In the mid l980's, Washington State University became increasingly concerned with the quality and coherence of its undergraduate instructional programs, particularly its general education program, which consisted entirely of distribution requirements to be selected from a large smorgasbord of course offerings. One of the main stimuli behind the original World Civilizations program was the perception of a need for greater organization and coherence in the General Education program--particularly in the humanities and social sciences. The courses were developed with the assistance of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1986-89, and, after several years of pilot offerings, implemented a course at a time in 1991 and 1993.

Why "Core" Courses in General Education?

The concept of core courses surveying the human past suggested itself as a means of solving several problems. It provided a dramatic way of asserting the University's desire to internationalize its curriculum and educate its student body for a global market place. Developing a core curriculum also appeared to present opportunities to put the General Education Program in order. By using the World Civilizations courses to form an organizational and informational base for the general education curriculum, the University could create a way to restructure the Humanities and Social Sciences offerings in the program, while at the same time addressing students' needs for contextual information about contemporary issues. Moreover, while it could not adequately compensate for deficiencies in the public school curriculum, such a core curriculum could provide students a small but carefully considered and predictable, common body of knowledge and academic experience. Through a common core, some familiarity on the part of students with the broad sweep of human history--as the background of their own world--could be ensured. Moreover, an overview of the human past, organized by a few, fairly simple intellectual constructs, should assist students in organizing much of what they subsequently learn.

A core curriculum could also provide a means to introduce students to campus cultural life and to "academic culture"; students could be taught early on how to use a modern library whose holdings must be accessed by computer, and they could also acquire some sense of the array of resources for learning available to them in the library and on the internet.

For these reasons, developing a core curriculum in General Education appeared to meet institutional needs as well as student needs. The paucity of general knowledge and the shrinking frames of historical or cultural reference which students are currently bringing to higher education have been well documented in the recent national studies. Benjamin J. Stein, in his recent study of California students, concluded that this generation of students is "not mentally prepared to continue the society because they basically do not understand the society well enough to value it." If Stein is correct, it may be even more alarming that students do not understand their society enough to criticize, challenge, or change it. Similarly, E. D. Hirsch argued that literacy is based on knowledge, and that precise, effective communication is dependent upon shared knowledge. If Hirsch's argument--and the research on which it is based--is even partially valid, then institutions such as WSU appear to bear a responsibility for identifying what is most important to know and then arranging for all students to learn it. This is a bolder agenda than American institutions of higher education are used to, but before dismissing that task as impossible or undesirable, perhaps we should ponder the question "If not us, who?"

Why World Civilizations Instead of Western Civilization?

Many institutions around the country have recently moved toward a global approach in their curricula, and this national trend has particular relevance to the Northwest. Washington State faces the Pacific and Asia; WSU students need to know the nations with whom we do business. Similarly, a glance at WSU's student body makes it apparent that our students' relevant past is not just the past of Europe or the Mediterranean. Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands, and ancient North America form part of our local heritage. Similarly, our single global economy, our single global political system of nation states, wars and alliances, and our global environmental predicament are but a few of many considerations which make a global perspective in the curriculum desirable. The world is, of course, a single system in other ways as well, and the core courses in World Civilizations provide

Washington State University is also committed to including the perspectives and the experience of women and ethnic minorities in the curriculum, a goal which the program faculty have systematically pursued. The imperatives for inclusiveness arise less out of a political agenda, however, than out of scholarly considerations. Any overview of human experience would simply be incomplete without these important perspectives. Western civilization itself is arguably better presented within such a global context, where its interactions with other cultures, its borrowings from others and its influence on others, are more visible than in the traditional "Western Civ" format.

Faculty Development

The decision to focus on "civilizations" rather than on "history" committed the Project to an interdisciplinary, multi-department approach. Such an approach presents some advantages, the most important of which has been the stimulating interaction of over forty people from eight different disciplines. The versions of the course being taught by World Civilizations program faculty have been significantly enriched by that interaction. The necessary retraining of specialists into generalists, however, puts a high premium upon faculty development.

In addition, while specifying a minimum common content in all sections [see the "Covenant" pertaining to common coverage below], the curriculum that has emerged over the ten years of the program's life is broad enough and flexible enough to allow scope for a variety of disciplines, individual talents, and instructional styles. An interdisciplinary approach obviously increases the size of the potential pool of instructors. Moreover, none of the relevant departments at WSU is large enough to take on the responsibility of a core course alone. In fact, the very breadth of the curriculum means that no individual--and no single department--can claim a special or exclusive competency in regard to the courses: we are all learners together.

The extent of re-education necessary to teach World Civilizations is expensive in both money and faculty time diverted from their research specialties. The ranking faculty who teach in the program do so out a commitment to the program goals. They attend an annual one-week summer workshop and several meetings during the year as part of a development program to maintain and improve the courses and to integrate new faculty into the group of instructors. The faculty engage "content" issues in the curriculum as well as pedagogical issues.

To engage in such intense academic development obviously requires resourceful faculty who can adapt their training as generalists in "World Civilizations" to enhance their other instructional assignments and specialized research programs. Professor William McNeill of the University of Chicago, a prominent advocate of world history as an academic subject, has, however, long asserted the value for scholars and teachers of continually referring their work in their specialty areas to the "big picture" of human experience. The intellectual discipline of that task appears to be of real value to faculty involved in the program. One of the by-products of the core program, then, has been the development of a lively, extra-departmental learning community among the faculty--one of very few of its kind at Washington State University.


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