HonorsCollege Curriculum Review:

Leading the “Examined Life”?

August 11, 2003

Mark B. Rosenberg

Provost

I want to thank Ivelaw and all of you for inviting me to share some thoughts with you as you spend two very important days in deliberations that will help to improve our College and our University.

I want to do three things today: first give a brief overview on the state of the university; second, review some thoughts about honors from our meeting two years ago, and finally challenge you to move our deliberations to a higher plane by focusing on some questions raised as a consequence of your preliminary curriculum review document.

The State of the University

  • Once again, we are starting a new academic year under difficult circumstances: we lost $5 million from our base budget and our new enrollment growth was not funded ($7 million).
  • On the positive side, we have our smartest Fall FTIC class ever (1165) and we expect the largest number national merits, Hispanic and achievement, as well as valedictorians and salutatorians ever.
  • Further, we are initiating our new undergraduate core curriculum this Fall, which is a significant improvement over the previous core, and we have more funded research dollars than ever to support faculty and graduate students in projects of importance locally, and nationally.
  • Finally, campus construction is booming (plan where and how to park).
  • Faculty salaries will be a boost as a result of President Maidique’s commitment to maintain our parity with SUS research universities.
  • Sometime this year, collective bargaining will begin—I expect a long but harmonious process leading to a contract.
  • Finally, we initiate our public discussions on medical education and the creation of a medical school this Fall—in fact tomorrow. These discussions will be of a parallel nature: with both our Board of Trustees as well as our faculty. I am excited about this.

Honors: High Expectations

I view The Honors College as the centerpiece of undergraduate academic excellence at FIU. Given our access mission and our public standing, we will always have diverse streams of students at the undergraduate level—transfers, AA degree transfers, AS degree transfers, adult learners, and many who do not have a formal high school degree. Therefore, it is The Honors College that will be our on-going primary magnet for the traditional high performing student. As we deepen our national profile and become more competitive for top performers from around the country and internationally, particularly the Caribbean, the HonorsCollege will be critical to this competitiveness for leading students.

What I want for The Honors College boils down to three “v”s that summarize the challenges:

Voice: The Dean, faculty and students from The Honors College must be seen as leaders in curricular, co-curricular, and extra-curricular arenas at the University. As a group who have a privileged status at the University, you have begun to have the voice that we need.

Vitality: You must be the “life “of the academic party. I was very impressed with how our Phi Beta Kappa faculty took leadership on the UCC last year. They set a good example for this life of the party theme.

Vocation: As faculty, you must have something that Max Weber pointed to as the “calling” to be members of The HonorsCollege faculty. I am pleased that Dean Griffith has such high expectations of you! If he doesn’t, then who will?

Curriculum Review

May I offer first and foremost a disclaimer: I am in academe because of my profound respect for the life of the mind and the work of the faculty. I truly feel privileged to be provost—there are an incredible set of responsibilities that accompany the job title and an incredible range of privileges.

One that should not be taken lightly is the opportunity to work with thoughtful people like you who believe like I do in our mission.

Thus, it is because of my commitment to what we are doing that I will offer some challenges to us in this task of curriculum review that you are embarked upon.

Let me make some general comments first:

  1. I appreciate the effort that has been made so far and want to commend the committee for putting together a document that attempts to link mission and aims with the kind of student that will be produced.
  2. I commend you for grappling with the concept of the intentional learner and setting this as a goal for your efforts—particularly because it does recognize the instability as a “setting” that characterizes our environment.
  3. I am pleased that you have listened to President Maidique and others who assert that there does need to be some shared experience coming through THC.

There is still some work to do:

Let me organize my comments here around the incredibly useful approach to The Honors College experience taken by one of your most prominent graduates, regarded by Steve Fjellman as a “pioneer”: Victoria Gitman. Let me utilize her voice to frame my challenges to you:

As Victoria points out, students want to know what their honors classes are “all about.” Great question—timeless for students.

