New Intensive Course 'An Attractive Innovation'
With the help of a $1.4-million grant from the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation, Colby is developing an integrated, intensive course of study that President Bill Cotter says could become a signature program in the College's curriculum.
The Johnson Foundation grant provides for the endowment of a permanent faculty position, the holder of which would design and implement a semester-long program involving 20 to 30 students and an interdisciplinary team of faculty. The idea is to examine a particular period of history through the lenses of several disciplines. Each program will comprise four or five courses that will serve as the entire academic workload for that semester.
"There is an antecedent for this program in the early 1970s that involved an integrated teaching approach, so we are capitalizing on something that is part of the Colby tradition," Cotter said. That earlier interdisciplinary program was discontinued because it was not permanently funded.
Robert Weisbrot, Christian A. Johnson Distinguished Teaching Professor of History, is acting chair of the program and already has developed a pilot semester for the spring of 1997. This inaugural semester, titled "Revolution, War and the Crisis of Modern Culture," will focus on the period between 1919 and 1945. Faculty will include Lee Family Professor of American Studies and English Charles Bassett, Assistant Professor of Physics Charles Conover and Professor of Music Paul Machlin.
A second pilot semester is planned for the fall of 1997, after which a chair holder will be selected to administer the program.
Details of the program still are being worked out, but preliminary plans call for up to 20 students to be enrolled from all classes, Weisbrot said. If more than 20 wish to participate, faculty will give priority to first-year and sophomore students. "We want to reach students early, especially before they are too far into their academic track, to acquaint them with the possibilities of a liberal arts education," Weisbrot said.
"It seems to me this is exactly the kind of activity in which a liberal arts school should be engaged."
Although the current proposal involves only one semester of the program each year, Cotter says integrative learning clusters might be provided more often and to larger numbers of students if faculty believe that should happen.
This is the second professorship endowed by the Christian A. Johnson Foundation, and was the product of several years of discussion between Cotter and foundation director Julie Kidd. Cotter says the foundation's support of Colby has been "almost unique," and he credits Kidd, who he says has "an extraordinary commitment to liberal learning."
"We've promised to have meetings here to share our experience with others. We think it is an attractive innovation," Cotter said.