Traditional Liberal Arts Curriculum Research Articles

The Gay and the Rad

The Gay and the Rad Amy Villarejo (bio) Dear Batman and Superman, In New York last summer, as I rode the escalator down from the movie theater on Forty-Second Street after seeing your home movie, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (Zack Snyder, 2016), I exited with two young and presumptively straight men (my Gaydar is at a disadvantage with this hoodie-wearing cohort). Both lamented the film's characterization of you, Batman. As you both know and I'm sorry to say, the movie is crap, save for Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman and Jeremy Irons as Batman's loyal Alfred. "They took everything about Batman that was cool and made him do things he wouldn't do," my theater companions complained. Said one, "He used to be gay and rad." In honor of Richard Dyer, I want to speak to this intoxicating cocktail of the gay and the rad, imbibed over the many years since Richard first celebrated that combination by proposing the divine figure of a clenched fist on a limp wrist. You, Batman, know exactly what I mean, even if you won't admit it. And although Richard might be my own superhero, what I have to contribute to this dossier has precisely to do with scale: with particular and intimate experience and the grander scheme of things, with the capacity to disperse judgment across discriminating aesthetic and formal observations as well as big-picture statements about ideas and culture. I don't want to make him do or say things he wouldn't; I want to keep what's gay and rad. And so, what I want to bring into focus, while celebrating the monumentality of Richard's work, is his countertendency against "field defining" or [End Page 161] diagnostic pronouncements. Instead, in his writings across the years, we find welcoming perspectives, revisions, and correctives, whether from historical hindsight or competing experiences and points of view. Batman, Superman, let me tell you two about my own point of entry. As an undergraduate student in the early 1980s, I encountered Richard's work in Gays and Film as the foundation of a new field I had inherited through literary study. At that moment, it was in literature that it seemed possible to pose feminist questions about authorship, genre, mass and popular culture, reception, signification, and consciousness—even feminist questions about superheroes. In my traditional liberal arts curriculum, where things like American literature or the novel itself were heinous departures from the core of lyric poetry, I thrilled to the prospect of studying women writers and, quickly thereafter, lesbian writers and writing, propelled by the energy of feminist and gay movements (Catwoman is in that cast). Two other currents fed the stream: one was a vestigial cultural feminism, that realm of solidarity, activism, and aspiration caricatured yet captured by earnest guitar-strumming womyn, an image that appeared as a performance of the Indigo Girls song "Closer to Fine" (1989) in the recent Transparent (Amazon Studios, 2014–) episode "Man on the Land." The other current involved my acute sense, in the early 1980s, that the most vibrant area of humanistic study—from questions of authorship and genre to the high stakes of feminist, postcolonial, Marxist, and critical race thinking—was shifting away from literature toward cinema and media, in the wake of the work of Richard, Laura Mulvey, and Stuart Hall, among many other authors. Closer to home, it entered through the teaching, writing, and mentoring of Marcia Landy, Gayatri Spivak, and Jackie Byars. That heady, sometimes gay, sometimes rad field has been revised in the past forty years by gays and lesbians and queers and trans folk with different political and aesthetic investments and genealogies. It is thanks to the wisdom and energies of these foremothers, forefathers, and multiply gendered ancestors that we stand here today; but let me pinpoint which debt I think we owe most palpably to Richard. His work has always made it clear that there is a great deal at stake in what we do. Not because a panel at the SCMS conference or a dossier of letters in Cinema Journal changes the world, but because they are of a piece with...

