Shaping Undergraduate General Education at BU

A task force is developing the first University-wide General Education program, intended to provide the knowledge, skills, and “habits of mind” that will equip BU graduates to thrive in an increasingly interconnected world. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi

A public process launched today by BU’s Task Force on General Education will shape the core of a Boston University education for the future. The 14-member faculty task force is charged with developing a vision for the first University-wide General Education program, intended to provide the knowledge, skills, and “habits of mind” that will equip BU graduates to thrive personally, professionally, and as citizens in an increasingly interconnected world. It is slated to be in place for freshmen arriving in fall 2017.

General Education is the common educational core required of undergraduates in all academic programs across a university or college. A General Education program is required for university accreditation, and currently each of the 10 undergraduate schools and colleges at BU has its own. In addition to advancing the OneBU philosophy, a unified general education program would “declare what we as a university believe is centrally valuable in an undergraduate education and what is distinctive about a Boston University degree,” says Elizabeth Loizeaux, associate provost for undergraduate affairs and a College of Arts & Sciences professor of English, who cochairs the task force with Bruce Schulman, William E. Huntington Professor of History in CAS.

The task force today unveils a website where the BU community can download a working paper listing a dozen possible core areas for the new General Education program, such as multimedia expression, critical thinking, and scientific and ethical reasoning.

Loizeaux says that she and Schulman “undertook this challenge with the understanding that we were not in this to simply shuffle around the existing courses into different buckets.” She says the new program is intended to spur interdisciplinary and cross-college collaboration among faculty and would include existing and new classes, cocurricular and extracurricular programs, and some “pedagogical experiments.”

General Education has traditionally been conceived as a set of courses (typically around 40 credits) that students take during freshman and sophomore years to establish a broad foundation on which to build expertise in their major. The task force’s working paper reflects an evolving concept of general education that continues to value breadth of knowledge, critical thinking, and communication skills, but understands that those core knowledge, skills, and habits of mind develop both outside and within the major, in cocurricular and extracurricular activities as well as in the classroom, and across all four years.

Among the new ideas discussed is the creation of a keystone experience, in which small teams of students from different schools and colleges would collaborate on a project addressing a contemporary real-world challenge or an enduring human problem, perhaps in their junior year. The idea arose because students often said they wished there were more opportunities to work across school lines, and because employers increasingly say that interdisciplinary teams define the 21st-century workplace, Schulman says.

Although the paper, titled Working Paper on University-wide General Education: Initial Ideas for Core Areas, was compiled over nearly a year of research, study, and outreach, Loizeaux and Shulman emphasize that it is only a starting point for a two-month listening tour by task force members.

“Our process is designed to encourage and enable the entire community to participate in the conversation surrounding the new General Education and to weigh in,” says Jean Morrison, University provost and chief academic officer. “We’re eager to have a vibrant discussion with all faculty on this important process and for them to provide candid, thoughtful input on how they envision this. They can, of course, go to the website for more information, and we invite everyone to take part in the forums we’re scheduling throughout the fall term.”

“Nearly 10 years ago, as part of our first strategic planning effort, a committee of faculty and staff coined the phrase OneBU and proposed that Boston University should leverage its strengths as an institution with depth in the liberal arts and sciences as well as in professional programs,” says President Robert A. Brown. “The committee argued that if successful, the University would add a distinctiveness of breadth and curricular integration to its commitment to disciplinary excellence. The range of educational opportunities would, it was argued, enhance the value of a Boston University degree and attract excellent students and faculty. The work of the Task Force is possibly the most important missing piece in fulfilling that early vision of a OneBU education.

“The Task Force’s working paper is a proposal for this vision,” Brown says. “We need to thoroughly discuss the proposed framework so that the final proposal for an undergraduate core program can be supported with clarity and enthusiasm. I look forward to the conversations that are beginning.”

Outreach begins with a half-day symposium on October 9, featuring a keynote address by Johnnella Butler, a professor of comparative women’s studies and former provost at Spelman College, and a panel discussion on General Education revisions at other universities, including Stanford and Harvard. (Register here.)

The task force also plans to meet with the faculty in each of the schools and colleges, trustees, and overseers, as well as student, parent, and alumni groups. There will be multiple town hall–style meetings on campus. Web feedback and surveys will also be used to gather input.

The task force will prepare a report to the provost by early in the spring semester. A second task force will then be named to develop an implementation plan, which will be phased in over four years, beginning in fall 2017.

Current requirements in BU’s schools and colleges vary in content and in number of credits. They range from the CAS Foundational Skills and General Education Breadth requirements to CFA’s liberal arts electives to the CGS team-taught, two-year integrated liberal arts core curriculum. Searching for model programs, the task force examined the General Education requirements of several universities. At Stanford, they found that requirements put in place in 2013 fall into four categories: thinking matters, ways of thinking/ways of doing, writing and rhetoric, and foreign language. At Notre Dame, they found a commitment to pursuing “purposeful cultivation of shared intellectual values” and to sending incoming students through a College of the First Year of Studies.

“What we learned from other places that we found exciting was a kind of general education that wasn’t the traditional ‘Check off a bunch of boxes,’” says Schulman. “It wasn’t the traditional, ‘Here’s what you have to do as a freshman or sophomore before you get to do what you really came to college to study.’”

The cochairs say it’s possible that BU students could do some of their General Education work across all four years of their studies, in or outside of their major, in classes and through other experiences outside of course work.

“It’s not that everybody is going to take the same course, because that is neither desirable nor feasible,” Loizeaux says, “but students ought to have a common understanding of what BU believes is important and valuable.”