone on an all-out media campaign accusing the board of bringing CUNY back to its pre-Rudy Giuliani days (when there were no standards and students learned little). Whatever they think of the former mayor, he was not a guy who would have supported a “flexible core.”
From the Brainstorm blog at The Chronicle of Higher Education.