THE PRIME DIRECTIVE:
A LIBERTARIAN LOOKS AT LAS 101, 102
By: Ron White
September, 2002
STUDENTS
The College of Mount St. Joseph is engaged in a “Struggle for Survival.” Many small liberal arts colleges are losing that struggle and are headed toward institutional extinction. (Sorry about the evolutionary metaphors!) The primary cause of extinction is the failure to generate progeny. In our case it’s attracting, retaining and graduating students. Therefore, the Prime Directive states that that we must avoid implementing any secondary directive that adversely affects our ability to recruit, retain, and graduate individual students. If we violate this directive, nature takes over, whether we like it or not. In recent years, we’ve been addressing an important secondary directive; that is the revision of our Liberal Arts and Sciences Curriculum and the development of tools for assessing it. However, we cannot allow the pursuit of this secondary directive to undermine the Primary Directive. After all, in the real world a college without students is an extinct college.
In a nutshell, we simply cannot afford to insulate our Liberal Arts and Sciences Curriculum from the dictates of the Prime Directive. As a liberal arts college, obviously, we must “force” our students to take a number of core courses that reflect our commitment to the traditional “Liberal Arts” and indeed, that necessarily involves a certain amount of coercion on our part. After all, most students are always much more motivated toward their majors than they are toward fulfilling LAS requirements. It is also important to remember that most colleges and universities encourage students to fulfill their liberal arts and science requirements in the first two years, which coincides with the time frame in which students either dropout of college, or transfer to another institution. Therefore, obviously, our Liberal Arts and Sciences Curriculum can have a profound impact on recruitment and retention.
The Prime Directive as it applies to the Liberal Arts and Sciences Curriculum in any small liberal arts college, has three distinct enemies: inordinate complexity (students and faculty don’t know what the hell their doing), coercion (forcing students to take courses and forcing faculty to teach them), and large classes (forcing students to learn and faculty teach in an overpopulated environment).
Complexity and its intellectual cohort “incomprehensibility” are probably among the Prime Directive’s worst enemies. Any LAS program that requires a “Czar” (no offense intended, Mike!) to administer, provide oversight, and coordinate is probably encroaching upon the Prime Directive. Students are universally repelled by overly complex LAS requirements because they don’t know what courses to take, when to take them, nor what to expect from those courses. In general, faculty members are also repelled by overly complex LAS requirements because complexity makes advising an exercise in interpretation, a prolific source of “advising errors,” and ultimately a prescription for personal embarrassment. Last minute advising errors that postpone a student’s projected date of graduation obviously undermine student satisfaction and ultimately alumni giving. For those that teach LAS 101 and 102, complexity also adds to prep time.
The Prime Directive is also threatened by coercion in a LAS curriculum. Unfortunately, most college students are not initially attracted to liberal arts courses and therefore all liberal arts colleges must employ a certain degree of coercion. But when we force students to take courses that they are not initially attracted to, it’s very difficult to cultivate student satisfaction. That’s because our students are individuals that come to us with their own varied interests. Nevertheless, historically, many institutions have embraced greater and lesser degrees of coercion as an alternative to individual choice. Institutional coercion typically takes two forms: 1. Unnecessarily limiting the number of choices that are available. 2. Providing false or deceptive inducements.
Both forms of coercion only “work” when students have no other options; that is, when students cannot “gravitate” toward other institutions that offer more and/or better choices. Monopolies thrive on the lack of alternatives. We do not enjoy monopoly status here at the Mount because most of our students can always choose another institution, including several that are less expensive. Therefore, our ability to coerce students is naturally limited by market forces. Hence, we cannot coerce students to take courses they don’t want to take for very long without violating the Prime Directive and thus suffering the consequences thereof. Conversely, one sure way to design a LAS curriculum that attracts and retains students, and thereby avoid institutional extinction, is to always offer a variety of clearly defined “attractive” individual LAS courses that students can choose from.
Although ontologically speaking, our students are individuals, they nevertheless can be classified into three basic interest groups: traditional students, non-traditional students, and transfer students. (We can debate the terminology but we can’t avoid the underlying Reality.) The fewer attractive course choices that are available to these three classes of students, the less likely we are to attract and retain the individuals that fall into those specific groups. If we were to put an adult student into LAS 101 and/or 102 as they are currently configured, we’d get laughed out of town.
Finally, most of our students are attracted to the Mount because they believe, based on our advertising, that we offer “small classes” with individualized instruction. Therefore, whenever we coerce students into taking large classes (especially at 8:00 AM) we are not only guilty of false advertising, but we also repel students from the liberal arts in general and invariably harm our retention rate. Now we can attempt to convince our students that LAS courses are really small classes. But that’s really “smoke and mirrors” and our students won’t fall for that hoax.
Given the fact that all professors are human and therefore, occasionally screw up a class and unintentionally repel students, the wisdom of offering diverse multiple sections, in multiple time frames, is obvious. If one out of five of sections of LAS turn out to be repulsive to students, we’d still have an institutional success rate of 80%. Conversely, if we force everyone to take essentially the same course and it fails, we face a 100% institutional rate of failure. Moreover, we know that students communicate to other students both their positive and negative course experiences. Negative course experiences of one generation of students, therefore, can infect the next generation of incoming students.
In class the other day, we were discussing the Principle of Utility (greatest happiness, greatest number), and the students brought up the issue of LAS 101 and 102. (They brought it up not me!) They thought those two courses are responsible for our declining retention rate here at the College of Mount St. Joseph. Mike, it was unanimous! I’ve heard nothing good from students about those courses. Perhaps you should start visiting classes and get a sense of the true level of student discontent that these courses cultivate. You can start with my 11 AM honors class. They’ll give you an earful. My view is that when we fail to maintain enough diversity (variation in Darwinian terms) in our LAS offerings, we run the risk of feeding this epidemic of student dissatisfaction.
