Provost Morrison shared the final report of the Task Force on General Education with the university community through her memo on March 4, and faculty governance will soon have the opportunity to take the historic step of approving the proposed outline of the BU Hub, our first University-wide General Education program. In today’s Dean’s Note, I want to first thank the members of the Task Force for their hard work; second, state my reasons for supporting the overall approach of the report; and third, offer a specific critique of the proposal that I believe must be addressed in the next phase of implementation of the BU Hub, through leadership of CAS faculty.
The Task Force, led by Associate Provost and Professor Beth Loizeaux and Professor Bruce Schulman, has designed a visionary general education program through a collaborative and consensus building process that incorporated the ideas of hundreds of faculty and students from dozens of schools and departments. Collecting and making a coherent whole of so many complex and sometimes competing ideas is a very difficult task, and they have performed admirably, on many levels. They have created a solid blueprint from which to begin refining the learning outcomes of an outstanding, rigorous, and uplifting BU-specific foundation for undergraduate education. This work requires difficult conversations, and the Task Force has gracefully absorbed and incorporated multiple critiques. For this we must heartily thank them.
I support the BU Hub for several reasons. The BU Hub presents an integrated, comprehensive, and comprehensible description of what a BU undergraduate degree guarantees in every student’s education. It pays due attention to classic forms of knowledge creation, interpretation, and analysis. It is visionary in its description of character and the use of co-curricular activities to tie the students’ learning to their practice in everyday life, and it leverages our Boston and study-abroad advantages to help students hone these characteristics. It puts the arts and sciences at the center, but ensures that the professional schools play important roles in educating all our students. Finally, I am most enthusiastic about how it proposes a unique, BU-specific educational experience, the Cross-College Challenge, that is well-suited to our array of strong colleges and responsive to longstanding, expressed student interest in meaningful connections with students in different colleges.
While the BU Hub proposal is an exceptional document, it is not yet the final, detailed implementation plan, which, I believe, could benefit from a relatively minor modification of terms and substance. I am concerned about the description and conception of “quantitative reasoning,” which is the least developed of the six major categories. The term is, I believe, somewhat outdated and the category is only briefly and blandly described. Yet the body of knowledge and intellectual skills for which this category is the placeholder is complex, exciting, and growing in importance in all fields of inquiry and creative activity. We must not miss this opportunity to describe and propose “computational thinking” as a category that is bringing about an epistemological revolution in every discipline and nearly every occupation.
Computational thinking refers to a broader range of skills than numeracy, and a wider scope than quantitative reasoning, but fundamentally involves using algorithms to solve problems that have been defined in terms of data, broadly construed to include all symbolic representations. Being able to interpret and conceptualize a question from any knowledge domain in terms of data and algorithms enables us to solve problems as never before, and being able to understand the world in terms of how software and coding choices structure much of our society is crucial to civic life. To be sure, I am not an expert who should define this category. Faculty from several disciplines, especially from the Division of Mathematical and Computational Sciences, but in other disciplines and Colleges (such as COM, ENG, SED, or Questrom), are uniquely equipped to help flesh out this category and its intellectual contribution to general education. Therefore, I would recommend that in the next implementation phase a select group of faculty who are passionate about this theme be commissioned to expand and refine this category as “computational thinking.”
Yet I also believe that we should strongly support this report, and not deter it from moving forward, while continuing to improve the overall plan at the next phase. In the coming weeks there will be several opportunities for faculty discussion. I have called a special CAS Faculty Meeting for March 21 to discuss the report, the faculty assembly will meet on March 23, and then the University Council will consider the report in April and vote on its acceptance in May. From everything I know now about this, I will be speaking and voting in favor of this proposal. Devising a new general education program is difficult work and no proposal will be perfect by anyone’s or any discipline’s lights. The criterion by which it should be judged, I believe, is not perfection, but whether it succeeds in significantly improving the status quo and creates a foundation for continual improvement in the education of our students. I am confident that the BU Hub deserves our support because it easily meets this standard. It is already much of what I had hoped to see in a general education that will guide students of this great institution for the next generation. Let us, in CAS, continue to support the creation and implementation of the BU Hub, while remaining engaged in and contributing to its continuing development.