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With the recent release of the Seaver College catalog for the upcoming academic year, the details of the general education overhaul are now public. In my estimation, it’s the biggest change to the curriculum since 1985. First, we’ll review what’s changed, and then I’ll share a few thoughts about it.
Before we get to the curriculum, though, let’s talk about where these changes are coming from. In 2018, professor Paul Begin was appointed associate dean of curriculum and general education for Seaver, serving ex officio as co-chair of the General Education Review Committee (GERC). The committee is composed of members of the Seaver faculty, including some I remember fondly from my time as a student, like professors Tim Lucas, Mason Marshall, and Fiona Stewart.
The GERC began meeting in spring 2019, and by fall 2020 they had generated a report with their recommended changes to the general education curriculum.1 Some of the changes were approved in time for the 2023-2024 academic year, but the majority of the update was delayed. Following a few years of faculty discussion taking place out of the public eye, the proposal was approved by the Seaver Academic Council at their meeting October 30, 2023,2 and the bulk of the changes will go into effect beginning this fall.
The general education curriculum has been rebranded as the “Seaver Core,”3 which is slightly misleading for reasons we’ll get to later. Among the main goals of the overhaul are (1) to reduce the load of required units, (2) to allow for more student choice, and (3) to add a diversity requirement.4
The new Seaver Core has certainly reduced the number of required courses. The previous curriculum required at least 63 units (roughly half of all units required to graduate), and the new one can be completed in as few as 49 units if certain courses are selected to satisfy multiple requirements.5 This reduction was achieved in large part by eliminating the 9-unit Western Culture sequence (HUM 111, HUM 212, and HUM 313).6
Also removed were some of the GEs taught by the social science division. The requirement to take two of psychology, sociology, and economics has been cut to just one,7 and now instead of taking both a political science course and an American history course, only one is required.8
But it isn’t all a matter of reduction. The first-year seminar is being replaced by a course with an emphasis on argumentation called “foundations of reasoning,” which seems not to be a philosophy course.9 The religion sequence has been reconfigured, so instead of beginning with an Old Testament survey and a New Testament survey, it begins with a course called “The Way of Jesus,” followed by a survey of the whole Bible. The literature requirement has been replaced by an “interpretation” requirement, which now will be satisfied by literature but also optionally by music, philosophy, or art history.10 New requirements were added for one course each in “historical thinking” and “diverse perspectives,” each of which can be satisfied by any of a long list of options.11
This listing of options is the new curriculum’s way of fulfilling the framers’ goal of allowing greater flexibility. The historical thinking requirement, for instance, can be satisfied by any of 25 courses, including Baroque and Rococo Art, Pre-Columbian Civilizations of the Americas, and History of Sacred Music. And the “US experience” requirement that used to be satisfied by political science and US history can now be satisfied by any one of 15 courses, to include Introduction to African American Studies, Diversity in US History, and Wealth and Poverty in America.
This increased emphasis on student choice has left almost no required courses. The only required courses under the new plan are foundations of reasoning (FOR 101), English composition (ENG 101), speech and rhetoric (COM 180), and the religion sequence (REL 100, REL 200, and REL 300, though the latter is a topics course that also has a fair few alternatives), and most of these can be substituted by the Great Books sequence or SAAJ.
The third goal of these curricular changes is to introduce a diversity requirement, here called “diverse perspectives,” which will teach students “the systematic ways various groups have been oppressed and marginalized” as well as centering “the contributions of minoritized groups and/or historically excluded groups, including ways they have resisted oppression.”12 The requirement can be met by any of 27 courses, including African American Cinema, Perspectives on Identity, Indigenous Peoples of North America, and Psychology of Gender.
My take
I’ve tried to give an accurate and disinterested account of the changes to Seaver’s general education curriculum. Now I’ll share my thoughts about these changes.
What I like
In general, there is a lot to like about the Seaver Core. It requires a broad base of learning, introduces students to a variety of academic disciplines, and maintains the Christian emphasis that has characterized Pepperdine’s curriculum since its founding. The decreased number of requirements will make it easier for students with certain aims (double majors, etc.), and I’m hopeful that the Foundations of Reasoning course can revitalize the freshman seminar. The update to the religion sequence is a welcome change that seems consonant with the university’s roots in the Restoration Movement. If nothing else, I’m glad the review has gotten people thinking deeply about how to improve Seaver’s curriculum. I know shepherding a big change like this through all the necessary forums is no easy task and that compromises have to be made. But I also have some concerns.
