[Discussion] General Education for Graduate Education From the issue dated No vember 1, 2002

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General Education for Graduate Education  From the issue dated November 1,
2002 	
	

 <<...OLE_Obj...>> 	General Education for Graduate Education By
CATHARINE R. STIMPSON  The graduate students who came to see me had teaching
in the university's general-education program on their mind. Their brief:
They didn't like it. They had to prepare too much unfamiliar material.
Deflected away from their specialties, they were wasting time.  Privately, I
was appalled. "You are scholars and intellectuals," I said. "Surely, our
responsibility is to explore what is unfamiliar to us and to others." My
piety was treated as what it must have seemed -- a piety. Fortunately, I had
not said "our joy and responsibility," which would have doubled the dose of
piety.  I shifted from principle to expediency. "If you go on the academic
job market, teaching general education will be a part of many of the job
descriptions you will read. Learning how to do it now will be helpful
later," I cajoled. "We'll learn how to do it when we have to do it," I was
told. "We won't get near a job if we haven't done research we can publish in
our discipline."  Credit them, I thought, for understanding the harshness of
the job market they were soon to enter and its incentives to be
conventionally professional. But I was also worried about their intellectual
growth. "What ideas particularly matter to you? What fields?" I asked. "I'm
working on gender," a woman told me. And what was she teaching in the
general-education course? "Genesis," she said. "But that's one of the
founding global myths about gender," I answered with excitement. "But I've
already read it," she answered, "in an undergraduate course."  For several
reasons, that encounter haunts me. Psychologically, I wonder if I did not
behave like one of the platitude-dripping fogies whom I had satirized and
endured when I was a graduate student. Intellectually, the experience has
evolved in my mind until it has become a parable about the travails of our
appreciation of depth in contemporary culture. Why would a very smart
graduate student assume that one reading of a profound text -- in
translation to boot -- would be sufficient for understanding it? Why would a
once-over of the surface of Genesis be considered an OK interpretative
gesture?  Educationally, my exchange has also become a parable about general
education in the contemporary university. If coherently and passionately
taught, general education does much good for both students and teachers.
Where else would a graduate student interested in gender read Genesis? Yet,
graduate students often resent teaching general education and may fail to
see how it has enriched their own lives. Doing so, they are both influenced
by, and mimic, too many of their mentors and professors for whom gen ed is
an unwanted grind for serious faculty members and gruel for undergraduates.
Yet, the graduate students of today will, if they become academics, control
the curriculum of tomorrow. If they are indifferent to general education,
what will happen to it when they are in charge? I am not the first to ask
this question, but I am, I believe, the first to propose the following
innovation: general education for graduate education.  Surprisingly, the
reform movement in graduate education has done comparatively little with the
curriculum -- although it has supported interdisciplinary work, and although
individual disciplines have vigorously examined their curriculums. The
greater concerns of the reform movement have been graduate students as a
labor force, pedagogy, career training, and the processes of graduate
education -- for example, mentoring or the time it takes to extract a degree
from graduate school.  What would general education for graduate education
be like? Designed for people who have chosen advanced inquiry as their
vocation, it would not just be an upscale version of general education for
undergraduates. Its purpose would be to cultivate a sophisticated
understanding of the nature and structures of advanced inquiry itself. One
of its byproducts could be a greater appreciation of the place of a
nonspecialized curriculum. But general education for graduate education
would also serve two of the overarching purposes of general education for
undergraduates as it has developed in the United States: the provision of a
common intellectual experience to an increasingly diverse student body, and
the exploration of what it means to be a particular kind of person.  Take
each of those two in turn.  First, creating a common intellectual
experience. Quite possibly, lurking below general education for
undergraduates in the United States has been an unconscious nostalgia for
the role of the liberal arts in the medieval university. There were set
books. Eventually, there was, in scholasticism, a set methodology. The
faculty of arts was the gateway to the professional schools of theology,
law, and medicine.  However, some explicit justifications of general
education have been a response not to the backward pull of the medieval
university but to the very present push of a burgeoning, growing modern
America that has been sending more students of varying backgrounds to
college. In the mid-20th century, general education was to create a
classroom experience that would glue together cohorts of such diverse
students. For James Bryant Conant, who, as president of Harvard University,
was the moving force behind its 1945 report on general education
colloquially and commonly known as the "Red Book," universities were to
choose students not because they shared a similar social background, but
because they signaled the promise and ability to join a meritocratic elite.
