Shared Futures

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

UNC’s existing general education curriculum, adopted in 1980, was subjected to a series of reviews by faculty, students, and administrators beginning in 1990 (the year that the designers of the existing curriculum mandated a general review and reassessment of the program they had implemented.)  The initial review reaffirmed the general goals and character of the curriculum while also citing problems of incoherence and aimlessness  and making several recommendations for revision (not all of which were implemented).  A 1995 institutional self-study called for a comprehensive review and rethinking of the general education curriculum, an idea that gained further momentum with the announcement in 1997 of the findings of a chancellor’s Intellectual Climate Task Force.  That Task Force especially took aim at the seemingly anti-intellectual habits and expectations of first year students at UNC and sought new ways to promote active learning in and out of undergraduate classrooms (e.g., with a First Year Seminar program.)  In 1999, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences gave definitive direction to this long-developing curricular ferment by creating a Curriculum Review Steering Committee and instructing that committee to conduct a thorough review and revision of the General Education curriculum.   That committee, working in tandem with sixteen satellite committees, and drawing on regular input from across the campus community, designed a new curriculum that was approved overwhelmingly by UNC’s Faculty Council in spring, 2003.

The new curriculum to be implemented in fall, 2006 directly addresses many of the problems that had been identified in surveys of faculty and students conducted by the Office of Institutional Research and expressed in numerous public discussions (for example, in discussions with department chairs in Spring 2000 and with students, staff, and faculty in three open fora on general education in Fall 2000).  First, some faculty and students have complained over the years that the proportion of credit hours devoted to general education was inappropriate or arbitrary; to bring UNC’s Gen Ed requirements more in line with national norms, the new curriculum slightly reduces the total hours in freshman and sophomore-level courses (by two hours), and reduces the number of hours that A.B. students must take to fulfill their Arts and Sciences general education requirements in the junior and senior years (by three hours).  It also establishes a fixed and fair credit hour requirement (42 hours) that allows sufficient space for both study in depth and elective courses.  Second, as students and advisors have repeatedly expressed, the relation between lower-level and upper-level Gen Ed requirements in the existing curriculum were unclear.  Many courses counted for both.  Others that clearly fit the implied criteria counted for neither.  Both the “Distributive” and “Integrative” Options for fulfilling the junior and senior-level requirements in the new curriculum resolve those difficulties.  A.B. students either will take three courses from three different divisions within the College—courses selected not from an approved list, but from among any courses in the University that make sense in light of a student’s own intellectual program—or they will elect to enroll in three linked courses that constitute an interdisciplinary “cluster” program.  Third, and perhaps most important, there was a wide perception that fragmentation and incoherence afflicted the General Education requirements structure under the old curriculum.  

The new curriculum provides greater coherence and connectedness in two basic ways.  1)  The new requirements encourage increased contact, conversation, and cross-fertilization between different disciplines, between different Gen Ed requirements, and between students’ major/minor requirements and their general education requirements.   Students may now use major/minor courses to satisfy Gen Ed requirements, for example.  They also enhance certain skills (in quantitative reasoning and in written and oral expression, skills first imparted in freshman classes) that are reinforced in later courses that meet different requirements.  Finally, A. B. students use their junior-senior level Gen Ed requirements to forge connections between forms of knowledge and inquiry specifically of interest to them.   2)  In perfect keeping with the spirit of the Academic Plan embraced by the faculty in 2003, the new curriculum incorporates an unmistakable emphasis on internationalization.  The curriculum introduces a brand new requirement in “Global Issues,” for example, the purpose of which is to acquaint students with the powerful trans-national, trans-regional, and trans-cultural forces that affect the entire globe and all of its constituent regions.  Another new requirement, in “Experiential Education,” is designed in part to increase the (already impressive) proportion of UNC students who gain experiences while studying abroad.  Other requirements have been redesigned to draw greater attention to other regions of the world.  The set of three history/culture requirements has been restructured and rendered symmetrical (correcting a lopsided emphasis on the West in the old curriculum.)  A “North Atlantic World” requirement is now joined to a “Beyond the North Atlantic World” requirement, while the specifically historical requirement has been redefined from pre-1700 western history to pre-1750 world history.  Finally, although we have had to defer its implementation for lack of resources, the new curriculum foresees a new requirement in Foreign Language Enhancement, one that encourages students to continue studying a foreign language they already know, to activate that language skill in a languages across the curriculum course, or to take up an entirely new language for one semester.