Consortium on Quality Education Campus Statements
Colgate University
A. Campus description
- 2,700 undergraduates and 7 graduate students (primarily
M.A.T.)
Structure
Funding source
Students served
-
Most enter directly from high school as fulltime students-
51% women, 15% minority.
Freshman to sophomore retention rate
Five year graduation rate or completion
and transfer rate for community colleges
Where students go after leaving your campus
-
Employment in a variety of fields, graduate school
or professional school
Information on student movement (into, out
of, and within your institution)
-
Number of transfer students (both in and out) is small.
B. Innovative practices related to Greater Expectations
Colgate prides itself on an institutional history
and culture, a curriculum and an attention to pedagogy that
are devoted to integrative learning and have defined the institution
over time.
Colgate's Core curriculum has been a continuous
center of the curriculum since 1928. The Core asks students
to think across boundaries of divisions and disciplines, to
see disparate ideas in context, and to learn to communicate
effectively. It has also served as a faculty development seminar
on a grand scale, an opportunity for faculty to collectively
think about models of learning and teaching that transcend
disciplinary and divisional boundaries.
Colgate's Core program faces the winds of the
general education debates head on. It takes seriously Western
tradition as well as multiculturalism and globalization, the
importance of the past as well as the contemporary, the relevance
of modern science and technology as well as the humanities.
The four required Core courses play on these dialogues and
others in asking students to think integratively about their
world and their own identities.
The Core is an integral part of institutional
culture with strong participation from faculty in every academic
department. For many years the Core program has sponsored
a two-day retreat after classes end in May. One hundred faculty
(more than half of the faculty who are on campus in a given
year) gather to engage in wide-ranging dialogue on curriculum
and pedagogy. Periodic revision of the Core curriculum has
always been a project for the entire faculty.
The Core is the interdisciplinary bedrock that
supports expanding integrated learning across the curriculum.
Recent experiments include extended study, a program in which
students travel for a month as an extension of an on-campus
course, and the use of asynchronous learning tools in traditional
liberal arts classes.
Still most exciting in our recent innovation
has been the linking of courses-most particularly the linking
of first-year seminars with core courses. The pedagogical
models for these linkages have been varied and present a set
of new options to be explored more fully next year. Core faculty
and Core courses have been central to all these innovations.
C. Institutional learning goals and a brief
description of the process followed to determine them
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For students to gain an interdisciplinary understanding
of different forms of knowledge, of their identity and
of culture.
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To help students to become integrative thinkers who
engage in contextualized judgements of complex issues.
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To prepare students for the twenty-first century, where
the complex relations created by competing points of
view in a society transformed by globalization and rapid
technological change demand broadness of mind and the
ability to engage in multiple perspectives.
-
To teach students to communicate effectively.
These overall goals are set by the entire faculty in its
latest revision of the Core curriculum and operationalized
by the faculty teaching in each of the components of the
Core curriculum.
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