Presidential Task Force Places Undergrads in a Global Context

Among the many ways in which University President Lee Bollinger is working to transform Columbia into a “global university,” one of the least tangible is how Columbia is working to amend the undergraduate curriculum to require students to engage in global thought in their everyday academic lives.

One year ago, Bollinger announced the creation of the President’s Task Force for Undergraduate Education, a group formed in part to tackle the major changes necessary to develop such a curriculum.

“The task force will review a number of broad aspects of our undergraduate education, including how well our curriculum serves the rapidly changing needs of an increasingly globalized world—a world that will require precisely the combination of highly specialized knowledge and broad general learning to which Columbia has long been committed,” Bollinger wrote in announcing the task force.

While the task force is still in session—it will submit its recommendations at the end of this academic year—some students have clamored to make their voices heard on curricular changes they say should have come sooner and cannot wait longer.

“If Columbia prides itself in being a global institution, then it comes as a shock to me that people graduate without being equipped to understand issues like poverty, different power systems in the world, and how we understand each other,” Christina Chen, CC ’09, said. “When we graduate, we’re not in any way prepared to talk and engage in these issues.”

Chen is part of a group of students on campus, many of whom are members of Students Promoting Empowerment and Knowledge, who claim that the University is failing to provide undergraduates with an education and environment that reflects a globalized world. For students like Chen, a Core Curriculum dominated by Western classics and an ethnic studies program that lags behind those of comparable institutions such as Harvard and Princeton are symptoms of Columbia’s inability to modernize in a global arena.

Peter Awn, dean of the School of General Studies and chair of the globalization working group within the task force, said that revision of the Core Curriculum is a main focus. “I think we’re going to try to make the requirements reflect where we are now and that we want to try to construct an ideal that students can respond to in a whole variety of ways,” Awn said.

Bollinger has also said that gaining insight into the lives of others across the globe should be a critical focus of a Columbia undergraduate’s education. “I don’t have any doubt in my mind that you as young people coming into a world that will be significantly different from the world that I live in, that you should be thinking about these kinds of issues [of global understanding] from the outset and it should be part of what we think of as the core experience,” Bollinger said.

While the Western-dominated syllabi of Contemporary Civilization and the Humanities requirements are a source of dispute, debate surrounding the 1994 addition of a Major Cultures requirement has also arisen. According to some students, faculty, and administrators, the requirement’s focus on only one culture does not provide students with a truly global perspective. “Of all the core requirements, the one with the question mark, or it’s just getting antiquated, is Major Cultures,” Awn said. He also referred to Major Cultures saying “I think it’s the least nimble [Core requirement] and I’m always suspicious of requirements which are just a list of courses. It’s a Chinese Menu—you do one from A, you do one from [list B or C] and who decides?”

Additionally, Chen said that Major Cultures teaches students to learn about cultures from an outsider’s perspective, presenting them as isolated others, hindering, rather than advancing, a global understanding. According to her, disciplines such as ethnic studies, which examine the role of ethnicity and minority narratives in American history, provide an understanding that is more essential to graduate with. “It’s important to look at ourselves, not just outward, but inward,” Chen said. “We’re creating a dichotomy of ‘us’ and ‘them.’”

In addition to the Task Force for Undergraduate Education, the University has worked toward enabling students to graduate with an enhanced the global perspective in various other ways.

In 2004, the University announced a massive diversity undertaking, which included the appointment of Jean Howard as the University’s first Vice Provost for Diversity Initiatives. Over the following three years, Howard directed the use of a $15 million fund to hire 17 new faculty members from underrepresented groups in the arts and sciences.

According to Geraldine Downey, who replaced Howard at the end of last summer, a diverse faculty is an essential step toward generating global thought. “To me, it’s synonymous: global means diverse,” Downey said. “We can learn as a University to take our place in a global society through thinking about how to embrace and make central in the University people from many different backgrounds and perspectives.”

Howard said she felt the diversity initiative was a strong statement from the administration that it is committed to this aspect of globalization. “There are a lot of ways Columbia has made a permanent commitment—through money—to furthering diversity goals,” Howard said. “This is a big commitment on part of the University. They have not been stingy.”

Howard noted, though, that diversifying the cultural and national backgrounds of faculty will not generate real change unless matched by curricular changes. “It [faculty diversity] won’t solve the problems of the Core being primarily Eurocentric,” she said.

As the task force considers making changes that could significantly alter the landscape of a Core Curriculum steeped in tradition, members of the Committee on Global Thought, which was established by Bollinger in 2005 to study ways of making changes within the existing curriculum, has put forth its own recommendations. Carol Gluck, a member of the committee, said that Columbia has extraordinary untapped potential to globalize without adding any courses to the curriculum.

The committee’s recommendations for undergraduate education focused on how to incorporate global thought across the curriculum on a small, but critical, level.

According to Gluck, the benefit of such changes is that they could be implemented quickly and easily within almost every classroom in the University.

Gluck recalled one student to whom the committee spoke who worked with her professor to redesign an Art Humanities assignment on the Parthenon to focus on the Taj Mahal. According to Gluck, changes on this level have a far more profound impact on global understanding than narrowing a student’s focus to one non-Western culture.

“We’re looking to infuse it [global thought] as broadly and quickly as possible in a globalized context,” she said. “They [students] don’t want to be assigned a part of the world. They want the interconnections.”