FACULTY
Now, if I may, I would like to interject a few words on behalf of the faculty. The only way to offer a variety of individual courses that attract and retain students is to attract and retain individual professors that know how to design and execute excellent courses within the limits of their own expertise and personalized teaching style. Admittedly, most members of our faculty have much less mobility than our students and therefore are subject to coercion by the chairs, deans, and presidents. (Most notably junior faculty.) Nevertheless, the College of Mount St. Joseph has been able to attract and retain an excellent teaching faculty. But when higher levels of institutional oversight overly regulate course content and pedagogy, it invariably diminishes innovation, which eventually repels faculty. (High school teachers hate teaching courses that are designed by others. That’s one reason why so many high school teachers quit the profession within the first two years.)
Team teaching? Now, in the real world, what are the odds of randomly selecting five or six human beings that actually like each other and are willing to cooperate enough to complete any complex task? That’s one problem with team teaching. Just because Fran and Peg can do it, let’s not assume that we can put any random combination of professors together to form a team. That’s why sports teams and choruses have tryouts.
Given the fact that all rationally self-interested professors with the power to do so, will seek to avoid “screwing up” their classes and thereby repelling students. Hence, over the long run, you can expect the LAS courses to be taught by faculty that are the most vulnerable to coercion. (Or perhaps by those who do not garnish very much student satisfaction anyway.)
At the moment I seem to possess enough “power” to resist the current level of coercion needed to keep LAS 101 and 102 alive. However, my refusal increases coercive pressure on Peg and Svetlana, which in turn makes it more difficult for me to avoid sharing the burden. Coercion can be very subtle! When I “volunteer” to team-teach with five people that I don’t know, rest assured that MSJ has mastered the fine art of subtle coercion.
To make these classes even more repulsive to the faculty, we’ve adopted a tradition (and that’s all it is!) of requiring the LAS teams to prepare so much, that it makes it difficult for them to teach other courses, work on their scholarship, and participate in service activities. Why on earth would any rationally self-interested junior faculty member choose to teach a course that requires inordinate prep time, that’s bound to procure lousy evaluations, and makes it impossible to fulfill the scholarship and service requirements? Of course, we can start tinkering with the scholarship and service components and thereby level the playing field. (Combat pay?) How about counting prep time as research or service? (That’s a joke.) Indeed, that’s the kind of reasoning that leads to more rules, and less variation. In the end, we’ll have to rewrite the faculty handbook just so we can retain two lousy courses. Again, over the long run, the only way to get senior faculty (like myself) and prudent junior faculty to participate in the system will be to rely on increasing levels of coercive pressure.
In sum, any secondary directive that impedes the ability of our individual faculty members to design and execute excellent courses tailored to their own individual scholarly interests reduces variation in the curriculum and by implication must be regarded as an assault upon the Prime Directive. We cannot micromanage each other’s courses without coercion, which unleashes a virus that infects our creativity, garnishes student dissatisfaction, and undermines the quality of our curriculum as a whole.
A LIBERTARIAN SOLUTION
As we tinker with our LAS curriculum, (which we will have to do!) we must keep the PRIME DIRECTIVE in mind. I believe that we are more likely to attract and retain students by allowing them to choose from among 10 courses that fulfill a specific liberal arts and sciences “requirement” than 2 courses that fulfill that same requirement. Specifically, I have argued that the best way to serve that Prime Directive is to maximize the number and variety in course offerings and thereby minimize the most damaging negative effects that monopolistic coercion that plagues the current system.
As for the “capstone course,” let’s view it as a “seminar.” We offer very few seminars here, which is very strange for a small liberal arts college. Offer ten seminars per semester with a limited enrollment of 15 students. Use descriptive titles like: War and Peace, Beauty, Love, Minds and Machines, Numerology, Souls and Minds etc. If the college insists on micromanaging these courses, require that each course spend half of the course reading and discussing one or two common texts and require each student to write and present a twenty-page research paper to the class. There’s your uniformity! If students want to solicit advice from other professors, let them do so. But let’s not teach each other’s courses. We already have purpose statements that will allow us to assess the quality of these seminars. Trust individual faculty members to teach and always strive for clarity, simplicity, diversity and creativity in our evolving Liberal Arts and Sciences Curriculum.
Finally, I must say something about interdisciplinary studies in general. We do not need to bring in an outside expert to tell us how to become interdisciplinary. That’s an insult to the faculty. As an interdisciplinary scholar yourself, you know that the only way to become interdisciplinary is to study and research in two or more disciplines. You can’t become interdisciplinary by contemplating the concept. Hence, we don’t need a “philosopher king.” We need to encourage interdisciplinary scholarship by increasing funding for attendance at interdisciplinary conferences.
In conclusion, if you want to get things back on track, open up LAS 101 and 102 to anyone that wants to teach them. The less micromanaging you do as Czar, the better! No more rules or mandates from the top that limit variation and innovation. Some of us may choose to team-teach with one, two, three, four, five, six, or seven other professors. I will immediately offer to teach one section by myself. Of course, those who choose to team-teach should be allowed to choose their teammates, and be informed that most research shows that students are repelled by team teaching. We should also limit class size to 25 students, which of course raises institutional economic problems. We can’t afford to use six professors to teach one class of 25. That means that if we allow team-teaching, we will have to revert back to large classes, which students also hate: an obvious prescription for failure.