Taking it Easy

Two afternoons each week, Richard White Lecture Hall buzzes with the sounds of a late-night jazz club. * Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald's musical stylings echo through the auditorium. Saxophones and trombones wail, drums roll, and pianos jam. Rhythm reigns. * No, this isn't Durham's freshest jazz joint. Nor is it a reincarnation of Jazz at the Mary Lou, with a marked absence of the laughter and alcohol-lubricated social exchanges that characterize that weekly soiree. * What goes on in White Lecture Hall is strictly academic. * Welcome to Music 74, "Introduction to Jazz," one of the most famous-and infamous-classes at Duke.

This particular Thursday, students wander in from an unseasonably warm October afternoon. During the last class meeting, they completed a mid-term exam; now, biology and classics majors drop their first jazz papers of the semester onto a pile growing at Professor John Brown's feet.

Looking cool and grinning behind a pair of thin-rimmed sunglasses, Brown shoots the breeze with a few students. Eventually, he loses the shades to start the lecture, but his sharp black suit says it loud and clear: This is Professor Brown's house.

"Can anyone define 'swing?'" Brown asks, addressing the clumps of students scattered around the auditorium.

"Up-tempo music!" a voice in the front of the room answers.

Brown nods.

"To the layperson, anything you can do this to," the professor says, beginning to snap his fingers, "is 'swing' in the jazz language."

Class rolls on from there, with words like Dixieland, ragtime, baritone, big band and bass punctuating the lecture. When Brown blasts sample songs over the audio system, he dances behind the podium. He can't help it, and neither can the students, who tap their pens, fingers and feet in time with the music. One student in the front row mimics playing a horn.

Brown hasn't always taught Intro to Jazz, but he knows it has a "bad history." Before he took over (and re-vamped) the course, the previous instructor so watered down the work that students enrolled in the class expecting an easy A.

"You just listen to a lot of music," students would say, recommending the class to friends.

Word got around, and then a few years ago, Playboy magazine included the class in a list of the country's easiest courses. Where that publication led, students followed. Athletes, pre-med students and average joes looking for a respite from killer classes signed up en masse.

But Intro to Jazz doesn't fly solo-not even at a world-renowned university like Duke.

When the University moved from its old undergraduate course of study to Curriculum 2000, students discovered that they had to fill in a new and complex matrix of requirements. In 2004, revisions to the matrix turned it into a list, but the requirements remained largely the same. Art History majors still have to take sciences; poets are pushed to find a course to complete their Quantitative Studies (QS) obligation; and physics students search for a way to fulfill their Arts, Language and Performance (ALP) requirement without diverting too much time or attention away from more demanding coursework in their major.

The result? A well-known collection of easy classes.

Whether you call them "gut courses," "rocks for jocks" or "physics for poets," everyone knows about them. Even, it seems, the professors.

"It must be 10 years ago, I went to some student-faculty game, where what happens is you just have to list things, and the person is supposed to guess the category," says Professor Owen Astrachan, director of undergraduate studies for the computer science department. "The category was 'gut courses at Duke,' and then people would say, 'Intro to Jazz, Comp Sci 1..' Those were the two I remember."

But there's a line between "easy" classes and those geared toward non-majors. As long as the University compels students to take courses in subjects they would have preferred to kiss goodbye in high school, its departments will have to provide a range of options to fulfill those requirements.

"Every university has classes that are of differential intensity... and depending on what we mean by that, there's probably some place for them," says Provost Peter Lange, the University's chief academic officer.

Professor Sheryl Broverman tends to agree. Non-biology majors flock to her "AIDS and Emerging Diseases" class, which connects modern pathology to the underlying socio-political implications of global health.

"A course that's introducing someone to a new disciplinary area and wants to encourage them to pursue it has a different agenda-it's not a weed-out course. It's appropriate for it to present the material in a more approachable manner than an upper-level course that's trying to stimulate students into higher-level thinking," Broverman says.

Although some students enroll in her class assuming it will be "easy"-there are no labs, no cut-throat, pre-med mentality-they find they have to work for a good grade. And Broverman says that, in the end, students enjoy the course, even if the work is more than they bargained for.

"The more relevant it is for students, the harder they're willing to work, because they care about answers," she adds. "And I really try to make my class interdisciplinary. I think that's one of the most attractive things to students, when they can see connections between biology and economics, political science, women's studies. It's really exciting when students come up to me and say, 'This relates to something we're doing in a different class..' That's what Duke would like education to be, that students are seeing connections, and not treating disciplines like silos."

But wrongly-reputed classes aside, are there still courses that are too easy?

You bet-but chances are, once publicized as such, they won't last long.

Case in point: Computer Science 196, "Technology in Film." Taught several years ago, Comp Sci 196 attempted to introduce students to the intricate programming skills behind movie special effects by showing films. in every class meeting. The Matrix, War Games, A.I., Star Trek-all in-class assignments. And best of all in students' minds, because it was a comp sci class, 196 carried a math (M) designation, a valuable commodity in the Curriculum 2000 lexicon.

"Wow," Astrachan says, as he checks the grade distribution from the Spring 2004 class. "There were a lot of A's.. From my perspective, when I look at a course and there are 80 people and about 70 of them got an A, that makes me feel it's got to be too easy."

