Core Conversations

April 25, 2024

Get ready, everyone! We’re about to start talking about the Core.

Work will begin this summer in clarifying the process that the anticipated review of the Core Curriculum in 2024-2025 will follow.
 
Of course, if you teach in it, or advise students—and that’s probably most of us, considering the audience of this message—you’re already talking about the Core. But it’s likely that the character of the conversation is about to change.
 
I know that I think a lot about how the courses that I teach contribute to the goals of the Core, and I speak with my colleagues about how I can change them to improve that contribution. But, if I’m being honest, I may not think quite so much about, say, the Social Science Elective (no offense intended, sociologists and political scientists!), and the distinctive contribution that it makes. Likewise, of course I know that the Core is not simply a list of boxes for students to tick. But when I’ve wrapped up three weeks of advising, and I’ve seen Core classes listed as literal boxes to tick on dozens of students’ DegreeWorks pages (no offense intended, DegreeWorks!), it might take a special effort to focus my attention on the integrity of the Core as a unified whole.
 
But as we look ahead to the fall, we will all need to invest renewed effort into thinking about all of the Core’s particular parts, even those outside of our typical areas of teaching, and into thinking about the Core as a whole. We have some outstanding resources that can serve as reminders, and, once your final grades are submitted, you might take a few moments to enjoy a cool glass of lemonade along with equally refreshing review of the Core’s structure, elements, and goals.
 
And it will also profit us to think about the kinds of conversations that we want to have about the Core. Given the outsized contribution that CAS makes to providing the courses that comprise the Core, we’ll want to make sure that our voices are prominent ones in those discussions. But we’ll also want to bear in mind that it is the faculty as a whole who “own” the Core, and that we’ll be involved in conversations with other faculty who might be new to the university, or to liberal arts education, or to the Jesuit Catholic tradition, who will be learning about the Core in the course of those discussions. How can we be gracious partners in that conversation? How can we invite our colleagues in to those discussions so that we can convey the nature and value of our contributions to the Core to our students’ development and to the university’s mission as “a Jesuit Catholic university rooted in the liberal arts tradition”?
 
We should be grateful to our colleagues on the Core Curriculum Committee, and to the committee chair, Niamh O’Leary, for hosting a helpful and productive Forum this past winter. In my discussions with colleagues from across the provost area, I heard uniform praise for that event as informative and as a spur to reflection. My own experience this past year working on developing principles for communication about the Core pointed to a wealth of resources available to us. (If you’re curious, here is a draft of the principles that that process yielded. I’ll be seeking more extensive feedback on these in the coming weeks.) These include not only faculty colleagues who participated in lively feedback discussions, but also our students.
 
On that note, as you’re completing exit interviews with graduating seniors in the coming days, I’d encourage you ask them for their reflections on the Core. My experience is that our students, and our upper-year students in particular, are admirably thoughtful and informed about the Core and its contributions, and they are a testament to its success. If you do ask, what you learn from them may provide a starting point for the big conversation in which we’ll all be engaged next year.
 
Best of luck to everyone wrapping up classes this week!

Dr. Tim Brownlee
Associate Dean
Professor, Philosophy
Co-chair, Core Curriculum Charter Task Force