Students: Curriculum Power

The militant demand for “student power” now being heard on U.S. college campuses sounds like a defiant challenge of academic authority. Yet at least one aspect of the undergraduate rebellion—student demands for new and more relevant course offerings—is generally embraced and welcomed by faculty and administrators. Not only do students now sit on many curriculum committees, but their interests are being reflected in countless new courses that carry regular academic credit.

Many of those courses deal with current social problems, often combine field experience with scholarly theory. Among 15 student-initiated areas of study offered last year at the Berkeley campus of the University of California was a course on poverty, in which students lived in an Oakland ghetto, and a class on the political and intellectual relationship between universities and the state, a topic that understandably arouses strong emotions at Cal.

Protest & Pollution. Similar student interest in current mass movements led Vassar to create a course on “collective behavior,” which explores crowd psychology and protest drives. Pondering the polluted Hudson River flowing near their Poughkeepsie campus, Vassar girls also sought courses in environmental studies; the first one applies ten disciplines to a case study of the river as an example of man’s relationship to his environment. Pomona College students secured an interdisciplinary seminar on “the urban quandary,” while University of Pennsylvania student interest generated a series of sociology seminars on such topics as an “analysis of the Berkeley riots.”

Paralleling the student interest in current problems is a new yearning for value-defining courses that help put life in broad perspective. This often takes the form of a demand for religious studies. At student request, Rutgers will offer a religion major for the first time this year, while at the University of Wisconsin’s Milwaukee campus a student-organized poll led to regent approval of a new Department of Religious Studies. A similar desire for scanning a broader scene led engineering students at Claremont’s Harvey Mudd College to secure a humanities course on “man, science and society.”

Many colleges are receptive even to the specialized interests of a relatively small number of students. Thus Wesleyan’s psychology department bowed to undergraduate requests for a course on “witchcraft and the occult.” Among some 15 student-requested courses created at Stanford were seminars on “Ideology and Utopia” and “Anarchism and Fascism.” The City College of New York is offering two courses on music of the Orient taught by Indian Sitarist Ravi Shankar, and, for the first time, an interdepartmental major in oceanography. The Political Science Club at Northwestern secured academic credit for students to work in Springfield as aides to Illinois legislators.

Arabic & Hebrew. At the universities of Washington and Illinois, small groups of students successfully lobbied for new courses in Arabic—although there seems to be a greater interest in Hebrew. Students got Hebrew courses at Washington and Minnesota, while Wesleyan students secured a course on Jewish intellectual history. Stanford agreed to a request for a course on modern China, Washington to a new emphasis on Mexico in anthropology, Wesleyan to teaching Japanese.

Although some veteran professors question the viability of many student-proposed courses, most academic leaders welcome the proposals as evidence of a healthy undergraduate interest in the quality of education. Says Neil Warren, dean of the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California: “Students pay money to go here, and if they feel they’re not getting something they should have, we’re ready to listen.”