A curriculum that will live in infamy

Note: The Duke Dialogue is a weekly campus publication usually consisting of p.r. propaganda. After they published this piece, I was told thanks, but no thanks to submitting more writing for publication. I understood. I was surprised that they published this thing, which pokes fun at Duke leadership, in the first place.

A little history. Duke's Arts and Sciences dean and its future provost got a bee in their bonnet about changing the undergraduate curriculum. They wanted to leave their mark with some politically correct "visionary" thing. Boy did they ever. The curriculum change - at the time of this writing still being hashed out - was a disaster. It had to be revamped a few years later.

This piece turned out to be prescient. Students complained vehemently about the changes in the curriculum. Quite a few of them had to go to summer school in order to graduate.

Duke Dialogue November 1998

A Curriculum That Will Live in Infamy

by Stuart Rojstaczer

Last night, I had a horrible dream about the future. It was the year 2004, the night before Duke graduation. I was president of the university (after serving for four years as provost I had been promoted), and was facing the greatest challenge of my administrative career. A large mob of angry students and parents outside of Allen Building were burning me in effigy. With every cardboard cutout of my body that they threw onto their rousing bonfire they shouted "Huzzah, huzzah!" (Yes, I've read Moby Dick one time too many.)

I sat in my office, glumly watching the ceremony through my windows, knowing full well that I deserved their hatred. Curriculum 2000 had proven to be my Waterloo. Passed with great fanfare in 1998 as a cure for our academic ennui, it had been a nightmare to implement. Because of bureaucratic snafus and the unavailability of classes that fulfilled the new curriculum requirements, only 23 out of 1600 seniors were eligible for graduation. The remaining 1577 seniors and their parents were outside my office venting their rage.

Seated around a large table in my office, a crack team of advisors burned the midnight oil hoping to find a way through the crisis. Bill Gates sat at one end of the table and my mother on the other. Albert Einstein, Bill Clinton, Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Kissinger, and a tall woman wearing a veil that obscured her identity occupied the other chairs.

My mother stood up, went before a chalk board, drew the infamous matrix of requirements that defined Curriculum 2000, and briefed my other advisors. "This is the problem," she said pointing to the matrix. "No can figure out how to get this thing to work. Now if my sonny boy had listened to me four years ago."

"Mom. This is not the time to gloat!" I said.

"O.K., O.K.," she said. "He's always been so sensitive. Anyway, let's get back to the facts at hand," and she told them the brief and sad history of Curriculum 2000. Problems surfaced from the start. First there were difficulties in deciding which courses satisfied each column in the matrix. Professors were forced to pick at most two columns for each course taught. But the faculty argued that choosing the appropriate columns for courses was a completely arbitrary exercise and that each course involved more than two "competencies" or "focused inquiries.". In protest, they refused to fill out the assignment forms for a full year.

Then there were problems with requiring research. At first, students flooded professors with requests to work on research projects. The associated work load proved too much for the faculty to handle. Plus only a small fraction of the students had any true interest in research and students and faculty felt that the research requirement generally produced work of marginal value. Students and faculty collectively decided to ignore the research requirement hoping that it would be dropped by the Arts & Sciences Council. It never was. Also, there were simply not enough classes in Foreign Language or Science, Technology and Society to meet student needs.

Recognizing that something had to be done, the previous president hired Andersen Consulting to devise solutions. They recommended that: 1) faculty size be slashed by ninety percent; 2) all students be outsourced to universities in developing nations where the cost of education was a fraction of what it was in the U.S.; 3) the burgeoning Office of Curriculum specially created to meet the bureaucratic demands of Curriculum 2000 be abolished; and 4) that the work of filling out the tens of thousands of forms required by the new curriculum be farmed out to an outside accounting firm. The recommendations concerning faculty size and student outsourcing were ignored, but H & R Block was hired to handle the forms. After six months, they abandoned their lucrative contract with the university stating that in comparison to the requirements of Curriculum 2000, federal tax regulations were a piece of cake.

"This is a curriculum that will live in infamy," Roosevelt said.

"Do you have any ideas how we can fix it, President Roosevelt?" I asked.

"Absolutely none," he said. "Your curriculum sounds like a much tougher nut to crack than the Great Depression. You have my sincerest sympathy."

