Though the move still awaits approval by the Board of Trustees at its next meeting in September, the Class of 2004 will likely be the last required to complete a course labeled as "interdisciplinary," according to the chair of the administrative body that assigns distributive assignments to classes.
If so, members of the Class of 2005 and beyond will have to meet one less distributive requirement to earn their diplomas, as the much-bemoaned interdisciplinary course obligation has not been substituted with another, new requisite.
The requirement's demise, according to faculty, a majority of whom voted to eliminate it at a June meeting, can be attributed to a variety of logistical and financial factors. Many professors noted that even the initial act of scheduling classes in this distributive category -- defined by the College as comprising those courses "taught by two or more faculty members, normally with appointments in different departments, who will bring to the topics of the course their different approaches and methods of analysis" -- can lead to tangles of problems.
"It involves a tremendous amount of resources," said Committee on Instruction chair Lindsay Whaley, noting that interdisciplinary classes create large financial burdens for academic departments because of complications arising from their team-taught nature. "Practically speaking, there just wasn't enough support."
Unfortunately, many have lamented over the years, enough support for the "I" distribution credit has never existed. At a 2000 conference discussing interdisciplinary courses at Dartmouth, organizers concluded that there was little love for the requirement within the student body.
"Complaints include the serious shortage of courses available to students to fulfill the 'I' requirement, with consequent high enrollments in available classes, unwilling participation by students who merely need an 'I' credit to graduate and inordinate delay on the part of students in completing the 'I' requirement," the conference report said.
Statistics show that since the requirement's insertion in 1994 for members of the Class of 1998, these conditions have held fast. During Spring term 1998, with Dartmouth's first batch of seniors scrambling to obtain their "I" credits before graduation, eight such classes were offered. Of these, many faced massive enrollments, with Jewish Studies 37, for example, having a waiting list of over 100 students. This past academic year provided a similar scenario, with over 300 seniors having left the requirement unfulfilled by the middle of Winter term.
Indeed, high enrollments still characterize many interdisciplinary courses, although the number of course offerings has risen. According to College Registrar Polly Griffin, for the 2002-03 academic year, 39 "I" sections were offered, with 482 students -- one-third of all "I" enrollments -- taking Classics 1, Math 5 and Astronomy 4. Smaller-sized exceptions, such as the two-course Humanities program offered each year to freshmen and capped at 20, exist as well, Griffin added.
Good intentions, poor handling
As the director of Dartmouth's now-cancelled, completely interdisciplinary human biology program, professor Lee Witters argued strongly for the retention of the "I" requirement in front of his faculty and administrative peers, although he acknowledged serious faults in the current distributive credit system.
"I think there's pretty universal agreement that we're not doing it well right now," Witters said. "There's a lack of administrative structure to achieve a truly interdisciplinary culture here."
Without resources and infrastructure to successfully implement interdisciplinarity at the College, he added, it's unsurprising that so many people are dissatisfied with current offerings. Adding to the problem is a dearth of incentives to develop such courses for the long-term: College Courses are only offered two or three times before being scrapped, and getting funding for an "I" course sponsored by a specific department is at times an impossible task.
To succeed, Witters said, an interdisciplinary class must actively engage students -- something that has been missing from many courses offered in the past.
And perhaps most importantly, both professors must always be present throughout the course's term. "It's not sequential learning," he added. "Having resonating or sometimes competing voices in a classroom shows students how you can look at the same set of info in different ways."
Witters cited a course he taught Winter term entitled "the Biology and Politics of Starvation" that attracted not only biology majors, but also students concentrating in government, anthropology and economics, as a class that truly crossed fields of study and one whose students enrolled because of genuine interest in the course material, not just to fulfill an administrative requirement.
"Frankly, a lot of the COCO courses don't meet that test," Witters said. "But the reaction to this has been to cancel the requirement, rather than to make it better."
In the future, he said, Dartmouth must look to schools like Stanford, whose human biology program "involves every discipline you can imagine." The program is strong, too: currently, over 25 percent of undergraduates elect to major in the subject.
"It can work, if the institution has the interest and the wherewithal in putting it together," Witters said. "It's a matter of budget priority, and a lot of people wanting a slice of the pie -- the way COCO was set up, it was doomed to fail."
"To me, the requirement's just a cudgel to get students to take it," he added. "If you design a great program, students will come."
Positive experiences
For music professor and one-time COCO 6 instructor Jody Diamond, co-teaching Hindu Epics in Text and Performance during Winter Term 2002 was a superb educational experience for her students -- and for herself, too.
"I had a great time," Diamond said. "As a faculty member, it's one of the most fantastic teaching experiences I've ever had -- in effect, I got to take the class."
The powerful dynamic between Diamond and her colleague, religion professor Reiko Ohnuma, allowed the 20-odd students enrolled to gain an exceptional amount from each class session, she said.
In science-oriented courses, too, instructors have dubbed their interdisciplinary teaching experiences as worthwhile achievements where students enroll for learning's sake, not simply to fulfill the "I" requirement.
Physics professor Marcelo Gleiser, who has taught the very popular Astronomy 4 and Physics 1 courses with history professor Richard Kremer since 1994, noted that while he and Kremer take turns lecturing, both always attend class and are there to correct or qualify each other's statements if needed. Past students, Gleiser said, have generally enjoyed the experience -- even those who initially signed up just for distributive credit reasons.
In interviews with The Dartmouth, both Diamond and Gleiser expressed disappointment at the abolition of the interdisciplinary requirement, although they predicted that student interest would maintain the popularity of co-taught classes in general.
A sign of success?
While others said that the interdisciplinary requirement was cut largely because of the practical problems -- coordination and budget -- surrounding it, the Dean of the Faculty's office assumed a more positive perspective.
"Most everyone seems to be of the opinion that our classes have become interdisciplinary by their very nature," said Assistant Dean of the Faculty Jane Carroll. "That's to say we've done it, we've succeeded."
Changes made in the education community in the past quarter-century have made interdisciplinarity unavoidable, Carroll said. Because of this, the "I" requirement has become unnecessary and redundant.
"When you look at syllabi, you'll find readings in different disciplines than the subject itself," she said. "There has really been a constant cross-pollination of fields."
