The new North Carolina State University curriculum that goes into effect in July is perfect—perfect, that is, for unmotivated students looking for a degree who don’t care about actual learning. As Jay Schalin described it in his article, “Hollow at the Core,” students will now need only 39 hours of general education requirements, compared to 50 before. (This is out of approximately 124 total credit hours over four years.) Some of these credits can be fulfilled with fluff courses on popular culture.
Looking to breeze through the requirements? Not only can you take lightweight courses but some of them can be double-counted. Taking “Postmodernism” will give you three hours of credit toward the humanities requirement, while also fulfilling the requirement for global knowledge. Or you could take “Women and Men in Society.” That course would fulfill both a social science and the new “U.S. diversity” requirement. You could fulfill the remaining hours in humanities and social sciences with “Community Relationships” and “Time Travel.”
Some students will complete the general education program at N. C. State without ever having taken a course in history, literature, economics, logic, or political science.
Fortunately, we believe that students reading this column are serious about their education. With that conviction, the Pope Center surveyed N. C. State students last semester to find the “gen ed” courses they consider challenging and enlightening. Our recommendations, based on that survey, are found in the table that accompanies this article.
The aim was both to demystify the process of finding interesting general education classes and to help students avoid courses where they are likely to encounter inappropriate intrusion of politics. This is our second report on “gen ed” courses; the Pope Center released recommendations for UNC-Chapel Hill courses last year.
General education courses range from introductory economics or mathematics to classes on popular culture, music, and movies—an often confusing mix of broad survey courses and classes on very narrow, specialized topics, distributed across many disciplines. Although course descriptions are available online, they are usually vague and sometimes misleading. Combined with the tremendous breadth of topics and the need to fit classes into a tight schedule, the lack of accurate and detailed information can make the task of finding good classes an arduous one.
Under the new curriculum, students choose 39 hours of course work in eight categories: Mathematical Sciences, Natural Sciences, Humanities, Social Sciences, Additional Breadth, Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Physical Education/Healthy Living, and Introduction to Writing. There are also five categories of “co-requisites,” requirements that must be met but don’t necessarily add hours, since double counting is allowed. Those categories are: U.S. Diversity, Global Knowledge, Foreign Language, Communication in the Major, and Technology Fluency.
The U.S. Diversity and Global Knowledge requirements are new. They replace rigorous academic courses with what our survey suggests is shallow, politically correct content. Thus, the new curriculum diminishes the importance of Western civilization, instead focusing on “privilege and oppression,” as the U.S. Diversity credit claims to do or “the complex interrelationships among nations,” which is the aim of the Global Knowledge credit.
Here are the Pope Center’s recommendations, which name both the course and the recommended instructor (the key to the chart follows).
KEY: ST 101 is Statistics by Example; BIO 105 is Biology in the Modern World; CH 101 is Chemistry—A Molecular Science; FL/ENG 220 is Studies in Great Works of Western Literature; ENG 486 is Shakespeare, The Earlier Plays; ENG 487 is Shakespeare, The Later Plays; PS 201 is American Politics and Government; EC 201 is Principles of Microeconomics; EC 205 is Fundamentals of Economics; HI 210 is Modern Europe 1815-Present; HI 251 is Early American History; STS 322 is Technological Catastrophes; STS 402 Peace and War in the Nuclear Age.
Our survey was adapted from a questionnaire conducted by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. In addition to asking whether the faculty member was unbiased and open to student viewpoints, questions also addressed academic rigor, the professor’s availability during office hours, and whether the course materials were interesting.
Students taking the survey evaluated both the content of each course and the professors who taught them. For some large survey courses—Introduction to Microeconomics, in particular—there were many responses about each professor. For classes with smaller sections, the response volume was lower, making it more difficult to choose definitively the best course and professor in each discipline. We received 260 survey responses.
Recommended courses are those that students found both interesting and challenging, with professors who were unbiased and open-minded.
Three categories—Global Knowledge, U.S. Diversity, and Interdisciplinary Perspectives—are new requirements; therefore we have very little data on those courses. Because of the low number of responses, we were unable to make a recommendation in U.S. Diversity. The few students who did comment on diversity courses were not enthusiastic. In the Interdisciplinary Perspectives category, we can only tentatively recommend two courses, since they were based on only a few survey responses.