Bill Gates entered the Curriculum 2000 matrix into his laptop computer. "Don't do that!" I screamed. Mr. Gates gave me a look that could fell an oak tree and continued to type. After a few seconds, smoke poured out of the keyboard and the laptop burst into flames.

"Yours isn't the first computer that Curriculum 2000 destroyed," I said.

"Damn," he said. "Solving matrices is usually child's play in Microsoft Excel, but this matrix must have been created by the devil. We won't have the software features you need to solve your curriculum problem until we've launched Windows 2012."

Bill Clinton stood up and said, "Just deny that you ever knew that this curriculum existed. Everyone knows that you played no part in creating it. And if they do find out that you are lying, I've found that a heart felt apology works wonders."

"That strategy won't work, Bill," I said. "I don't have the great approval ratings that you did in 1998."

Then an instantly identifiable voice with a heavy German accent filled the room. "You must understand, that the world's balance in higher education has changed," said Mr. Kissinger. "The United States no longer has hegemony, and we must act accordingly."

"So what do you suggest?"

"Peace is at hand," he said. "Abandon all requirements and declare victory."

"We already tried that at many universities in the 1970s. It was a complete disaster," I said.

"What about Brown University?" Mr. Kissinger said. "It seems to work for them."

Albert Einstein went to the chalk board and wrote down a few incredibly lengthy equations. "It's very simple," he said. "As a student moves through the curriculum he or she gains mass. The problem is not with the curriculum. It's with the mass."

"You mean that if all of our students go on a diet this crisis will end?" I asked.

"No. Your students are fine. You, on the other hand, need to lose thirty pounds."

Finally, all eyes turned to the diminutive woman in the veil. We collectively understood that she would have a solution to Duke's dilemma. She stood up slowly and spoke in a near whisper. "Gentleman and Mrs. Rojstaczer, you are all too smart for your own good," she said. "Fixing this curriculum is super easy." She went to the board and with a flourish erased all of the columns in the matrix. The curriculum had been instantly reduced to a few rows of requirements. "You want to require a foreign language, right?" We nodded in unison. "You want to require students to take science and math, too?" We nodded again. "Requiring research is unrealistic and unmanageable, correct?"

"Absolutely," I said.

"Then let me ask you one final question. If students were required to take courses in arts and humanities, foreign languages, science and mathematics and social sciences what are the odds that they would, save for skills in research, acquire all of the skills and "focused inquiries" listed in the columns of the matrix?"

"The probability is almost 100%," I said. "A fair percentage will even pick up some research skills along the way."

"Well then there you have it," she said. "The matrix is completely superfluous." My advisors broke out into spontaneous applause.

"That lady sure knows what she is talking about," my mother said and opened the doors that led out to a balcony overlooking the mob scene below. I walked onto the balcony hand in hand with the woman in the veil. The crowd turned in our direction and watched as we raised our arms and flashed the victory sign. Sensing that a solution to their problems had been found, they halted their barrage of personal insults and cries of protest. A silence filled the air. "With the help of this mystery woman," I said, "we have found a way that assures that all students will graduate tomorrow.

"Huzzah, huzzah!" the crowd cheered.

Invigorated by their response, I was beaming. I turned toward the mystery woman. "How did you do it?" I asked.

"Creating a curriculum is just like making a party," she said. "Just follow the K.I.S.S. rule."

"K.I.S.S?" I asked.

"You know," she said. "Keep It Simple, Stupid," and as she spoke she tore off her veil.

The next thing I remember was being abruptly woken. My wife was shaking me. "What on earth were you dreaming about? You were screaming, and you looked as if you had been poisoned."

"It was horrible," I said. "Martha Stewart outsmarted us all. Me, Einstein, Clinton, Roosevelt, Kissinger, Gates, and even my mother." Tears were forming in my eyes.

"I seem to be missing something."

"She was right, too. We've overintellectualized the whole process of creating a new curriculum. We need to abandon academic pretense and keep our curriculum simple. This matrix idea is completely unworkable."

"Sounds like shop talk to me."

"I think I'll write an op-ed piece about it."

"OK, but do everyone a favor, and get a few hours more sleep before you do anything else. I'm sure that Martha would recommend the same. What was she doing in your dream anyway? I didn't think that she was your type."

"It's a long story.""I'll wait to hear about it in the morning," she said, and we both went back to sleep.