Professor Robert Duvall, who taught 196, says the course's demise did not ultimately stem from its ease-although he acknowledges that it wasn't the toughest class on the menu that semester. He says he knows that several students took the class to fill their math requirements and that students didn't list the class as "the hardest of their semester."

"There was at least some strong urging [from the department] that the course should have some mathematical content. In my mind, that never really materialized," Duvall explains. "That was one of the major failings of the course.

"But I certainly don't fault the students for taking what I hope was an interesting class," he adds. "Students take courses for all sorts of reasons."

Scott Lemmon, Trinity '05, enrolled in the class after friends returned from the first meeting and told him movies were the main event. He admits 196 required a fair amount of reading-about eight science fiction novels-and that it didn't earn him his best grade at Duke, but Lemmon is glad he chose it over Statistics 101.

"For me it was easy relative to other classes that would have given me a math credit," Lemmon says, noting that there was a fair amount of work to be done in the class. "The in-class time itself was the most relaxed-watching a movie each week, with popcorn the professor bought for us. I think my friends thought it was about as easy as classes get at Duke."

Duvall says the class has not been taught since its maiden semester mainly because the department has had other priorities that required his and other professors' efforts. He also points out, however, that 196 has not been discontinued, per se. There is a need for departments like computer science to construct classes that attract students not so inclined to science of technology. Comp Sci 196 had a pop culture appeal, and Duvall said the department hoped it would bring in non-majors as a result.

"We try to make our courses as interesting and accessible as possible and see how broadly and see how we can make them applicable and interesting," he explains. "Sometimes we succeed, and sometimes, not so much."

But Duvall says he hopes his department-and every other department-would never deliberately create an "easy" class to attract students.

"There's some value that we want to impart to the people in the classroom. So if I give in to a student demand or choose not to teach something simply to ease off on the student, in general, I feel like I've lost something," Duvall says. "I'd like to think that most professors don't go into a course thinking, 'I'm going to give them a break or make my life easier.' Conversely, I'd like to think that professors try very hard to cut as much fat, as we say, off the assignments, so that we don't give work for the sake of doing work.

If 196 were to re-emerge, or if other non-major courses were to surface, they may or may not have a QS designation attached. Duvall also says he would certainly take into account the difficulties he encountered in 196 of discussing a movie with 80 students and grading as many film criticisms.

Lange says he has discussed excessively lax courses with deans, directors of undergraduate studies, concerned colleagues, the professors who teach the infamous courses and, in one case, a student.

"He said, 'You know, I took this class, and it didn't make me work that hard. I could have learned more if it had been more challenging,'" Lange says.

More often than not, non-major experiments that are failing or falling into the trap of being too easy face internal, departmental scrutiny. In some cases, too-easy classes are given the axe, whether permanently or, like Comp Sci 196, for the time being. In other cases, however, they're revamped.

Jazz 101's effortless heyday ceased, for instance, when Brown took over in Fall 2003. Among other new requirements, he added a strict attendance policy; students wait in line to sign their name at the classroom door.

Still, lured by the free iPods and tantalized by rumors of an undemanding syllabus, students came in droves.

Now, however, Intro to Jazz's reputation as a breeze is on the decline, even in students' word-of-mouth descriptions.

"This is not an easy class," a pre-med senior says before the Thursday lecture, folding her arms across her chest. "It's harder than my science classes."

Sure enough, Intro to Jazz is tougher, mainly because it's time-consuming; students have to attend 10 musical performances and rehearsals on their own time, and they face several tests and two papers.

"I want them to study and get underneath what they are hearing," Brown says. "I want to teach them to listen critically."

Nonetheless, Brown knows that many enrollees may be sitting in his lectures expecting a high grade. A few have even approached him complaining that the work was more than they expected. So Brown discusses his intention to make the coursework "legit" on the first day of class. He means business.

"People expect it to be easy, so they don't expect to do work," senior Jill Barzilay says of the course. "If you're in four classes, and you expect this to be your easy one, you're in for more work than you think.

"But I really like the class," she adds with a grin and a shrug.

Since beefing up the course load, Brown has seen a boost in class enrollment-up from about 40 in 2003 to a peak of 160 in Spring 2006.

"It's significant to me that so many people are interested in the course, because one of my missions here is that no one can come through Duke without being touched by jazz," Brown proudly boasts.

Such is the cycle of easy, non-major classes. A course emerges, students talk, and when the class passes the acceptable threshold of poor reputation and undesired ease, it either disappears or emerges anew-much to many students' surprise and chagrin.

New "easy" classes are always rearing their heads. Currently, "Food and Wine in European History" is gaining notoriety. So are "Tai Chi," "History and Issues of Sports" and "Waves, Beaches and Coastline Dynamics."

In the long run, the classes won't survive-or at least, not in a form that fails to meet the University's bottom line by balancing user-friendliness with academic rigor.

"The issue is not whether class material is accessible for those that are not as skilled with the kind of material taught in the class.. There can be outstanding classes that are precisely designed for students that have those qualities. The issue is whether you have to work to do well," Lange says.

Easy As do exist, and they always will. And many undergraduates grab them when and while they can.

But the reality of the situation is that "easy" will end up a misnomer for any class with the reputation. It just can't last.

For now, students in "Food and Wine" can relax. If things do change, they can take comfort in the example set by Brown and the hard-working students in Intro to Jazz. The extra requirements and tougher grading have created a more valuable course.

And the music still rolls on.