Dartmouth and other Ivy League schools have a long tradition of using general education requirements to ground students in the liberal arts tradition.
Recent decisions by the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University to institute major revisions of their general education requirements put in perspective the process by which Dartmouth evaluates its own set of distribution requirements.
The College aims to provide students with a well rounded educational experience that exposes them to many different methods of social analysis through a set of broad requirements, according to Associate Dean Lindsay Whaley, former chairman of the Committee on Instruction.
The College institutes major changes in the requirements when it believes that there might be a better way to fulfill these goals, Whaley said.
"You want to make sure that you are giving your student body guidance in terms of course selections that maximize the benefits of a liberal arts education," Whaley said.
The current set of requirements, first effective for the class of 1998, were instituted in 1994.
Significant changes usually occur only after a formal review generally initiated by the dean of the faculty or the president of the College.
There have been two such reviews of the current system, Whaley said.
Dartmouth might also reexamine its requirements when another institution pioneers a new system, Whaley said.
"Anytime schools that we recognize as competent try innovative approaches to education, we want to see why are they doing it, and how is that working, and is there something that we could learn from their efforts," Whaley said.
Minor modifications are made to the requirements every few years based on proposals submitted to the Committee on Instruction, according to Robert Drysdale, the committee's current chairman.
These proposals originate from various sources, including Student Assembly, professors, or members of the committee itself. After a review, the Committee on Instruction either dismisses the proposal or sends it to another committee, depending on its content. Ultimately, a majority of the faculty must approve any changes.
The recent change in the wording of the technology and appplied Sciences requirement was part of this normal review process, Drysdale said.
According to Drysdale, the committee often considers student input when evaluating the requirements.
Two students serve on the Committee for Instruction, and students can also submit petitions to voice concerns or suggest revisions.
For all classes graduating after 2004, the College eliminated the interdisciplinary requirement -- which mandated that students take at least one interdisciplinary course -- partially because students indicated that the relatively small number of interdisciplinary courses made the requirement difficult to fulfill, Whaley said.
For all classes graduating after 2007, the College changed the world culture requirement to include the culture and identity category in response to a Student Assembly request for a requirement that considered issues of race, ethnicity and migration.
The recently instituted changes at the University of Pennsylvania and the proposed changes at Harvard are more substantial than any recent changes at Dartmouth.
In 2000 the UPenn launched its Pilot Curriculum, a five-year experiment designed to gather information about how to better streamline the university's general education requirements according to Kent Peterman, director of academic affairs at UPenn.
The Pilot Curriculum consisted of four general education courses taken during a student's freshman and sophomore years. Peterman stressed that the program was not created as system of new requirements, but rather as a way to gather empirical data about student habits in course selection to facilitate the creation of a new system.
In early February the General Education Task Force at Harvard University released a report to the faculty proposing a new set of general education requirements. If the proposed curriculum is accepted students will be required to take a number of extradepartmental classes in eight categories. The new system would replace Harvard's current core.