What concerns me
I’ll start with a minor point about the name “Seaver Core,” which I find catchy but misleading. A requirement that can be met by any of a number of courses is what has traditionally been known as a distribution requirement, as distinct from core courses, which are required of every student.13 That’s why I think “Seaver Core” is something of a misnomer for the new curriculum, which has almost entirely abandoned the idea of core courses in favor of distribution requirements.
Curricular coherence
My first concern is about the increased reliance on distribution requirements. While it’s true they give students more choice and may result in increased student interest in GE courses, they have some disadvantages too. First, they tend to reduce the coherence of the overall curriculum because they make it harder for curriculum designers to plan a series of courses that follow neatly one after the other or that build toward some overarching goal since the multiplicity of options means no two students will be taking the same slate of GE courses. Early versions of the Seaver Core proposal seem to be aware of this shortcoming, proposing in response “thematic pathways” that would allow a student to fulfill several of the requirements by choosing courses that focus on a theme like social justice or religion and society.14 But the thematic pathways were tabled at the Seaver Academic Council meeting when the rest of the Core curriculum was approved,15 so the problem remains.
Campus cohesion
Another of my concerns about the shift toward distribution requirements is that it leaves too few common experiences shared by most or all Seaver students. When I was a student, nearly everybody had to take Dr. Sonia Sorrell’s HUM 111 lecture, which meant we all had a common vocabulary and a shared experience bonding us together. I can’t help but worry about college-wide cohesion on a campus where students’ experiences don’t overlap in the same way. There are other routes to cohesion, of course, but I’m not holding my breath for the whole student body to simultaneously take up an intense interest in the women’s tennis team. I hope this worry will prove to be unfounded.
International programs
I also have doubts about the effect of the reduced GE load on Pepperdine’s beloved international programs (IP). I was fortunate enough to study in Florence for a year during my time at Seaver, and it was a life-changing experience. As a student who entered with some AP credits satisfying a few GE requirements, I didn’t have to worry about running out of courses to take while studying abroad because the GE load was so heavy that everyone still had similar requirements to fulfill as sophomores abroad. But under the new system, a student who enters undeclared with just 8 units of AP credit and takes a full load of GEs (say, 32 units) as a freshman might find it hard to rationalize studying abroad for a semester, much less a year, with only 9 more units of Seaver Core requirements that may or may not be taught at their preferred international campus.
The intersection of the new curriculum with IP was evidently a concern discussed during deliberations over the Seaver Core proposal.16 The only public assurance I’ve found with respect to the new plan is the following: “We are confident that there are sufficient courses for students to take with the new proposed plan and that they will continue to study abroad in droves.”17 I sincerely hope they are right.
Justification
I haven’t been privy to the discussions that must have swirled around the Seaver Core between its proposal in 2020 and its implementation this fall, and the launch of these changes has (as far as I know) not been heralded publicly aside from some documents silently posted online. So I can’t speak to the current state of the debate. But I have read the public GERC report from 2020, and some of the justifications it offers for its changes to the curriculum strike me as questionable.
For instance, the report justifies many of its proposed changes by contrasting Seaver’s GE program with that of eleven peer institutions (think Baylor, Calvin, LMU, and Wheaton). Some of the recommended changes seem to be urged in a spirit of conformity, as if Pepperdine aspires to nothing more than to match what other schools are doing. This seems to be misaligned with the university’s vision of itself as preeminent and squarely at odds with at least 55 years of Pepperdine conceiving of itself as a distinctive institution.18
Another line of argument for the Seaver Core involves student survey data made available by the Office of Institutional Effectiveness (OIE). In other words, the curriculum overhaul seems at least in part to be a reaction to student complaints. I don’t intend to suggest Seaver should ignore feedback from its students, but I regard it as a disservice to students to offer survey data in which students label the GE program “burdensome”19 as sufficient reason to replace the humanities sequence with the flavor of the month. The student is not the customer.
Surveys (ubi sunt)
But let’s put aside any alleged problems with the report’s argumentation and take up the curricular changes themselves—after all, they may be good even if we have reason to doubt the motives behind them. The sense I get from the Seaver Core is that survey courses are regrettable because they’re too broad and students find them a bit boring. Wouldn’t they much rather take upper division courses with narrower topics? Why take a survey of US history when you could take a whole course about Jacksonian democracy? Don’t we want to develop expertise? This is an especially appealing line of argument for professors who are themselves experts in very narrow domains.