Integration and the liberal arts: a historical overview

Purpose–The traditional liberal-arts curriculum of the word-based Trivium (grammar, dialectic/logic, rhetoric) and the number-based Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music) has an intrinsic unity. Used in an integrated way, it provides a tool for self-development, self-realisation and self-integration. The purpose of this paper is to outline the core nature of the integrative quality of the liberal-arts curriculum, trace the gradual disintegration of the curriculum from its adoption in classical Greece, and provide practical suggestions for the re-integration of the curriculum in the context of modern educational practice.Design/methodology/approach–The paper presents a philosophical survey of the history of the theory and practice relating to the intrinsic integrated quality of liberal-arts education from pre-classical Greece to the present day.Findings–The integrated quality of the liberal-arts curriculum has experienced a gradual disintegration from its adoption in classical Greece to the twenty-first century. The paper provides practical suggestions for the re-integration of an integrated approach to the curriculum in the context of modern educational practice.Practical implications–Re-engaging with the integrated quality of the liberal-arts curriculum is vital for fulfilling the purpose of education as a practice: that of enabling a human being to flourish in a holistic way, in order to take an active role within a civil society.Originality/value–The paper provides a valuable antidote to overly rational thinking by arguing for the need to restore the intrinsic integrative quality of the liberal-arts curriculum in educational practice in order to support the flourishing of individuals, society in order for the emergence of a mutually supportive interaction between them to appear.

The Farmers' Schools of 1909: The Origins of Arkansas's Four Regional Universities

ARKANSAS'S UNIVERSITIES at Jonesboro, Magnolia, Monticello, and Russellville owe their existence to the Farmers' Educational and Cooperative Union. It struggled a century ago to have the legislature establish four schools in the state. These schools took many decades to flower into universities, an evolution that occurred in several stages and was by no means assured. But without the union's uncompromising demand from 1906 to 1909 for four schools, at least two of these institutions of higher education-Arkansas University, Arkansas Tech University, Southern Arkansas University, and the University of Arkansas at Monticello-would likely not exist today. Agricultural reform during the Progressive Era was part of a broader national impulse-the County Life Movement. It aimed generally to reverse the decline of rural America. Several approaches to spreading modern farming practices in a countryside still using traditional methods competed within the movement, including various models for education. In Arkansas, the views of the Farmers' Union triumphed with respect to the number, type, and management of schools. The union prevailed even against its allies-Arkansas educators, the General Education Board, and Gov. George W. Donaghey-who wanted fewer schools and different kinds of schools. When the Arkansas legislature in 1909 passed Act 100 to establish a State Agricultural School in each of four districts, the state joined the front ranks of progressive reform. Such schools at the secondary level had captured the imagination and won the support of many who worried about the widening economic and social gap between urban-industrial America and the agrarian countryside. It was made worse, they believed, by the drain of able, ambitious young people from farm to city. President Theodore Roosevelt declared in 1907: I am firmly convinced that most farmers' boys and girls should be educated through high schools and through the teaching of elementary agriculture in the rural common schools, so that when grown up they shall become farmers and farmers' wives. Education should be toward and not away from the farm. There must be an organized effort to restore or create the highest social condition in the country districts.1 Roosevelt favored legislation that Georgia congressmen introduced to provide federal funding for instruction and home economics in secondary schools.2 Roosevelt's assistant secretary of agriculture, WiIlet M. Hays, confidently predicted in 1908 that soon there would be some 300 to 400 finishing schools-practically one in each country congressional district.3 The Commission on Country Life that Roosevelt established declared in 1909 that redirected education was of paramount importance and advocated three approaches: 1) the study of agriculture in regular public school work; 2) specialized and 3) extension teaching conducted by colleges by means of the printed page, face-to-face talks and demonstrations.4 A movement for schools was already underway in many states. Largely through philanthropic efforts, some and industrial schools had been built in the nineteenth century. By 1900, three states-Alabama, Minnesota, and Nebraska-had established public schools; within a decade fourteen more states had done so. The earliest schools in the South aimed their practical at blacks, while the preferred educational path for whites remained a traditional liberal arts curriculum.5 Alabama, in addition to funding the Tuskegee Institute for African Americans, had, beginning in 1889, established white-only agricultural schools in each of its congressional districts, but these schools' curricula remained largely literary and did not emphasize training until 1908 or home economics until 1912. …

