A current issue on this campus is the proposal to restructure of General Education program. In the SUNY system, SUNY-Central has established GE requirements for all the colleges and universities. Cortland also has its own GE requirements, and the two sets of requirements overlap fairly well, but not without some confusion. So the proposal was made to "streamline" the situation by revising Cortland’s GEs to better match the SUNY GE’s. The idea was that this could be done with little real change, but now at least some faculty feel the changes are more substantive than orignally advertised.

Here’s my thing. As I’ve said before on this blog, I don’t place a great deal of value on general education to begin with. In theory, like many things, it’s a good idea. Historically speaking, GE strikes me as class warfare, an attempt to make students coming from the working class more like their bourgeois professors in aesthetic and ideological terms. In many cases, that has changed, though I would say that principle still remains. Second, I think GE programs (and here I am not thinking necessarily of the one here at Cortland, but generally of the various GE programs with which I have been involved) can suffer from a lack of cohesion. At Cortland, GE amounts to some dozen courses, plus a foreign language proficiency, which often means an additional four courses. That’s easily enough credits for a second major, but GE does not have that level of consistency. I realize the idea is to give students breadth, to make them "well-rounded," but that’s an idea from the past, when there was perhaps greater agreement among faculty and a narrower (e.g. eurocentric, patriarchal) view of education.

I see GE as more an institutional function than an educational one. It distributes students through the Arts and Sciences. It provides a curriculum mechanism upon which external assessments can be established. They articulate disciplinary turf inasmuch as any given GE category will be largely dominated by a single department (e.g. you can fulfill your literature GE by taking a course in literature in a foreign language but almost everyone takes English).

So I’ll close this with two points.

1. One needs to consider to what degree GE rests upon non tenure-track faculty. Clearly this is a significant issue for English, from composition through literature GEs. If we want to insist on GEs then we need to development in conjunction with an ethical staffing practice.

2. The last time Cortland faculty voted on revising the GE program, the vote was actually a tie! For whatever reason, this counted as approval. This would only be one local example of the extensive disagreements in the academy over what GE should be. My point is not to take a side, but simply to point out that given such disagreement, isn’t it obvious that there is no such thing as general education? That is, if a general education existed within our culture, wouldn’t we be able to recognize it?

Or perhaps this is the wrong approach. Perhaps GE is about providing a space for such disagreements. However, if that is the case, then I would think the structure and the discourse surrounding it would be different.