Duke University’s undergraduate curriculum — like many others – went through a period of erosion beginning in the late 1960s. For many schools, that decline has continued, but not at Duke, according to a new paper just released by the Pope Center. “The Decline and Revival of Liberal Learning at Duke: The Focus and Gerst Programs,” written by Russell K. Nieli, examines how Duke stopped the decline and suggests ways in which other schools can help their students find more meaning in their education.
Nieli, who graduated from Duke in 1970 and now teaches at Princeton, observes that the administration at Duke – as at many other prominent universities – succumbed to two Siren songs during this period. One was to relax the constraints of the old idea of a core curriculum in order to give students more control over their college education. The result was a “distribution requirements” system that allowed students to pick most of their courses from a smorgasbord of offerings.
That change destroyed the educational commonality that had once tied Duke students together. “Gone were the days when almost all Duke students would have read the Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, and King Lear; when you could strike up a conversation with even a Duke chemistry or biology major on the differences between St. John’s Gospel and the Synoptics; when students eagerly debated in their dorm lounges whether Yeats, Eliot, and Pound were fascists or high-minded traditionalists; and when Southern students and faculty took special pride in the outstanding literary achievements of the great Southern writers,” Nieli says.