Interactive web-based software for musical technology

A general course covering digital music basics, electronic synthesis of musical instruments, room acoustics, CD and DVD players, and compressed data formats has been developed to draw upon the penchant of college students for music and computer technology. Nonscience majors populate this course at Davidson College to satisfy an elective or a core requirement in the traditional liberal arts curriculum. Students directly apply material covered in the course to daily experiences and to musical performances they are required to attend. This presentation will briefly describe the course structure and focus on several interactive web-based sound exercises and demonstrations that examine acoustical and psychoacoustical phenomena. Interactivity is achieved through the use of Java-based Physlets (developed at Davidson), JavaScript, and streaming of audio clips. Currently available time and frequency domain visualization plugins for popular media players (Windows Media Player, WinAmp), while imaginative and colorful, do not lend themselves to scientific measurement. New measurement-friendly visualization plugins are being developed at Davidson. These plugins will be described and made available for download.

Computer science

A traditional computer science program, in the liberal arts tradition and environment, has been in existence at Allegheny College for many years. The program was designed and adopted in 1979 [6] and the ideas and structure of that program became a substantial contribution to the LACS "Model Curriculum" developed in the early '80s and reported in [12]. In both of these cases, a concerted effort was made to identify and establish just what computer science is and design a curriculum to ensure that its graduates were well grounded in basic concepts and skills, the central core of the discipline, and some advanced or application areas. The Allegheny curriculum underwent minor changes in 1990 in conjunction with the College's adoption of a new base curriculum and calendar. The LACS model curriculum was revisited in the early '90s following publication of ACM's Computing Curricula 1991 [1] resulting in a "Revised Model Curriculum" published in late 1996. [16].All of these efforts were based on the certainty that computer science had "evolved into an important academic discipline with a unique core of knowledge, a set of basic questions and problems, and a distinct method of approach to analysis of those problems." [6], p. 1. The Allegheny and LACS models were specifically designed to fit into and enhance a traditional liberal arts curriculum [7]. To this end, the goals or objectives of these programs were, above all, to provide for a good liberal education in computer science as a discipline. In particular, the programs were designed to ensure that the student obtains a solid academic base for further study or upon which to build a long-term successful career in computing. Specifically, successful completion of a course of study in computer science following these curricular guidelines ought to:1. enable the graduate to understand the capabilities, limitations, and ramifications of computing, the state of the art, and current research and development in computer science and related areas;2. to provide the potential for creative contribution to the art;3. to facilitate adaptation to changes in hardware and/or software technology and to new and changing applications areas;4. to prepare one for further study in computer science at the graduate level; and5. to prepare a student for distinguished professional development in a career in computing, or, in fact, many other areas. [6], p 8.

Real World Writing and the English Curriculum

The NCTE's publication of Myra Kogen's Writing in the Business Professions in early 1989 marked an important step in the wider acceptance of professional writing as a legitimate academic discipline. In the past seven years, articles on professional and technical writing have also appeared in collections such as Nelson's Theory in the Classroom, Daiker and Morenberg's The Writing Teacher as Researcher, Smith's Audits ofMeaning, and Ronald and Roskelly's Farther Along which explore wider issues of theory and practice in teaching composition and literature. Nevertheless, many of us who teach writing have been skeptical of admitting the study-and especially the practice-of professional writing into the traditional liberal arts curriculum. For one thing, most of us have already experimented in our writing classes with assignments that seem to offer many of the same benefits as those in the professional writing classroom, for example, collaborative assignments, peer review, and even real world writing ranging from sending letters to state representatives to engaging in types of ethnographic research. Why then should we have our students write memos, press releases, reports, instructions, and the like? Furthermore, though professional writing specialists claim they deal in real world writing, attempts to reproduce this real world in the classroom seem intrinsically doomed to fail since students will likely measure their success not by the response of classmates or even a state representative but by the grades we teachers give them. Finally, we object, professional writing is at best a complex and challenging form of transactional writing, writing to get things done (Britton 18), and any time devoted to it is time stolen from the kinds of writing which offer our students opportunities for reflection, discovery, and creativity. What, then, can professional writing offer to the English writing classroom? My own and my students' recent experience with an MA course in Writing for the Public has confirmed my conviction that introducing professional writing assignments into a traditional writing class offers unique opportunities-at least

