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In a letter printed in the Faculty Newsletter some weeks ago, I argued that the new Communication Requirement should be designed with the aims of both professional competence and literate citizenship in mind. This letter outlines a four-year communication program in which different MIT departments would work as partners in a sequence emphasizing different aspects of communication at the stages of undergraduate education where they are most appropriate.
1. A Humanist's View
Let me begin by observing how strange the current efforts to construct new "communication-intensive" subjects, or to fit out existing subjects so that they can qualify for "communication-intensive credit" can appear, from the perspective of a core humanities professor such as myself. (A note of clarification: when I say "core humanities," I am referring in particular to such fields as literature, history, philosophy, and languages. I am not referring to all HASS disciplines. Unlike the social sciences, core humanities subjects make no claim to scientificity; unlike the creative or performing arts, they are essentially critical and hermeneutic.)
For a start, it is troubling that the very label "communication-intensive" so perfectly exemplifies the ungainly bureaucratese that already afflicts so many MIT students' writing. What do we mean by "communication-intensive subject?" Obviously, we mean a class that teaches writing and speaking skills, whatever else it may also be teaching. But because we can recognize that "communication" is an exchange, not just a unilateral action, we should add that a class designed to make students better participants in the process of communication must also teach the skills of receiving, interpreting, and responding to the "communications" of others. In other words, a "communication-intensive subject" ought to offer training in writing, speaking, listening, and reading. To divorce the skills of "message-production" from those of "message-reception" is to stunt the development of both. To omit the critical practice of reading from "communication" is to promulgate the tin-eared discourse of bureaucracy, and to offer us the vision of a future in which everybody will be energetically "communicating" but nobody will be getting the message.
The obvious question which anyone setting out to design a new MIT program of communication training ought to ask is, "Where is communication training already going on at MIT?" – or, in other words, "What existing strengths can we draw upon?"
And here I must draw back for a moment, to observe that this issue of "communication" leads me down a path I often find myself traveling as a professor of humanities at MIT.
To be a humanist at this institution is to find oneself constantly on call to articulate the most basic principles of humanistic study – principles that professional humanists may easily forget how to articulate, since their work is occupied with higher-order questions sky-scraping far above those foundations. Now, the atmosphere of skepticism surrounding what we do is actually one of the things I value most about being a humanist at MIT: it kills complacency and makes impossible the kind of hubris, product of the hot-house Ph.D. programs, that has earned our disciplines (especially mine) such a bad name in the general culture.
But so tenuous a hold does the rationale of humanistic study have on the institutional imagination of MIT that it does not seem to occur to people to consult our disciplines on problems especially germane to them. For a humanist, it can be uncanny to move about the Institute and to encounter people in several different settings groping with questions for which an obvious place to look for solutions is in the humanities . When the Task Force on Student Life and Learning recommends that MIT take up the goal "educating the whole student," it enunciates the most classical of humanistic ideals, that of Bildung or "culture," the shaping of an entire mature self; but does this recommendation lead anyone to conclude that the core humanities disciplines ought to play a much greater role in MIT's undergraduate curriculum, so that students can have a chance to develop in more well-rounded ways?
When the Committee on Student Affairs hears testimony about the "lack of community feeling" among the student body and the lack of identification students feel for the Institute, does anyone acknowledge that this alienating atmosphere stems at least in part from the anti-humanistic bias of what students call MIT's "education-with-a-firehose?" And does anyone then consider that increasing the importance and visibility of the core humanistic disciplines would be an invaluable step to take in redressing the situation? Alas, not without some pugnacious humanistic evangelist on the scene to argue the point. A humanist at MIT must be prepared to make a case for "the obvious," at the risk of being thought a cockeyed idealist or a curricular claim-jumper. To return, then, to the questions: where is communication training already going on at MIT? What existing strengths can the new requirement draw upon?
Communication training is what the core disciplines do, all the time, in every class we offer. Every core humanities class – introductory, intermediate, and advanced – ought to carry "communication-intensive credit." But not all humanities disciplines bear the same relationship to the problem of communication, so we should pose the above questions more specifically. In which disciplines does the teaching of communication skills bear the most direct relationship to the intellectual core or content of the discipline? Literature and writing are the disciplines in which the teaching of communication skills bears the most direct relationship to the intellectual content of the discipline. These programs should be the backbone of the new requirement.
