An Update from the Task Force on the
Undergraduate Educational Commons

Robert J. Silbey

The Task Force on the Undergraduate Educational Commons has been working for over a year-and-a-half on its charge to review the General Institute Requirements (GIRs) and to suggest changes in the undergraduate curriculum. We hope to make all our recommendations known quite soon; we are scheduled to preview these recommendations at the November Institute faculty meeting.

Since the implementation of the basic structure of the GIRs about 40 years ago, reviews – both major and minor – have taken place fairly regularly. Committees have worked hard, releasing reports suggesting improvements to some aspect of the current GIRs; but then, more often than not, either the report was forgotten in someone's filing cabinet or only minor changes resulted from that hard work.

A good example is the Laboratory requirement. Over the 40 years the requirement has existed, a number of committees have suggested that the requirement in its present form hardly lives up to its lofty goals, and should be overhauled – the recommended overhaul taking various forms, from a natural sciences laboratory requirement to a "phase one" add-on to the current requirement. Other committees have suggested numerous improvements to the Science requirement, but except for the introduction of the Biology requirement (a major change, to be sure), little has happened that addresses the long-standing sentiment that the Science requirements may not be the right mix of subjects for the twenty-first century MIT student. In much the same vein, committees that have reviewed and made proposals for change to the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) requirement have met with much the same resistance to major improvements.

Why has so little change occurred in the past 40 years? There are a number of reasons, including: a) most faculty think our undergraduate program is pretty good, so why change it; b) the department programs are designed assuming the current set of GIRs, so any change in those requirements would require rethinking and reworking of the departmental program; and c) there is a natural tendency to resist change.

(I am reminded of the joke: "How many tenured faculty members does it take to change a light bulb?" The incredulous response: "Change??! Change??")

A final reason that many past reports and proposals met with resistance is because often faculty were taken by surprise when committee reports and recommendations were released. Hoping to avoid that particular result this time around, the Task Force has taken the tack of visiting every MIT department to talk to the faculty (and many others) about the GIRs and the first-year experience. We've heard from most everyone that improvements of various sorts need to be introduced. The faculty voices were not uniform, of course, but certain themes were clear; our Task Force deliberations have been based on what we heard.

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Those of you who attended any of our public forums last year heard what the Task Force considers to be some of the "forcing points" that we have heard repeatedly from faculty and students.

a.  The first is universal: the desire for a more energizing and "flexible" first-year experience. As we heard time and time again in meetings with departmental faculty, "our students are beaten down," in ways that don't seem necessary. They need more exposure to the candy store that is MIT; they need to be offered more choice earlier on.

b. There is a larger role for Engineering in the first-year experience.

c. There should be no increase in requirements.

d. The four-year professional degree is essentially a thing of the past.

e.  Students need more time: for exploration, for research, to study abroad.

f.  The HASS requirement is too complicated; there are no clear goals (and from some quarters, eight HASS subjects are too many).

g.  Project-based, active-learning experiences are a good thing for freshmen.

h. Double majors should replace double degrees.

i. There is real intellectual depth in the intersections of fields: multi-disciplinary work should be encouraged

All of these visits and conversations have taken a lot of time. The members of the Task Force have worked hard with no release time from other duties, and I am very grateful to be working with a group of colleagues who have given so generously to this effort. As I said, we plan to preview our recommendations at a faculty meeting later this term, but much of what we're thinking is revealed in the d'Arbeloff Call for Preliminary Proposals that was released in June and identifies three target areas of interest to the Task Force:

•  First-year subjects that provide broader coverage of the fundamental concepts and methods of modern science and engineering . [We hope to introduce new subject matter into the technical core by offering freshmen more choice in what they are required to take.] Such subjects may be the result of cooperative initiatives between departments and schools.

• A more common first-year experience for students as a component of the requirement in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences , which may take the form of coordinated subject offerings.
• Increasing the number of "project-based" experiences for first-year students , including curricular offerings across departments and schools.      

There is a common theme in these different areas: the desire for more cooperative educational initiatives between and among faculty across departments and schools. This was a major theme of the 1998 report of the Task Force on Student Life and Learning. That report underscored the importance of the principle of the "unity of the MIT faculty" in taking responsibility for the undergraduate commons and in keeping it healthy and exciting.

The public discussions that will take place starting later this term will need faculty to keep an open mind about what is important for our students, even though the prospect of change may be uncomfortable for how it might affect the status quo. I look forward to thoughtful and objective reactions to our ideas and recommendations and to your help in designing the best educational opportunities for our students.

For more information about the d'Arbeloff Grant Call for Preliminary Proposals, see web.mit.edu/darbeloff. For more information about the Task Force on the Undergraduate Educational Commons, see web.mit.edu/committees/edcommons.

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