terrapinsanity.com

The campus committee on revising General Education requirements has been busy at work most of this and last academic years, so far without much of a hint about what might be in our future, except for the I-series courses which have already rolled out. (So we know pieces of the puzzle without yet knowing what picture they are intended to fill in.)

Behind the scenes, though, there continues to be a sense that almost anything can be “core” – we’ll know it when we see it. Or at least Admissions and the Provost will, when they see it serve enrollment management and recruiting needs, and good luck to departments trying to plan workload with hard-pressed faculty and a suite of offerings that might not be the same in any pair of adjacent needs. (Good luck to students who might want to avail themselves of ‘freshman forgiveness’ in a course repeat, if the course was a one-time unique construct.)

Bringing this to mind is today’s news (see Washington Post) about national efforts to identify a ‘core’ set of expectations for all school systems. Not the ceiling, but at least perhaps the floor – what ought all students know at various mileposts in their early years in order to succeed?

Good bad or other, this doesn’t have the feel of being accepting of almost anything, and there’s the rub. Planning about baseline expectations at College Park are proceeding completely independent from any analysis of what may soon be a standard expectation of the input to our undergraduate programs. More’s the pity, if the campus committee continues on its present trajectory, nobody after us will be able to plan what to rely on from our graduates since, of course – core can be “anything.”