Ian Wilhelm: Why did you want to reform your approach to general education?

Belkys Torres: We were engaging in conversations with students and understanding structural barriers to student success. We hadn't really thought about our universitywide learning outcomes as they correlated to gen ed for over 20 years. Our gen-ed-reform effort is one of three complementary initiatives happening at the same time at our institution, including revising academic regulations and developing a shared model of advising. 

What wasn’t working was having nine separate, independently managed gen-ed curricula — one for each of our schools at the Pittsburgh campus and one for each of our regional campuses. That made it really hard to define shared learning goals for our undergraduates, to assess whether a program was working, and to support students transferring either externally or between our schools and campuses.

Paul Stob: We had a lot of students asking why we even bother with gen ed. There was no clear, purposeful pathway through their education. They were on their own to cobble together a bunch of different classes, which hopefully would add up to something. That might have worked 20 years ago, when our student demographics were very different, but we have first-gen students who don’t have parents they can talk to about what the different disciplines are and how they should put together a meaningful gen-ed program. We had to create a more purposeful structure that would allow students to move intentionally and meaningfully through the curriculum.

Roosevelt Montás: In most places, gen ed isn’t guided by a vision of a foundational education that should be common to all students, looking at them not just as professionals in the making but as full human beings. We’re trying to stimulate conversations among faculty and campuses to get back to some shared notion of what an educated person looks like — what are the types of knowledge, debates, and intellectual experiences that should be at the foundation of any specialization.  

Wilhelm: As I understand it, your work is rooted in four principles — the study of works of major cultural significance, or great books, as defined by the faculty; small discussion-based classes, a common intellectual experience, and a nondisciplinary course design and teaching. Is that right?

Montás: Yes. Now, there's always concern that a general-education program will become an instrument for ideological imposition — whether through the state legislature or entrenched interests within the faculty. This idea, to which most of us are allergic, has entrenched the idea of particularity — professors teaching whatever they want as a function of their discipline. Our four principles uphold the notion that general education happens around relationships between faculty and students — that there’s personal mentorship and modeling and relational learning in small, discussion-based classes where people look each other in the eye and talk about questions concerning our common human experience.

Paul Stob: Our first-year core curriculum has two classes — one in the fall and one in the spring — that all students take: “Being Human” and “Science and Technology.” They’re taught by faculty members from across the university — small seminars capped at 15 students. These classes aren’t about content knowledge or expertise. They’re about larger questions. We don't have students take exams, but we want them to show up, having read and thought about the material, and have good conversations. We have shorter texts so we can have more voices in the room. These discussion sections are all taught from a common syllabus, so all 70 sections have a shared syllabus, with a little wiggle room — there are a few days when faculty members can change things up.

Torres: We designed a competency-based program to span a student's whole college experience — a four-year opportunity — and we had three major goals:  to make it clear to students why a liberal-arts education still matters, connected to learning in their majors and meeting graduate-school or professional goals; to create a program that is accessible; and to do all of this without increasing students' time to degree or creating more of a financial burden for them. We’re consolidating nine separate curricula into one universitywide program. It’s part of our commitment that every graduate will be able to put knowledge into action; to analyze, synthesize, and exercise judgment; to communicate effectively; to thrive in a data- and AI-powered world; to engage across differences; and to flourish throughout their lives.

Stob: We have “core capacities” — written and creative expression, systemic and structural reasoning, cultural and interpretive investigation, data literacy, and computational thinking, and social and ethical reasoning. Those are reflective of the kinds of skills and perspectives we want all students to have, regardless of their major, by the time they graduate.

Wilhelm: Roosevelt, do you see gen-ed reform as a trend in higher ed right now? Sometimes it seems to be driven by political pressure. There are efforts to bring back civics education and the study of Western civilization. How would you describe what’s going on?

Montás: We are in a moment of reassessment and reckoning. There’s a recognition in the broader culture that something is broken about our civic and discursive capacity. Our body politics is ailing, and part of the problem is in how we talk — or don’t talk — to each other. The thinking about revising gen ed includes asking about essential norms and histories providing a foundation for a communal conversation for self-governance. 

Wilhelm: How do you think about the role of faculty in these efforts?

Torres: We recognized we needed to bring in the faculty early in our process. We weren’t going to get buy-in on something we created on our own. We hosted a series of listening sessions in person and online for faculty. I won’t say those were easy conversations. There was difficulty understanding one another, especially with faculty members from multiple disciplines who are incredibly student-centered and focused on learning. We were sharing draft documents, asking for comments, and we arrived at 16 learning goals after more than 100 subject-matter experts talked with us. We just approved two new committees of the Faculty Senate that will maintain and assess this program in perpetuity. 

Wilhelm: What about when you’re asking faculty to teach something other than their discipline?

Montás: Some degree of re-education is involved. The general-education space stands in contrast to specialized, disciplinary education, and it hardly exists in our universities. Our universities are disciplinary spaces. Sometimes the faculty needs to be put into a room with the doors locked and not allowed out until they come up with, say, 20 texts they think every graduate of their institution should read by graduation. Part of why this doesn’t happen in our universities is there aren’t administrative structures to conceive of common courses.

Wilhelm: How do you plan to measure outcomes of these reforms?

Torres: We’re developing a multiyear, cyclical-assessment plan for program improvement. We’ll ask whether programs are helping students such that in their first job interviews or graduate-admissions conversation, they’re comfortable speaking to the skills, knowledge, aptitudes, and abilities they’ve built and developed. Also, can they prove they’ve built and developed those? We’re building tools to showcase students’ progressive learning — microcredentialing opportunities for students who want to pursue interdisciplinary learning, badging opportunities for students who want to participate in co-curricular and high-impact practices. There’s a reflection component, asking students to connect the dots between their interdisciplinary learning in and outside the curriculum — whether they feel confident we’ve trained them to build and meet competencies.

Stob: We have internal assessment, collecting data and feedback, and then we have accreditation-based assessment. We do pre- and post-surveys, asking students, for example, whether they’re open to taking classes in fields they didn’t know about, or how comfortable they now are listening to opinions they disagree with. So far our data and feedback has been encouraging.

Wilhelm: How much do you lean on the argument that gen ed is good work-force preparation, with employers valuing skills the liberal arts teach, versus the idea that this education is important for our civic fabric or for students in their personal lives? 

Montás: There’s a paradox here: A liberal education equips you for a whole bunch of different professional functions and fields, but that education really works when you’re not pursuing it for the sake of that. In my experience, students are hungry for it. They want college to give them a set of professional skills and marketable credentials, but that’s not all they want. They’re looking for existential grounding — orientation for their lives — and these courses are a space for that. Nothing transforms you like self-reflection and exploring your inner life. 

Torres: Those of us engaged in gen-ed reform agree that we want students capable of understanding and explaining how they've developed knowledge, habits, relationships, and a sense of purpose that supports their well-being and fulfillment throughout life. 

Stob: Reform is hard, but it's really worth it. I can’t imagine going back to the system we had before. We see the difference it’s made for students and faculty who are excited to be part of something new that gets them out of their disciplinary silos and allows them to engage in conversations across boundaries.