Working Paper for Education at Brown University )
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THE MAGAZINER -MAXWELL REPORT (D RAFT OF A WORKING PAPER FOR EDUCATION AT BROWN UNIVERSITY ) Ira Magaziner with Elliot Maxwell and Eleanor Saunders George Lee Jane Beckett Elwood Carter Cathy Johnson Laura Geller Harlan Hurwitz Cynthia Breitberg Kenneth Ribet Bruce Blodgett Arthur Grossman H. Theodore Cohen Laurie Overby Susan Jamieson Kathryn Au Ross McElwee William Salganik Susan Boyd Bowman Cataloging Information ISBN 978-0-615-52953-0 LCCN 2011937073 Magaziner, Ira; Maxwell, Elliot; with others . The Magaziner-Maxwell Report (Draft of a Working Paper for Education at Brown University): the seed of a curricular revolution at Brown First Open Jar Edition (October, 2011) Published by the Open Jar Foundation (Providence, RI) Draft of a Working Paper for Education at Brown University was first published in 1967; it is a public domain work, unprotected by copyright. The Open Jar Foundation has produced this new edition with the consent of Ira Magaziner and Elliot Maxwell. Cover Image © 2007 Wikipedia-En User Apavlo; used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For info, visit creativecommons.org. New Material © 2010–2011 Open Jar Foundation and contributors. “Open Jar” and the OJF logo are trademarks of Open Jar Foundation. The copyrighted portions of this work are released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. THE MAGAZINER -MAXWELL REPORT FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION In the Fall of 1966, seventy students set out to rethink the way that undergraduates are taught at Brown University. Eventually joined by more students and a number of professors, the group (called Group Independent Studies Project, or GISP) conducted a yearlong study of college education, its history, and the latest ideas for making it better — all in the hopes of applying what they learned to Brown. The end result was a 400-page tome that presented the group’s research, proposed a philosophy of education, and set out the details of a new curriculum to implement that philosophy. Within three years, the student-centered philosophy of education presented in their report became Brown’s educational philosophy, and it endures to this day. Every Fall, more than 1,600 new undergraduates walk through Brown’s Van Wickle Gates to discover a world of intellectual freedom unmatched by any other college. For most of these students, this freedom is precisely why they chose to come. Simply put, the New Curriculum defines the undergraduate experience. Today’s Brown students owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the individuals whose names appear on the title page of this book, and the countless others who were involved. We have grand hopes for this new paperback edition of the GISP report. More than anything else, we hope that the report will get the recognition it deserves — recognition that has been hard to come by for the library-bound hardcover manuscript. We were disturbed to discover that the recent report of the Task Force on Undergraduate Education, entitled The Curriculum at Forty, makes no reference to the report or the student activists who brought it to fruition. We believe that the report’s new, more accessible format will help it reach many audiences: administrative groups at Brown, like the Task Force; students in education courses at Brown and elsewhere; Brown students who are simply interested in learning where their celebrated curriculum came from; and students at other schools who are attempting to effect their own curricular change. ii THE MAGAZINER -MAXWELL REPORT We hope that the occasion of this new edition’s release will serve as an opportunity for Brown students to reflect on the New Curriculum as it exists today, and the degree to which it successfully carries out its goals. Like few student bodies anywhere else, the students of Brown have an ownership stake in their college’s curriculum. If the curriculum is no longer living up to its ideals, the onus is on Brown students — not the faculty, not the administration — to make it better. We hope that the availability of this new edition will help avoid misconceptions about the history of the curriculum — misconceptions that have cropped up in the past. In 2006, a group of administrators and faculty members embarked on a misguided attempt to alter Brown’s grading system, based in part on the idea that the grading system was not an integral part of the New Curriculum. The forty pages of this book dedicated to grading suggest otherwise. In the 2006 incident, report authors Ira Magaziner and Elliot Maxwell personally stepped in to correct the record; in the future, we hope that they won’t have to. Finally, we hope that, like any good historical source, the new edition of the report will help future generations to avoid rehashing old questions without the benefit of previous generations’ thoughts on the same issues. Many of the basic issues considered by the GISP students forty years ago are issues that we continue to struggle with today, mistakenly believing them to be unique to the present. The tension between the research and teaching roles of professors, the rise of pre- professionalism and hyperspecialization, and problems with undergraduate advising — the report confronts these issues and many others, and offers surprisingly fresh analysis in each case. It has been a delight assembling this new edition over the past year, and we are so excited to finally share it with the community. We hope that you enjoy reading it as much as we have enjoyed putting it together. The Board of the Open Jar Foundation October, 2011 The Open Jar Foundation is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the performing arts and curricular freedom in higher education. Learn more by visiting us at openjar.org. AUTHORS ’ INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION It was more than forty years ago that a group of students and faculty began the discussions that led to the report on Brown's curriculum that is now being republished. We are relatively sure that no one who worked on that mimeographed document expected that it would someday be available electronically to people around the world. More important, the students who sought to change the curriculum, hoping to improve the educational experience for themselves and for others, had little reason to believe that a new curriculum would lead to the remarkable faculty and students that have since come to Brown, at least in part because of its adoption. And no one could have expected that Brown's "New Curriculum" would remain relatively unchanged for 40 years or more. We are pleased that the report is being made more broadly available, but not because we believe that it provides the right blueprint for a curriculum for the twenty-first century. The report itself anticipated that the curriculum should and would change as the times changed. We hope, instead, that the report will spark discussions about the goals of higher education, the role of the curriculum, ways to evaluate students, the importance of a global perspective, the impact of the departmental organization of knowledge and governance, and other core questions. Such discussions would be particularly valuable today, when knowledge is exploding; when the Internet is providing global access to high quality educational materials and experiences, as well as massive amounts of trustworthy and misleading information; when new technologies are offering promising methods for teaching and learning and collaboration across borders — but when fewer people are obtaining degrees and more people are challenging the value of a liberal education. If this report helps initiate or facilitate these discussions, it would clearly justify the efforts that enabled its republication. It would not disturb us if people reached quite different conclusions than we did. The report’s suggestion of the need to re-evaluate the curriculum at regular intervals was based on our belief iv THE MAGAZINER -MAXWELL REPORT that the very fact of a review was energizing for an institution and would improve the educational experience; we find the absence of on-going discussions in colleges and universities about the nature and purpose of higher education somewhat ironic. Brown's "New Curriculum" has itself been reviewed several times over the last forty years, without major change. We attribute its longevity to the strength of the core principle of the report — that the student be the center of the educational experience — a principle that we still embrace. Perhaps another reason for the Brown curriculum's stability is that, unlike at many other colleges and universities, the students and faculty at Brown understand and agree with the centrality of this principle and view the curriculum as their own. Placing students at the center of the educational experience is not a device for reducing their obligations. It places an enormous burden on them, making them responsible for their own choices and allowing them to learn from their mistakes in a supportive environment — something that we have come to see as a shared requirement for growth, whether it be in childhood, adolescence, or as a team member in the workplace. The quality of Brown graduates is testament to the value and rigor of the experience they had, even without distribution requirements, a fixed corpus of knowledge to be studied, or letter grades with pluses and minuses for every course. The report sought to encourage students to learn how to learn so that they could and would continue their education throughout their lifetimes. We think that here too, Brown graduates provide evidence that the New Curriculum has been a success. The late 1960's were a time of great ferment in the United States. The debate over the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, the women's movement — all were contesting the prevailing views in our country.