General education would teach those future leaders about the connections
between truth and freedom, and, as a consequence, give them the tools to
shape a shared democratic future.  Graduate students today are as diverse as
the global map. The Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York
University, my institution, enrolls men and women from more than 100
countries. Their differences are academic as well as demographic. Merely
medium in size, we give these students a choice of 45 programs with 200
different tracks. Diversity and choice extract a price. The graduate
experience can -- and usually does -- become isolated within a department or
program. That is where seminars, advisers, dissertation committees, holiday
parties, and brown-bag lunches dwell. Such a social and educational
architecture can provide a sense of a secure home, but, negatively, it can
also breed a sense of fragmentation and isolation. As I have watched efforts
to organize graduate assistants, I have concluded that one of their
attractions, especially to the most active organizers, has been the sense of
cross-university solidarity they offer.  The common intellectual experience
that could be the foundation of general education in graduate education, and
that would set it apart from undergraduate general education, could be a
history, global in scope, of institutions of advanced inquiry themselves.
The modern research university did not arrive wrapped in cellophane in a UFO
that happened to land in Berlin in the 19th century. Significantly, the
institutions of advanced inquiry have not exclusively been universities.  I
think, for example, of European academies or of today's private biotech
laboratories. Graduate students have chosen to spend a big chunk of their
lives in a research university with a complex but mappable past that
connects the university to major social and intellectual movements.  A
teachable history would include four themes: the evolution of the
contemporary disciplines and their paradigms (that is, why graduate students
confront the fields they do); the demography of scholars and intellectuals
(that is, who graduate students are and have been); the relations between an
ideal of freedom of inquiry and inquiry itself (that is, the moral
conditions of scholarship); and the governance of institutions of inquiry
(that is, who controls and pays for them). Amputated from their own history
as they now are, graduate students have an incomplete identity and a
foreshortened understanding of the nature and contests of inquiry itself. So
wounded, how can they be expected to advance and defend inquiry fully,
spaciously, and carefully?  Such a course in history might include Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein, published in 1818 and written by a young woman, the
daughter of a radical feminist and wife of a radical poet, conversant with
the scientific theories of her time, but unable to get a university
education because of her gender. Her character Victor Frankenstein is a
gifted scientist who wishes both to discover the causes of life and to
create new life. He succeeds, but then runs away from the man he has
manufactured, whom he finds monstrous. Alone, despised, Frankenstein's
creation goes on a rampage. Frankenstein's sin is twofold: his hubris in
imitating God and creating life, and his heartlessness in refusing to
nurture and educate and love his new Adam. His story is also a vehicle for
expressing a pervasive fear of science and technology out of control, a fear
that graduate students of all disciplines must understand.  Studying Mary
Shelley in a general-education course for graduate students could also
extend to the work of her descendants from all fields who are exploring the
moral consequences of scientific inquiry, including the invention of nuclear
weapons and the cultivation of stem cells. Perhaps most profoundly,
Shelley's descendants are asking if scientific creativity has not changed
the definition of being human. The borders between man and machine,
especially between mind and computer, are no longer so sharply demarcated.
Nor are the borders between the human and other species. How purely human am
I if I have a pig valve implanted in my once-sputtering heart?  Indeed, a
second purpose of general education for undergraduates has been to nurture a
particular kind of person. For Conant, that person would fulfill his unique
functions in life, but he would also be able to sustain a common democratic
sphere and the joint culture he had inherited in the company of others. At
my university, our version of general education, the Morse Academic Plan
(MAP), in which the graduate students who visited me were teaching, also has
the formation of human capital in mind. Its goal is an intellectually agile
and buoyant person who can adapt to a changing world. Our MAP brochure
states that "no fixed canon of knowledge [can] provide an adequate
preparation for students today." It goes on that our "sequences introduce
students to the modes of humanistic and scientific inquiry ... help students
become independent and creative thinkers who will possess the skills,
background, and social awareness to thrive in dynamic circumstances."  This
second character-building purpose of general education has been a
battleground. Indeed, the history of general education has arguably been a
fight between those who believe general education should explore a set of
texts, a core curriculum or canon, and those who believe that it should
foster a set of behaviors, a core or canonical character. If so, general
education has not surprisingly been a microcosm of the tension between a
vision of undergraduate education as intellectual or professional training
and a vision of undergraduate education as moral development. General
education for graduate education could dissolve that tension by encouraging
habits of mind that sustain a fundamental commitment to learning.
