New Core requirements include social justice, diversity classes

By Johanna Mitchell

Beginning fall 2009, all incoming students will be required to take courses centered on social justice and civic engagement. Business and engineering majors will have to complete a diversity course and four units of fine arts, and a campus writing center may be in use by faculty and tutors.

On Friday, Santa Clara's Board of Trustees approved a proposal for the new core curriculum, which offers alterations to existing requirements.

The proposal was drafted by the Core Curriculum Revision Committee, a team of seven faculty members appointed last February from all departments on campus. The committee spent the past 14 months drafting the document.

"We are trying to make the core reflect Santa Clara's mission as a university a little bit more clearly to show the distinctiveness of a Santa Clara education," said Chad Raphael, committee chair and communication professor.

Students will be required to enroll in courses centered around the experiential learning of social justice and civic engagement, both of which will ideally contain off-campus components.

These requirements should expand what the Arrupe Partnerships for Community-Based Learning are already doing and provide students with new ways to learn first hand, teaching them to "participate in and contribute actively" to community service, philanthropy and the political system, according to the proposal.

Currently, there is only an ethnic or women and gender studies requirement for Arts and Sciences majors, but the new core will include a one-class diversity requirement for all students.

One of the biggest innovations in the new core is the implementation of the Pathway System for selecting already-existing core requirements. Students will choose a set of four required courses from pre-determined lists that fall under common themes, such as business or the environment. Upon making their decision, students must submit a one-page declaration of their pathway, as well as a short reflection paper following its completion.

This process, Raphael said, should encourage intentional learning, in which each student has the opportunity to make thoughtful decisions about choosing required courses, rather than just registering for classes based on convenience. Raphael also thought the system would help foster a culture of interdepartmental communication.

The new core also revises the current introductory English progression, which will cover many of the same topics, but in the form of a two-course sequence called Critical Thinking and Writing. The sequence should be taught to the same group of students by the same professor over a period of 20 weeks.

Rumors of the committee's omission of Western Civilization in the new core have circled in past weeks, myths which Raphael said hold no truth.

"Inevitably, when you have a document of this length, there's been some misinterpretation and concern about things that aren't going to happen," said Raphael of the 32-page document. "We are not throwing out Western Culture." In order to accommodate for proposed smaller class sizes, the committee suggested an increase in tenure-track faculty, those who would become invested in the courses and their success. The committee also proposed the addition of a campus writing center, a facility that could be used for faculty development as well as a central location for tutoring, and it suggests investing in more lower-level science tutors.

Also, after the completion of one math and science course in each discipline, students will now be required to enroll in a "science, technology, and society" course, instead of choosing another math or science course.

Contact Johanna Mitchell at (408) 554-4546 or jjmitchell@scu.edu.