Teach Them to See: A Non-Visual Art Course

How does one teach visual art to a blind person? To six or eight blind persons within a single class? How does one do this when the law (and visually impaired persons them selves) insists that physically handi capped students be mainstreamed? Our special campus unit within the College of St. Catherine provides asso ciate degree career preparation in health and human service fields in the context of a traditional liberal arts cur riculum. All students must study some fine arts. Because our small size pre cludes staffing a range of options such as music, theater, or dance, students must fulfill this requirement by choos ing from studio art or art appreciation courses. This arrangement presented no real problem until the 1980s brought visually impaired and hearing-impaired students to our programs in significant numbers. Confronted with this challenge, and encouraged by faculty members already experimenting with adaptations in other subject areas, I proposed offer ing an art course that had been simmer ing in the back of my mind for years? a studio art course:

The Apollonian Investment of Modern Humanist Education: The Examples of Matthew Arnold, Irving Babbitt, and I. A. Richards (Part Two)

art I of this essay (Cultural Critique, No. 1) attempted, by way of a destructive analysis of the educational discourses of three exemplary humanists Matthew Arnold, Irving Babbitt, and I.A. Richards to show that the history of modern humanistic education has been characterized by a recurrent effort to recuperate a logocentric pedagogy in the face of historical ruptures that disclosed the affiliation of humanism with an essentially reactionary bourgeois ideology and its complicity with the repressive capitalistic power structures that have dominated the life of Western industrial societies, especially that of America, in modern times. The first part, it should be emphasized, was not intended simply to focus on past instances of this affiliation and complicity with power. It was intended, rather, to establish the continuity between the will to power informing the history of modern educational discourse and practice and the massive current institutionally sponsored effort to restore the traditional liberal arts curriculum in the University after its disruption by the protest movement by students, blacks, and women of the Vietnam War decade. I am referring specifically to the project inaugurated with the adoption by the Harvard University faculty of the Core Curriculum in 1978 and culminating in the pro-

Survival of Small Private Colleges

Many colleges are troubled by inflation and shrinking applicant pools, but small private colleges are the group most crucially threatened by these conditions. Throughout American history, small liberal arts colleges have managed to retain a place in higher education by attracting a clientele interested in their particular characteristics: a traditional liberal arts curriculum, concern for the individual student and his or her personal development, a small, often rural, campus, and value orientation. The Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education [13] has divided these colleges into two categories. I colleges are highly selective. This article will focus on colleges. Category II colleges closely resemble the 494 colleges that Astin and Lee [4] called invisible because of their smallness, moderate selectivity, and relative obscurity. Their students tend to be local, coming from homes within fifty miles of the college, and a large percentage of their students are from rural or farm backgrounds. Students at Catholic colleges are an exception; they tend to be from urban or suburban areas [5]. Category II students, unlike those from other private colleges, come from lower-income families-28 percent are from families with incomes below $10,000 [19, p. 59]. Forty percent of these students are from families in which neither parent attended college. Their modest high school achievements are accompanied by modest

Institutional Design of Public Service Internships: Conceptual, Academic, and Structural Problems

Abstract This paper is designed to evaluate the types of problems that arise when undergraduate institutions establish public service internship programs in response to student interest in applied field experience prior to entry into the labor market. It deals with the relationship between internships and liberal arts curricula, structural and staffing problems within institutions, and student recruitment for internship positions. Essentially it argues that many program problems emerge because institutions do not completely address the conceptual role of field experience within the context of a traditional liberal arts curriculum.