Listen to Victoria Gitman:

…the HonorsCollege is about “something else” –something far less tangible than information, far less quantifiable than “knowledge” but far more profound and life changing in its implications: the basic perceptions, assumptions and beliefs upon which such “knowledge” is based. That is, the Honors curriculum is not about the knowledge of a subject—whether it is history, art, science or contemporary society—but rather about the ways we come to “know” it and understand it.

So if this is the case, have we thought critically about how students, our students, our current students, learn?

Let me try to summarize what I am getting at.[1]

  • The National Center for Education Statistics tells us that 75% of all undergraduates are non-traditional (delayed enrollment, part-time, work full time, financially independent, have families, are single parents).
  • Life experiences for these students are different from earlier generations.
  • The Millennial generation is different from Generation X:
  • Prefer group activity;
  • Identify with their parents values and feel close to their parents;
  • Spend more time doing homework/housework; less time watching TV;
  • Believe its “cool” to be smart;
  • Are fascinated by new technologies;
  • Are racially and ethnically diverse;
  • One in five has an immigrant parent.
  • Exhibit distinct learning styles (tend toward teamwork, experiential activities, structure, and the use of technology).
  • Technology is assumed to be a natural part of the learning environment—the younger the age group, the greater the number who use the Internet for school, work, and leisure.
  • Our new students can be characterized as having an “information age mindset” that is quite different than our mindset:
  • Computers are as assumed to this group as electricity was to us;
  • Doing is more important than knowing—results and actions are considered to be more important than the accumulation of facts;
  • Learning may resemble more closely “Nintendo than logic—in other words losing is the fastest way to mastering a game because losing represents learning.”[2] Linear, rule-based learning is being replaced.
  • Multitasking is a way of life.
  • Consumer and creator are blurred.

So I have several questions about what you are doing.

Has The Honors College carried out a serious assessment of these trends in the context of your pedagogical goals and structures? Can it be the centerpiece of undergraduate academic excellence unless there is a very serious effort to understand how best to provide meaning through the curriculum and specific courses to this new generation?

Is this new curriculum being designed for today’s students or yesterday’s students?

Are we seriously underestimating what their expectations and capabilities are?

Should the faculty who are suggesting these changes practice what The Honors College preaches—to look across disciplinary borders to a way of transcending categorical boundaries? In this case, the boundaries physically structured by the traditional text-oriented education or the metaphysically-oriented idea as concept?

Listen to Victoria Gitman:

...what The Honors College asks students to learn—to think critically about our lives and our worlds…to take nothing for granted and to question the framework of this very thing we call reality, is difficult and often uncomfortable…

I believe that this was Dr. Griffith’s intent through his mandate to recommend appropriate changes either by way of modification or complete revision of your program.

Maybe there has been a critical discussion about the overall structure of your four-year curriculum, but I find little evidence of this in your document. Are you guilty of grubby incrementalism here, content to tinkering on the margins but not really examining what needs to be done at this point?

This curriculum and its structure seems to feign an interest in critical thinking but I do not see a serious attention to the reason that there is interest in an intentional learner—they are to adapt the skills they learn in one situation to problems encountered in another: in a classroom, the workplace, their communities or their personal lives….

Here Dr. Griffith in his mandate suggests that a possible modification might take advantage of South Florida’s special geographical, and environmental features…I do not see any evidence of this so far. Great curriculum for Williams Massachusetts or for that matter Oberlin or Kenyon, but for Miami and for our students…-?

Finally, listen to Victoria Gitman:

So what is this course all about? I believe it's about nothing more difficult than learning to lead an examined life. Nothing more difficult, nor more important and more rewarding…

The challenge in this curriculum review is nothing more difficult than learning to lead the examined life…to do the examination!

I would submit, respectfully, that there is a great deal more examination that needs to be done if you are to be true to your calling….

Thank you very much!!

Office of the Provost

University Park.North Miami, FL33199.Tel 305-348-2151 . Fax 305-348-2994 .

Florida International University is an Equal Opportunity/Access Employer and Institution .TDD via FRS 1-800-955-8771

[1] For further information see Diana Oblinger, “Boomers, Gen-Xers, Millennials: Understanding the New Students,” Educause, July/August 2003., pp. 37-47.

[2] See above, p. 40.