John,

I can certainly appreciate your stance on distribution requirements. The spirit of a liberal arts education is to allow and encourage students to engage in a significant breadth and depth of study, and attempting to steer that exploration can interfere with a student’s educational agenda. In the same sense, a liberal arts education is lacking if it produces graduates without an academically diverse background.

As you point out, Middlebury students generally arrive with four years of vigorous secondary school under their belts. However, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to require students to continue to branch out during college. Middlebury, as you correctly assessed, is extremely expensive. I would hope that someone with a $200,000 degree would have at least some basic understanding of history, for example, or at least fundamental deductive reasoning skills. To dismiss Middlebury’s duty to produce graduates with facility in many disciplines on the basis that they may or may not have been exposed to them in high school does students a disservice.

Many students talk about “getting around requirements” or “taking the easy way out” by, for example, taking a CW in the math department (for a math-brained student) or taking logic for a DED requirement (for a humanities-prone individual). This isn’t avoiding requirements at all, but living exactly in the spirit of them: an english lit major who had a visceral reaction to algebra probably won’t get much out of calculus, but could benefit from the deductive reasoning that logic offers. Similarly, the finer points of Kafka might be lost on a physics major who would greatly enjoy learning about important mathematicians while honing his or her writing skills. It’s unlikely that either student would take those classes without the requirement, and it’s undeniable that both would benefit.

To many, the goal of a liberal arts education is to dedicate four years to studying whatever seems interesting. Unfortunately, this attitude will not always produce the dynamic and multi-faceted graduates which Middlebury prides itself on cultivating.

I hope I’ve at least provided some food for thought in your considerations of distribution requirements.

Parker

Thanks for your comments. I will leave it to my faculty colleagues who glance at this blog to offer up some arguments for distribution requirements at Middlebury.

I, personally, have some strong views on what students who graduate with a college degree ought to know, and maybe that will be a soon-to-be post on this blog. I will say that while I have those views, I share some of what you voice here. I am not so sure our current requirements, which in essence were passed by the faculty in the early-to-mid 1990s, with some minor tweaks after, are the most relevant for our students today.

I proposed two years ago to our Ed Affairs Comm that we revisit our distribution requirements and reduce them significantly and/or simplify them significantly, but the faculty did not agree that change was needed.

I think the issue of requirements needs some kind of review, along with our very conservative and restrictive stance (relative to about 70 other liberal arts colleges) regarding the ability of our students to take even 1 course Pass/Fail. That is, as I understand the latest information, we might be the last liberal arts college (among 70 queried) to not allow a P/F option for a regular semester course. I have changed my position on this over the course of my 26 years here, and hope we have a chance to discuss this issue, too, sometime this year.

I will bring the issue of distribution requirements up once again with our Ed Affairs Committee and see how interested they are now in this issue. Perhaps students sponsoring an open forum on this issue (and the P/F issue) might be a good idea.

Ron

First off, as a competitive and selective college in terms of admissions, any Middlebury College student likely has had a varied academic experience upon arriving to Middlebury as a freshman. From the admissions website:

“Middlebury does not require a specific secondary school program of study, but we suggest:

Four years of English
Four years of one foreign language
Four years of mathematics and/or computer science
Three or more years of laboratory science
Three or more years of history
Some study of music, art or drama”

Clearly, most Middlebury students have already experienced a wide swath of academic options before taking their first Middlebury class. If a student has already taken AP Calc BC, AP Biology, AP Chemisty and AP Physics in high school, but doesn’t want to take a SCI or DED at Midd because they want to focus on languages or a social science, why should they have to?

Some of Middlebury’s academic peers agree that distribution requirements aren’t an essential factor in providing a liberal arts education (Amherst, Brown) and I would laugh at anyone who would tell me that an Amherst grad’s academic experience is any less varied, broad, or ‘diverse’ as a Midd grad’s; I would go so far as to say that a “truly” liberal liberal arts education is one that endows its students both with the responsibility and the freedom to choose their own academic path. Middlebury College students are adults when they arrive on campus as freshman, and they should be the masters of their own academic ship. Students should have complete freedom over the classes they want to take in their four year, 36 course, $200,000+ Middlebury experience.

I would really appreciate hearing a truly convincing argument in favor of distribution requirements.

Sincerely,

John

RL

Thank you for the dialogue on this matter! And absolutely, offering concrete alternatives was the aim of my comment (and proposal), I did not intend in any way for it to be disparaging. I never knew the SEAC existed before reading this blog and I am contacting my senators about this matter immediately.

I can also greatly appreciate the concern over the issue of increasing the requirements: which is why what I initially proposed and will continue to propose is a four/five of seven type system, similar to how the academic requirements are given, which would not (or barely) increase the requirements. It would not be possible or reasonable to ask students to take a course pertaining to all the academic areas and all cultural & civilizations areas and I would never advocate for forcing all to be mandated. However to be competitive in the global arena and the complex and dynamic times in which we live (as one of your questions asked President Liebowitz) it will be to the benefit of the Middlebury community to appreciate and respect on an equal plane all areas of the world.

Looking forward to a continued discussion on the curriculum of our great institution!

Yours respectfully,
Brittany

Perhaps engaging the SEAC and offering some concrete alternatives would be productive. Just be careful about the number of “requirements” you begin to propose, or at least consider the consequences. Faculty have their issues with requirements (which areas of the curriculum are you saying are more important than mine by requiring some and not others?), and so do students (if one is required to do more and more courses, one has less freedom to choose one’s course of study, and the chances to double major, something I don’t personally like or endorse, will be reduced).

So engage other students, your faculty advisers, the SEAC, and propose some alternatives.

Ron