There's definitely part of the issue that is rooted in the faculty--in particular the inability of many faculties to reach strong shared views that can survive the discontent and non-cooperation of a long-tail group of faculty that just don't want whatever the system is that most of the faculty support. A lot of curricular designs die by getting pecked slowly to pieces over a decade.
There's also the fact that no design really solves the problem underlying general education--we have distribution requirements and nothing much else, and that doesn't lead to students having a robust sense of a common experience, plus it just means that students who don't want to be generally educated spend a lot of time hunting for courses that will get their distribution obligations over with a minimum of effort and engagement. No matter what you come up with, it generally loses some of its coherence when it is implemented simply because some students see it as an obstacle and an annoyance.
Your Gen Ed comments are hitting very close to home, as we just had a multi-year effort for a race/power/privilege/colonialism Gen Ed req (including situating a course in the major) come to a head. So much heat and angst, and so much of what Tim Burke says below.
There's definitely part of the issue that is rooted in the faculty--in particular the inability of many faculties to reach strong shared views that can survive the discontent and non-cooperation of a long-tail group of faculty that just don't want whatever the system is that most of the faculty support. A lot of curricular designs die by getting pecked slowly to pieces over a decade.
There's also the fact that no design really solves the problem underlying general education--we have distribution requirements and nothing much else, and that doesn't lead to students having a robust sense of a common experience, plus it just means that students who don't want to be generally educated spend a lot of time hunting for courses that will get their distribution obligations over with a minimum of effort and engagement. No matter what you come up with, it generally loses some of its coherence when it is implemented simply because some students see it as an obstacle and an annoyance.
Your Gen Ed comments are hitting very close to home, as we just had a multi-year effort for a race/power/privilege/colonialism Gen Ed req (including situating a course in the major) come to a head. So much heat and angst, and so much of what Tim Burke says below.