But I think the instinct to make experts is wrong in the context of undergraduate education, especially when it comes to general education. Since 1937, Pepperdine’s undergraduate colleges have been on guard against overspecialization. At first, the best defense was the survey course, which “brought much-needed coherence to a curriculum that usually verged on excessive specialization.”20 When designing the curriculum for the Malibu campus, faculty took care to emphasize interdisciplinarity, lumping the disciplines into big divisions rather than small departments and requiring several survey courses, including the Western Heritage sequence that has now been eliminated.21
The humanities sequence was tremendously interdisciplinary, balancing history with art, literature, and philosophy, and covering thousands of years of human endeavor in a broad sweep that established a framework for students’ later specialization. In his magisterial report on the history of general education at Pepperdine, David Baird wrote, “The history of the Seaver College curriculum is a story of one attempt after another to modify the interdisciplinary model instituted with much hope in 1972.”22 The elimination of the humanities sequence seems one further step down this road.
Telling students they don’t need to take any courses in Western civilization feels to me like saying, “We don’t care whether you learn any particular facts during your time at Seaver, apart from ones about the Bible you learn in the religion sequence. We want you to learn how to do historical thinking, but it doesn’t matter whether you know the first thing about Aristotle, the protestant reformation, Shakespeare, or the baroque. It’s enough if you can interpret primary sources in context.” If this content-neutral message is indeed what Seaver means for its students to receive, I think it is a regrettable abdication of the faculty’s duty to provide pupils a balanced education.
Like so much in life, curriculum design is a matter of balance. Balance breadth with depth. Balance teaching facts with teaching skills. I’m worried that the Seaver Core is out of balance.
I’d like to read your thoughts about the Seaver Core, especially if you disagree with my take and especially if you’ve reviewed the curriculum in this year’s catalog. Please engage in the comment section below, or get in touch by other means. If you’d like to respond at some length, I would be delighted to publish a rebuttal on the blog.
GE Review Committee, "General Education Report," fall 2020.
Minutes of the Seaver Academic Council, 30 Oct. 2023, p. 3.
GE Review Committee, supra note 1, p. 26.
Seaver Catalog, supra note 3, p. 102. Cf. the 2023 catalog, p. 99.
Note that the HUM sequence is still in this year’s catalog (p. 279); it’s just no longer required, and none of the three courses count toward any of the requirements in the Seaver Core. It’s possible that the courses are still being offered to students who are completing the old GE requirements. I expect to see these courses removed from the catalog in the near future.
Seaver Catalog, supra note 3, p. 107.
Seaver Catalog, supra note 3, pp. 108-109.
Seaver Catalog, supra note 3, p. 103.
Note that the "interpretation" requirement is not taking the place of the old fine arts GE, which is a requirement of its own, now called "creative arts" and satisfied by any of a number of art, art history, creative writing, film, music, or theater courses.
Seaver Catalog, supra note 3, p. 105-106.
Seaver Catalog, supra note 3, p. 106.
The distinction is made clear on page 11 of the report "Opportunities for Liberal Learning in the Twenty-First Century," written by a commission led by David Baird in 1997.
"Seaver Core Program Proposal", 2021, p. 2.
Seaver Core Program Proposal, supra note 14, p. 5.
See, e.g., William S. Banowsky’s "The Case for Malibu," Mar. 1968, Box 62, WSB papers, Pepperdine Univ. Special Collections and University Archives: "Pepperdine claims its right to be on the premise of distinctiveness. Pepperdine is different! Distinctive education is our only hope."
General Education Report, supra note 1, p. 23.
Baird et al. "Opportunities for Liberal Learning in the Twenty-First Century," 1997, p. 7.
Baird et al., supra note 20, p. 9.
Baird et al., supra note 20, p. 10.
Agreed on most counts! I also grieve the humanities sequence, that, despite its faults (namely, that so many students took it in Elkins) helped provide a common experience to undergrads. I'm hopeful that students will be more engaged in their core courses (and take the occasional elective or pick up a minor!) if they feel as though they got some choice in that course.
A small note for posterity--the REL GE sequence review happened independently of the GERC review (that is, the REL faculty revised our courses prior to the passing of the Seaver Core (they went into effect in Fall 2023)), although we were aware of and anticipating the GE review.