The New Liberal Arts Program

• Medical Technology and Society. Joseph D. Bronzino, Mourice L. Wade, and Vincent H. Smith.
• Understanding Quantitative History. Loren Haskins and Kirk Jeffrey.
• Light, Wind, and Structure: The Technology of Historic Architecture. Robert Mark.
• The Age of Electronic Messages. John G. Truxal.
• Personal Mathematics and Computing: Tools for the Liberal Arts. Frank Wattenberg.
• Nuclear Choices. A Citizens Guide to Nuclear Technology. Richard Wolfson.
• Discover, Innovation, and Risk: Case Studies in Science and Technology. Newton H. Copp and Andrew W. Zanella.
• Architectural Technology up to the Scientific Revolution. Robert Mark (Editor).
• Reproductive Technology. Lawrence J. Kaplan and Rosemarie Tong.

• Four out of five students in NLA-supported colleges take at least one course that requires quantitative reasoning, but only two out of five take courses that enhance their technological literacy.

• Approximately one in four faculty became involved in NLA project work on the most active third of NLA campuses. Faculty engagement on the majority of campuses was much lower.

• Success on selected campuses is due primarily to a small number of resourceful faculty backed by solid administrative support.

• Faculty seminars enabled colleagueship across disciplines and created a "culture of conversation" that had heretofore been absent, even in the liberal arts colleges.

• Since the NLA program coincided with the arrival of the personal computer, the program brought about a far more thoughtful, creative, and extensive integration of computing into the curriculum than might otherwise have occurred.

• Offerings of NLA courses have declined since the peak of Sloan funding activity due to increased pressures on institutional budgets and greater emphasis on traditional scholarship.

Indirect Costs. To develop a plan to allow the city of San Bernardino to document the full costs of providing central services to various funds (enterprise, internal service, special revenue, capital projects, and user fee) in order to help the city make realistic decisions about fees and future budgets.

Ethnic Population. Analysis of chronic diseases among ethnic communities in California in order to educate at-risk groups and provide better health care to unique communities.

Hunger Project. To develop guidelines for community-based hunger projects based on an analysis of options for reducing the cost of food and supplies delivered to economically disadvantaged people in a region of Los Angeles.

Issues and Observations

Yet on the NLA campuses the reactions to increased technology and numeracy have often diverged. In contrast to mathematics which has been part of liberal education since ancient times, computing (at least in 1980) typically lived in colleges of engineering which, with few exceptions, are absent from liberal arts colleges. Thus the case for technology as a discipline appropriate for liberal education is harder to make than for applied mathematics. Even after a decade of subsidy from the Sloan foundation, courses dealing with technological literacy have made only modest gains at selective liberal arts colleges.

Modes of Thought. Advocates for the New Liberal Arts hoped that leading liberal arts institutions would embrace not only the computer but also the modes of thought--principally quantitative reasoning--that computing employs. By integrating computing effectively into courses across the curriculum, advocates hoped that student would learn "to reason effectively with numerical information." In his memorandum on NLA, White argued that courses in applied mathematics must be seen to lie "at the heart of the curriculum." Evaluator Ames reports that on the NLA campuses applied mathematics "is a liberal art," although not yet one that lies at the heart of the curriculum. Faculty at these institutions are generally quite aware of the power of computers to help students develop quantitative intuition. "Numeracy in liberal education," the title of Spelman's program, is a suitable theme for all the NLA projects.

Pedagogy. Reports from NLA courses--as from virtually all courses that make thoughtful use of computers--indicate a natural shift in both teaching and learning styles. Faculty lecture less; students learn more. Access to data and to tools capable of analyzing that data open up enormous opportunities for independent student work. (Similar themes emerged in the movement to reform calculus and K-12 mathematics that blossomed just as the NLA program was winding down.) Collaborative learning, both in class, out of class, and now via e-mail, has thrived as well. On many campuses, the nudge of the NLA argument helped pioneer what has now become a commonplace recommendation.

Evidence. Most undergraduates have access to social science data not only unheard of but undreamed of by Ph.D. student just one generation earlier. The discipline of statistics has been totally transformed by the power of computers to manipulate data. Evidence from real data can now be used as the basis for analysis and inference, supplanting the prior tradition of theorizing based on general principles. Nonetheless, tradition prevails: despite innovation of NLA and related programs, the vast majority of students in the United States still study social science as if real data were untouchable.

Enriching Scholarship. Comments by campus leaders of NLA projects reveal consistent enthusiasm for the indirect benefit of the program in helping faculty who hardly knew each other discover common interests. As a consequence of the substantive interdisciplinary interaction inspired by the NLA program, many faculty also found that their scholarly interests were broadened and enriched. Even at liberal arts colleges, the pressures of scholarship outweigh pedagogy, so curricular innovation can be sustained in the long run only if it arises from a vigorous professional and scholarly interest. Many of those who became involved in the NLA program found that it did have a long-term affect on their professional interests.

Replication. Not surprisingly, most NLA courses still being taught in the early 1990s were being taught by the same faculty who created them eight or ten years earlier. Innovative courses are not easily transportable or transferable. When new faculty are asked to take on these courses, they are more likely to create their own than to pick up the course created by the pioneers. "We can barely get our colleagues to teach the course on our own campus, let alone getting the course taught at other universities."

Students. Most NLA courses are intended for students who have avoided quantitative disciplines and whom mathematicians believe to have less mathematical ability than do those who study mathematics voluntarily. In a 1990 analysis of the NLA experience, faculty at the University of Chicago report that, despite their years of teaching experience, they were surprised to find that this student stereotype is quite inaccurate. Their students eagerly embraced many topics that mathematicians believe to be sophisticated (e.g., systems of differential equations), yet stumbled on others (e.g., number theory, geometry) that to a mathematician require virtually no prior knowledge or experience. They discovered what experienced high school teachers have always known--that many who have difficulty with abstract mathematics, even if simple, can readily learn concrete mathematics, even if subtle.

References