​Diving into curriculum change

With next semester’s registration wrapping up, our curriculum and its requirements have been on students’ minds. For juniors and seniors, this often means scouring ACES for those last Trinity requirements (in classes that meet after noon on any day except Friday). For underclassmen, it means exploring different fields of study and finding classes that give them a start on an overwhelming variety of requirements. Registration is just one occasion to remember the many ways the current undergraduate curriculum stands to be improved.

Fourteen months ago, the Imagining the Duke Curriculum committee began a three-year process aimed at reviewing and revamping the foundation of the undergraduate academic experience. After a year of reflection, the committee will spend this year developing proposals from faculty and students with final discussions and voting to be done next year.

After meeting with the committee’s chair, Professor Suzanne Shanahan, and Trinity’s Dean of Academic Affairs, Lee Baker, we applaud the narrative forming around the “big tweak” of curriculum. It recognizes the tremendous potential to make Duke’s academic experience an exceptional one but, more importantly, the intimately connected socio-cultural problems of the Duke experience. Today, we survey facets of curriculum change, a reflection of sorts like last year’s process.

First, we encourage the curriculum to become a space where Duke’s myriad programmatic offerings, ranging from DukeImmerse to Bass Connections to DukeEngage, can be made integral to students’ academic experiences instead of being self-selecting, one-off experiences. A requirement would ensure every Duke student comes to offer program-developed project skills with a story behind them, perhaps with a partial-credit on-campus seminar for writing up and sharing experiences with other students. It would certainly help students envision ways to leverage their education outside of Duke and remind them of alternative paths to leadership other than the most popular post-graduation choices.

These experiences also reveal how academic programming is a fruitful source of a diverse community. After our first year, we often fall into caricature with communities siloed by living group or extracurricular choices. We should improve the intellectual nature of students’ social environments as best we can by inspecting FOCUS programs' contributions to residential spaces. After the first year, having sustained academic bonds with a residential house can marshall Duke’s diversity of thought, lived experience and background to enrich interpersonal relationships.

We view this interdisciplinary boost as central to facilitating a broader academic community that we all know to be lacking. It could take the form of short classes, lecture and faculty conversations or other requirements that force diverse segments of Duke to engage with each other. The burden of the committee is to figure out how best to do this. Rather than inoculating students in the first year with academic social spaces and rich programmatic offerings, we agree with the committee that we stand to gain from sustained and iterated academic experiences.

A revamped curriculum can help enshrine and perpetuate the ethos of the University we see emerging: leadership oriented around thoughtful engagement with issues, incorporating different analytic approaches to solve problems. The drive of students to strike out and try new things in the pursuit of this education is, as Shanahan noted, part of what excites our faculty most about Duke. Many of the problems we have discussed with the undergraduate experience stem around the lack of a united, smushed together Duke community that makes us reflect, solve problems and lead together with our skills, in and out of the classroom. Curricular change is no panacea, but it can become the groundwork for the academic journey at Duke as we envision it.