Cosmopolitanism helps to define those habits of mind. By cosmopolitanism, I
mean neither urbane sophistication (think bright young things on TV drinking
cosmopolitans) nor the latent role that the sociologist Alvin Gouldner, in
the 1950s, saw academics playing. As Judith Shapiro, the president of
Barnard College, has written, Gouldner saw cosmopolitans as "those members
of the academic community whose orientation was toward their profession."
By comparison, locals "were focused on the institution, where their primary
loyalty lay." The book Cultivating Humanity, by Martha Nussbaum, a scholar
of the classics, philosophy, and the law, is a leading force for the serious
contemporary definition of cosmopolitanism, the trait of someone who is a
citizen of a homeland and of the ever-expanding, head-banging universe of
ideas.  Crucial though cosmopolitanism is, it is but one feature in what I
now call -- with praise -- codependency among scholars, researchers, and
intellectuals. Codependency may seem a strange term of praise. It usually
means interlocking weaknesses, the relationship between the sadist and the
masochist, or between the alcoholic and the enabler. However, codependency
can have the far more affirmative meaning of a relationship among equals who
recognize that they have common interests as well as complementary strengths
and who know their individual well-being depends upon the well-being of the
others. Codependency can also mean a way of thinking.  A codependent is
collaborative, willing to exchange insights and ideas, even at the risk of
making a damn fool of herself or himself. A codependent is connective, able
to function as a part of various networks of information. She or he prizes
curiosity, wondering what might be around the corner, or between the lines,
or in the folds of the cosmos. Crucially, a codependent is comparative, able
to see similarities without wanting all phenomena to converge, and equally
able to see dissimilarities without wanting all phenomena to fall away in
showers of fragments. The codependent sensibility is perhaps equivalent to
the imagination as Alfred North Whitehead, the philosopher, defined it. In
The Aims of Education, he flatly declared that the great function of
universities is to animate the imagination:  "Imagination is not to be
divorced from the facts: it is a way of illuminating the facts. It works by
eliciting the general principles which apply to the facts, as they exist,
and then by an intellectual survey of alternative possibilities which are
consistent with these principles. It enables men to construct an
intellectual vision of a new world, and it preserves the zest of life by the
suggestion of satisfying purposes."  When I have tested these ideas about
general education for graduate education out on friends and colleagues, I
have met with three reactions. The first has been confusion and distaste for
making codependency a nice word. To that, I answer with some trite yammering
about language's malleability.  The second, more common reaction has been
the fear that graduate students, who live in a world of expanding databases
and exploding knowledge, do not need anything more to take in, especially
something as vague as general education for graduate education. I ask such
respondents to consider Whitehead's theory of the imagination, and the
possibility that an imaginative general education -- with its stress on
organizing principles, fresh interpretations, and a profound liveliness --
might not provide a way of coping with the constant inrush of information,
facts, and factoids.  The third, and most common, response has been the
insistence that graduate education is training in doing research in a
specialty. To be sure, these voices admit, graduate students should probably
learn how to behave in a classroom of their own, but the real purpose of
graduate education is expertise in specialized research.  That third
response is utterly tedious, a symptom of the difficulties that general
education in graduate education might ameliorate. The response is not
utterly wrong. A graduate degree is a research degree. But the response
reinforces that tired old dichotomy between disciplinary and
interdisciplinary work, or, to put the distinction in other words, between
specialized and interdisciplinary work. The disciplinary and the
interdisciplinary, or the specialized and the interdisciplinary, should not
be an either/or construction. They, too, are codependents, part of a
both/and construction.  Interdisciplinarians are hugely codependent; they
need to know something of all the disciplines if they are to transcend
disciplinary borders. How, in corporate parlance, can we think outside that
much-maligned box if there is no box there to think outside of?
Disciplinarians are also codependent, since they need the
interdisciplinarians to ask new questions and make fresh networks and
connections. Any worthwhile institution of advanced inquiry needs them both.
Any scholar must understand them both. General education in graduate
education would make that point clear.  Even more important, general
education for graduate education would insist that our survival depends on
bringing to bear a multiplicity of perspectives upon life's forces and
phenomena, its movements and complexities. Our constructed sense of life
must be as rich and thick and hybrid and multiplicitous as life itself.  Let
me offer one stark, contemporary example: a man planning a major act of
bioterrorism. We won't get him -- in all meanings of "get" -- if all that we
do is to declare war and have law enforcement target him. We also need the
artist to imagine him; the humanist to hear his words and translate his
language, and understand his history and religion; the social scientist to
map his politics, ethnography, and psychology; and the scientist to decipher
what his weapon is and how to disarm it. Only with collaboration will we
begin to be able to understand the terrorist, and only if we understand him
can we really stop him and the next generation of terrorists he might be
recruiting.  Yet, general education in graduate education would also defend
the necessities of specialization. As our life becomes more and more complex
and differentiated, specialization is desirable and necessary. It does focus
thought. It does force us to push further and further into a question.
