Courses for Hillsdale College’s new core curriculum will begin this fall.
“The whole core is not being rolled out at once,” said Assistant to the Provost Mark Maier. “It’s being rolled out gradually in chunks.”
The Great Books and Heritage courses are the first classes to change, plus a new health and wellness course to satisfy the physical education requirement. This fall’s incoming freshmen will take Western Heritage in the fall as usual, but they won’t take their first English course until the spring. Inversely, the new students will take their second English course the following fall, and then take American Heritage in the spring of their sophomore year.
“One of the things they’re trying to do, part of the big picture, is to spread out the core, so that it is not simply something you get done in your first four semesters,” Maier said. “I think also the unofficial purpose of this is to spread out the writing intensive courses so they’re not all lumped together.”
For potential English and history majors, waiting to take a Great Books or Heritage course would put them behind in the major. For students who know they want to be English majors, the English department hopes to offer a section of English 101 in the fall to take alongside Western Heritage, according to head of the English department and Professor of English Michael Jordan. But spreading out the four courses could have a temporary disadvantage for all students.
“It is both good and bad,” said Professor of Religion and Humanities Tom Burke. “It is very helpful to do them both together –– the two classes move intellectually together –– but it just means students won’t be able to put things together until the end of their sophomore year.”
Burke said he thinks the new core will be an overall improvement.
“The disadvantage is a temporary one that, by the end of the sophomore year, will be eliminated,” he said.
Jordan also said with the changes being made to the Great Books II course, the curriculum will compliment American Heritage more. The course will focus more on American and British literature, giving the students a more universal and cohesive educational foundation, he said.
The tier-two English literature course – English 201 – will look more like the current Great Books II course. Currently, there are no 200-level English courses. A classics, theater, and foreign language literature course will also fulfill the upper-level literature requirement.
“The committee that put this new core together thought it was crucial to have every student know some of the same books,” Jordan said. “These are essential books for every American who is supposed to be liberally educated.”
Burke said the humanities department is working on adding a new course, Logic and Rhetoric, that will help ground students in the fundamental principles of logic and rhetoric so as to make the transition from high school writing assignments to college-level essays easier.
“Writing has always been a problem with students coming into college,” Burke said. “Even good students haven’t had their writing skills honed. I think they will really prosper from the new course.”
All the proposed new courses imply the need for more staff.
“We are managing this with current staff, although it is essentially an overload arrangement for most of the professors who will teach,” Brubacher said.
Maier said staffing is indeed the biggest obstacle to the new core. He approximates the necessity for 12 additional faculty, but said that number changes daily as changes to the core continue to be in flux.
“So much of these plans are based on having the right people to teach the courses,” he said. “In order to fully roll this out, there’s going to be a lot of hiring that’s going to have to go on, and it’s largely tied to whether or not we’re in a financial position to do it.”
The science department has already received permission to hire new chemistry and biology professors. Ideally, the department also would be able to hire a new physics professor, said Professor of Chemistry Chris Van Orman.
These hires would pick up the extra work in store for the department as the current Science 101 course will now be taught in two separate, semester-long courses: Physics 101 and Chemistry 101.
“We thought it was kind of a crime to have students leave here with only a half semester of physics and chemistry,” Van Orman said. “We can get very little done in seven weeks.”
The core revamp extends to sports studies as well. The original physical education requirement –– that students take two one-credit activity classes –– will be replaced by a single, two-credit physical wellness dynamics class in the fall of 2013.
Director of Athletics Don Brubacher said the change to the sports studies area of the core was in part inspired by the wellness initiative on campus – the effort to provide more and varied physical activity opportunities for students. The new, two-credit class will be more science-based than activity-based and will focus on the effects of exercise on the mind and emotions.
Maier said the common goal is to make a core curriculum which gives every student a strong foundation. The creation of a “capstone course,” a class meant to encapsulate the Hillsdale experience, will eventually round off the core in a student’s senior year. Though some courses are still in the planning stages, Maier said he is optimistic that the whole experience will be much more cohesive.
