Postsecondary Curriculum

Development of Contemporary Postsecondary Curriculum

The hegemony of this academic structure has not been inevitable. Between 1965 and 1980, a number of academic leaders argued that reform of undergraduate education required rejection of conventional practices of institutional structure, grading, and size. For example, one slogan that united discontented undergraduates in the 1960s was that the “impersonality of the multiversity” had tended to denigrate undergraduate education by conveniently relying on large lecture courses and impersonal multiple-choice examinations in which professors and students had little conversation. Remedies included developing small undergraduate [Page 672]courses, shifting seminar instruction from graduate programs to undergraduate programs. More drastic were innovations associated with the “cluster college” movement of the 1960s. Foremost in this category and energy was the new University of California, Santa Cruzan experiment hailed as the solution to the riddle posed by Clark Kerr: “How do we make the university seem smaller as it grows larger?” The answer pursued by the University of California, Santa Cruz, and others was to find inspiration in the Oxford-Cambridge model of residential colleges. According to this plan, the curriculum came to be comprehensive: an architectural environment of a quadrangle in which living and learning, students and faculty, were brought together in a humane scale, limited to about 500 or so total students per college. Additional students were to be accommodated by adding new, small residential colleges resulting in a honeycombed pattern of universitywide expansion. Instructors were to provide written commentaries for each student's academic performance in place of the standard practice of assigning a letter grade or numerical score. Eventually such plans encountered problems: First, residential education and small courses were expensive. Second, many undergraduates were reluctant to sacrifice all the curricular and extracurricular choices of the large, sprawling university to gain a small, coherent residential collegiate experience. Third, most students did not relish the responsibility of designing their own course of study, especially if such a task demanded the discipline of building in coherence as well as choice. By default, familiar and conventional curricula were less demanding and more certain. Most important, the “cluster college” scheme faced difficulties in gaining acceptance of faculty at universities where rewards and prestige often were tied to achievements in research publications and grants, with less emphasis on commitment to undergraduate teaching and mentoring.

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