Three Critical Points Regarding General Education

Three points should be made before we proceed:

· While individual universities should have freedom to articulate unique emphases, we expect that the goals outlined below will each to some extent be pursued by most if not all institutions.

· We would also apply an interdisciplinary analysis to the long-standing dispute between those who stress that undergraduate education should focus on transmitting a particular content versus those who stress the skills that an undergraduate student develops. Interdisciplinarians are naturally inclined to integrate the best from competing perspectives, and would thus ask not only ‘what skills?’ and ‘what knowledge?,’ but also ‘how can we best transmit this knowledge and these skills together? Skills, after all, are best transmitted when applied to particular content.

· We should stress before proceeding that our goal is not just to outline a theoretical case for the importance of interdisciplinarity but to provide practical advice on how interdisciplinary elements can be incorporated into an undergraduate curriculum and how their success in achieving various curricular goals can be evaluated.