Let me speak for my own field only. What professors of literature do, as our normal course of business, is teach students how to respond to language, in language. We try to help students develop a sensitivity to many different uses of language and a familiarity with different literary traditions. This familiarity makes them more sensitive and alert participants in the process of communication: it allows them to bring more and richer resources with them to that process. We operate in comparatively small classes placing a premium on active student discussion (including, at the advanced level, formal oral reports). We base our students' grades largely on their ability to write persuasive prose, and consequently we require a significant number of written assignments, with ample provision for rewriting. Speaking, writing, listening, and reading, functioning not as separate elements but as interacting components of a literate sensibility: our curriculum helps students mature as users of language. From where we stand, any "Communication Requirement" that does not envision a vital role for the discipline of Literary Study is going to seem seriously misguided.
2. Outline of a Program
These questions and answers suggest that a properly conceived four-year program of communication training might divide communication-intensive (CI) credit into three tiers:
CI#1 (freshman year), CI#2 (sophomore year), and CI#3 (junior and senior years).
At each successive stage, the pool of MIT departments eligible to participate should broaden:
Different disciplines could offer different levels of CI credit:
Commitment to sequence would be essential to the program:
Let me now fill out this sketch with some details:
FreshmanYear: Those students whose placement essays receive a grade of "Subject Required" must take one of the following Writing or Literature subjects: "Expository Writing," "Writing and Experience," or "Writing About Literature." (ESL students will require a special arrangement.) Others take another CI#1 Writing or Literature subject, most likely a HASS-D. CI#1 class size should be small, tutorial assistance should be available, and there should be ample opportunity for revision of written work. Readings will be briefer than in more advanced courses so as to provide class time for discussion of writing issues and student essays. HASS-D courses also eligible for CI#1 credit should be limited to 18 students (preferably fewer). Funding must be made available to staff a sufficient number of these essential small classes.
Sophomore Year: Students may choose among CI#2 courses offered in core humanities disciplines. Current HASS-D offerings and Intermediate courses would be eligible here, though it would be beneficial to provide tutorial assistance at this level, too. Current HASS-D classes in Social Science or Creative and Performing Arts could qualify for CI#2 credit if they are prepared to meet CI#2 criteria, but they would not be required to do so. This would free up instructors of HASS-D courses in these areas to decide whether or not to participate in the communication program.
Junior and Senior Years: Students may take a CI#3 course in their major field or in humanities. Although many students at this point may move on to pre-professional communication training in their majors, those who wish may satisfy their CI#3 requirements by taking additional Intermediate or Advanced subjects in Literature, Writing, or other core humanities subjects.
3. Conclusion
You will not need me to point out that the plan outlined above is an ambitious and expensive plan, a radical plan. And it is no doubt a sociological fact that all institutions offer disincentives against radicalism; every entrenched system will favor limited inquiries and minor adjustments. In the case of MIT, institutional tradition and identity are at odds with the questions the Institute now finds itself compelled to ask. Like the question of student life, the question of "communication" is a radical one that will lead us, if we debate it fully and candidly, to the root question of what kind of institution MIT wants to be. If it wants to implement the recommendations of the Task Force on Student Life and Learning, its dedication to the ideal of "educating the whole student" must be reflected in its curriculum. The new Communication Requirement offers us the opportunity and the challenge to do just that.
In closing, I would ask you to consider what message the Institute will be sending if it adopts a plan that does not recognize (by awarding "CI" credit to) the communication training already taking place as the standard operating procedure of humanities classes. Speaking for myself, it will be difficult not to interpret the denial of CI credit to my middle and upper-level classes as an invitation to drop all those time-consuming student essays from my syllabi, to give quick-grading true-false or short-answer exams rather than paper assignments, to read out prepared lectures instead of undertaking the much more laborious practice of trying to engage students in classroom dialogue – in short, to save time now "wasted" on improving students' writing and speaking. Instead of using the opportunity which the communication problem offers us to make humanities and other MIT disciplines partners in a common cause, such a plan would widen the gap between them, and it would encourage further declines, not improvements, in our students' communication skills.
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