Encouraging depth, it discourages shallowness and superficiality -- a
constant risk of interdisciplinarity. To be sure, specialization also breeds
rigid and isolated departmental structures, the "silos" of contemporary
jargon about advanced inquiry. Isolated departments fear and disdain The
Other, departments in another field or budgetary unit.  Specialization also
nurtures a fetishistic attachment to one subject, activity, or method.
Francis Bacon, a founder of modern scientific thought, was aware of those
dangers. In Novum Organum, published in 1620, he sought to reconstruct the
sciences. The book is also a profound analysis of the ways in which the mind
can go wrong. Of specialization, he wrote:  "Men become attached to certain
particular sciences and speculations, either because they fancy themselves
the authors and inventors thereof, or because they have bestowed the
greatest pains upon them and become most habituated to them. But men of this
kind, if they betake themselves to philosophy and contemplations of a
general character, distort and color them in obedience to their former
fancies; a thing especially to be noted in Aristotle, who made his natural
philosophy a mere bondservant to his logic, thereby rendering it contentious
and well nigh useless."  Moreover, the knowledge that specialization
generates may seem notoriously arcane, useless, frivolous, worthy of nothing
but the Golden Fleece Award that Sen. William Proxmire from Wisconsin once
invented and gave to government grants he found especially ludicrous.
However, when trouble comes, and it will, the knowledge that has seemed
arcane becomes essential. Scholarship about Afghanistan no longer seems so
peripheral to American officials and citizens. I often think that great
research centers are like gas stations. Drivers speed and zoom past them
cavalierly, but then a driver suddenly needs gas or oil or spare parts, and
heads straight for the once-ignored station. Society likes the credentials
the university offers, but speeds past them -- until it has to know
something unexpectedly. Happily, there the university is with its robes and
funny hats and nerds and suddenly useful pumps of specialized knowledge.  To
institute experimental programs in general education in graduate education
on most campuses would require a shift in the culture of the research
university that faculty members -- who are responsible for a university's
intellectual climate and curriculum -- would have to lead. However, in
autumn 2000, my graduate school, with the support of two private donors,
constructed a small seedbed, a group of 10 students drawn from across the
university and from a variety of disciplines.  They were chosen as
participants either through nomination by a faculty member or by
self-nomination, and were studying epidemiology, history, comparative
literature, economics, music, neurosciences, public policy, and education.
The group is known, not very imaginatively, as the Graduate Forum.  They
meet at least once a month, and their deliberations are summarized on a
forum Web site. The purpose of the deliberations is deceptively simple --
nothing so grand as an exploration of the history of institutions of
advanced inquiry. The students are to discuss their work with each other,
baring the fundamental assumptions and methods behind it and justifying its
importance. It's a start.  The first evaluations from the students are now
in, and this is what they praise: the chance to make friends who have
different ideas; the opportunity to experiment in a setting in which they
are questioned but not subjected to hostile fire; and, finally, the new
clarity about their own work that they achieve by having to explain its
assumptions to peers and by comparing their assumptions to those that govern
their peers. What they want next, they said, is to explore the possibility
of a common project, something they could do together, an opportunity to
engage in inquiries that might become more than the sum of their parts.  I
have wondered what would happen if this seedbed were to grow beyond its
initial frame. What if it were to lead to a more systematic program of
general education in graduate schools? One can imagine learning how Genesis
changed from being a canonical text in the faculty of arts and the faculty
of theology in the medieval university of the West to being a selected text
in a general-education course in an urban university at the turn of the 21st
century. Or, one can imagine learning how Aristotle, working but a few
decades after the codification of Genesis, changed from being one of the
greatest polymaths and interdisciplinarians who ever lived to being the
object of Francis Bacon's scorn. And one can even imagine a community of
inquiry, the graduate-school general-education seminar, finding in such
explorations that all-too-rare wonder: a codependent pleasure.  Catharine R.
Stimpson is graduate dean of arts and sciences at New York University. This
essay is adapted from her presidential speech at the annual meeting of the
Association of Graduate Schools.