A General College at Work

W HAT is to be done with large group of young people, graduates of high school, too young for industry, who can gain little from traditional liberal-arts curriculum? Certainly it can hardly be disputed that they still have needs, more imperative perhaps than their more academically apt brethren. Experience with them has demonstrated that they are not without capacity to learn, though failure to achieve on a high level in a traditional curriculum may have discouraged them to such an extent that some have embraced apostleship of inertia. Their interests may be less various than normal group but to them these interests are no less compelling. While not a potential community of scholars, they have possibilities and we have a correlative responsibility. It used to be fashionable to dub this group the lost generation, but we are finding that it is much more challenging to fashion a school to meet their interests, needs, and capacities. Such a school is General College of St. Louis University. This paper will attempt to describe its innovations in point of view, curriculum, and method. The testing program will be but briefly alluded to, for its unique features will be described more fully elsewhere. The General College is designed primarily to provide for personal development of individual. The primary concern of instructors is to help student to know himself and his capacities, to set goals and purposes, and to achieve these purposes by applying his powers to challenging problems. Each is thus stimulated to achieve commensurate with his ability, and does not compete with arbitrary standards set in advance. Such knowledge of student presupposes a thorough testing program, of course, and strenuous efforts have been spent to make program adequate. Various tests of general academic ability have been given, together with tests of special aptitude, personality, attitude, and habits of work. The student is taken where he is in his stage of maturation, and training emphasizes maturing student's adjustment to his present environment and his problems in an evolving society. The newly organized courses, placing emphasis upon experience and marking a notable departure from

Cultural terminal courses in the junior college

It has been a common tendency for junior college executives to regard terminal courses as additions to the traditional offerings, courses which by reason of their popular appeal would increase enrollment by drawing in students not now in attendance at any institution of college rank. Actually many of the terminal courses in the vocational areas have been additions to the traditional liberal arts curriculum, but those cultural courses which have long been fully accepted toward the A.B. degree in the liberal arts colleges have been a part of the junior college offering from the first. The vocational aspects of college training have been the goals toward which many junior college administrators have directed their efforts. This concern for doing something eventually about the terminal functions has caused junior college executives in some instances to overlook the fact that the junior college is terminal already, A study of the enrollment of the Jefferson City Junior College from 1926-27 to 1935-36 emphasized the terminal character of that institution, and prompted a desire to know what was the condition of other Missouri junior colleges in that respect. An inquiry was sent to the administrative heads of ten leading Missouri junior colleges, five private and five public. The public junior colleges were all co-educational; the private institutions included separate schools for both men and women. The executives were asked to state the number of different students enrolled in their institutions within the last ten years, the number now enrolled, the number graduated in the last ten years, and approximately the percentage of their graduates enrolled in other institutions of higher learning.

Fluctuations in General Cultural Information among Undergraduates

In reporting some of the preliminary results of the Study of the Relations of Secondary and Higher Education in Pennsylvania/' the research staff of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching recently threw a bombshell into many academic circles by its announcement that the general culture information of all four under graduate classes was approximately on the same level. With the in telligence means fairly stable, the average freshman did practically as well as the average senior in the four comprehensive fields of foreign literature, fine arts, history and social studies, and general science. The same extraordinary overlapping of performance which has distressed educators in the elementary field apparently persists in even more marked form on the collegiate plane. Obviously, this startling revelation seemed to involve an indictment of the efficacy of our present practices, and many administrators speedily began the hunt for some explanation of these curious results. Its sheer length and wide range of sampling eliminated any question as to the reliability of this particular test battery, but the more diffi cult issue of validity (which many test-builders have evaded) pre sented a more vulnerable point of attack. However, from a common sense approach and in the light of the objectives and content of the tra ditional liberal arts curriculum, there seems little reason for doubting the legitimacy of the opinion that actual growth in cultural mastery'' should be indicated by the scores on the Carnegie blank;?especially since the items comprising it were all prepared by experienced col lege instructors, who, presumably being cultured individuals themselves and in the most strategic position for appraising it in others, would probably emphasize only that material which professional contacts had shown to be most diagnostic of its presence. This, of course, is not a quantitative demonstration of a test's validity but it does create a strong presumption in its favor. The mere fact that a test designed to un cover racial differences fails to do so does not mean that the test as such is no good; it may merely show that no significant race differences exist ! 255