January 30, 2003

Charge to the Inventing America Review Task Force

The last comprehensive review of Inventing America occurred in 1998-99. At that time the course was significantly modified, then approved by the Curriculum Committee and the faculty. Nevertheless, persistent difficulties in staffing the course with tenured and tenure-track faculty and attendant criticism of the course and its curriculum from various faculty quarters suggest the advisability of considering this program yet again "in a comprehensive way." In particular, the faculty of Lewis & Clark College should be given an opportunity to take stock of the first-year course, to determine if it continues to meet the faculty's goals and desires for the first-year core course, to assess whether this is the right course for first-year students, to evaluate whether the principles underlying this course are ones we continue to embrace as a College for General Education - in short, whether Inventing America as presently configured is the course we want.

Normally, program and department reviews are primarily or exclusively curricular in nature and rightly fall within the purview of the Curriculum Committee or its designated subcommittee. Such curricular reviews normally occur approximately every 10 years. In the present case, both curricular and staffing issues are in question in like measure, yet the impetus for the review at this time is primarily a staffing issue. For this reason, and because the review will be comprehensive in scope, including questions about the very identity of this course, its appropriateness for the College at this time, and how it should be staffed, the review be conducted by a faculty task force constituted by the Dean of the College in consultation with the Curriculum Committee and the Director of Inventing America. The review task force should include a member or members of the Curriculum Committee, a member or members of the Inventing America Planning Committee, including the Director, and other faculty of the CAS, including one member elected by the faculty at large.

In addition, program and department reviews normally involve an "external component," but this is not a requirement. In this case, because of the nature of the review, I propose that the review be an internal one only. It should, however, include significant attention to other first-year programs at comparable colleges by members of the review task force, in lieu of bringing in a team of external reviewers.

Process

To ensure broad faculty support for the results of this review, the task force charged with reviewing the course should consult widely within the Lewis & Clark community, including faculty and students. This consultation should include (though not be limited to) systematic, anonymous polling of student and faculty opinion. The task force should present a draft report to the individual academic departments. The departments should then review the draft report, providing feedback, criticism, and suggestions as they deem appropriate. After modifying the report in light of such feedback, should that be necessary or advisable, the task force should report the results of the review to the Curriculum Committee and then to the entire Lewis & Clark voting faculty for deliberation and debate. Any recommendations of the task force should be voted on both by the Curriculum Committee and ultimately by the full voting faculty.

Charge

The review should include consideration of, but not necessarily be limited to, the following questions:

1. What resources are required to mount this program? Are current resources sufficient? Should the program be modified better to fit existing resources?
   
   
2. What is the history of the program being reviewed, including the staffing history? To what extent has it been staffed with tenure-line faculty and to what extent has staffing relied on adjuncts?
   
   
3. What are the program's current and future goals?
   
   
4. How do these goals relate to broader institutional goals?
   
   
5. Do the underlying principles of the existing program continue to be embraced as important and worthy ones by the faculty? What goals and principles do the faculty believe should guide the first-year course?
   
   
6. What characterizes superior first-year programs at colleges comparable to Lewis & Clark and at colleges to which we aspire to be compared? How does Inventing America compare with first-year programs at these colleges?
   
   
7. Should the first year course be modified? Among the options the reviewers should consider are the following:
   
   
   1. no first-year course;
   2. the status quo, as approved by both the Curriculum Committee and by the faculty in 1999 at the end of the last review of General Education at the College;
   3. a two-semester course, the first of which is the current "Inventing America" fall semester, the second a new configuration of special seminars (small sections, departmentally based, retaining the goals of discussion, writing, critical reading);
   4. an entirely different two-semester first-year course;
   5. a first-year fall semester course (along the lines of the current fall semester of Inventing America), coupled with a "senior capstone" semester course (interdisciplinary, integrative, common focus);
   6. a one-semester course, resembling the present fall semester of Inventing America in content and organization (a common syllabus course), retaining the present character of a discussion course;
   7. a one-semester course, resembling the present fall semester of Inventing America in content (a common syllabus course), with approximately one common lecture per week and two discussion sections led by tenured or tenure-track faculty, organized around reading more in fewer texts;
   8. a one-semester course, resembling the present spring semester of Inventing America in organization and possibly in content (i.e. four-five weeks of common material followed by faculty-designed modules spinning off the common theme);
   9. one-semester first-year seminars mounted in the departments, designed to reflect faculty expertise and faithful to some basic expectations about writing, speaking, critical reading, and bibliographic literacy. (Although the content would vary widely, the faculty could still profitably meet to discuss issues of pedagogy.) A steering committee would approve the seminars (all under a common catalog number - e. g. CORE 120), monitor compliance with standards, and exclude courses that do not meet those standards;
   10. a one-semester, first-year composition course;
   11. others that the task force may identify, if any.

Any option proposed for consideration by the task force would have to make provision in some way for participating in the new advising structure foreshadowed in the ongoing advising pilot. Any option that involves regular and predictable staffing contributions by the tenure-track faculty must include a staffing model that shows how the course will be staffed from year to year.

Those conducting the review should consult the following constituencies:

1. Faculty who have taught in Inventing America
2. Members of the Inventing America Planning Committee, past and present
3. The faculty generally and by departments
4. The divisional deans and Dean of the College
5. Students

Schedule

The draft report of the task force should be presented to the individual departments no later than late April 2003. Suggestions for the task force should be submitted as soon after that as time and ability permit. The task force should work on suggested revisions over the summer. The task force should redraft its report for the faculty by the beginning of the fall semester 2003. The faculty should debate the report early in the fall, perhaps at the faculty retreat. The task force should make final revisions to the report in the first month of fall semester, for final vote by the faculty no later than November 5, 2003.