Correction: This article incorrectly listed the number of required GE courses under the new GE curriculum. Students under the new curriculum requirements will take between 15 and 19 GE courses.
Pepperdine’s new General Education (GE) program is officially set to roll out this semester, and this includes big changes for the Humanities Division.
The General Education Review Committee began the conversation about a reformed GE curriculum in 2015, and the structure was officially approved in April 2022, said Bryan Givens, associate professor of history and Humanities sequence coordinator.
Pepperdine’s former GE program required students to complete 19 GE courses, but the new program will require 15-19 courses, according to the webpage for Seaver’s GE sequence (Seaver Core). The Humanities sequence counted for three of the required courses and has been eliminated from the requirements beginning this fall. Givens said the faculty have differing opinions about the changes.
Sharyl Corrado, associate professor of history, said the program needed reform, and the Humanities sequence, while beneficial, is also excessive.
“The skills of the Humanities are really valuable,” Corrado said. “I think that Western culture is really important, but when we first focus exclusively on Western culture, that gets to be a bit much.”
Givens said the GE requirement was somewhat inflexible, and the reform is an attempt to give students more variability in their classes –– allowing them to explore other passions or add a double major or minor.
“There was a pretty widespread consensus among the faculty that if we could find some ways to streamline the process and, perhaps, reduce it, that would be a good thing,” Givens said.
Paul Contino, a Great Books professor and Humanities and Teacher Education Division representative to the GE committee for the past two years, said the Humanities are crucial to a holistic liberal arts education.
“The Humanities have a lot to say to say about what it means to be human,” Contino said. “It’s part of why we refer to the liberal arts as liberal; they’re liberating. They free us to open our eyes to see more deeply and clearly.”
A New Opportunity
There will be two new class options with the HUM designation, but Corrado said they will be different than current Humanities classes. She said they will not be Elkins classes, nor will they be offered as frequently.
“As someone who teaches right now in the Humanities sequence, that’s going to mean I’m going to be teaching very different courses, but it’s also kind of exciting to have that opportunity,” Corrado said.
Givens said the plan going forward is to develop new history classes with a more GE-oriented structure. He said the courses will be 200-level topical classes with seminar sizes closer to 30 students.
“We have lost a lot of real estate,” Givens said. “At least required real estate, but there’s also a lot of free land out there and opportunity.“
Givens and Corrado both said they are adapting their past first-year seminars and 300-level classes into 200-level history courses. The hope is that professors will be able to develop classes on a variety of topics that interest both teacher and student, Corrado said.
“With more topical things, we’re hoping that students will just be more engaged,” Givens said. “Instead of some vast survey of centuries or even millennia, they can choose some topics that really interest them, and that will kind of be win-win.”
Humanities is not as much about the knowledge as it is about the skills students learn for understanding the world or interpreting the past, Corrado said.
“[We need] Just more niche classes, so you can still get a lot of the same skills and the same concepts without necessarily having the exact same content,” Corrado said.
Moving Away from the Elkins Model
Contino said many students struggle with Humanities when taught in large lecture classes. The ideal situation, Contino said, is 12 people sitting together to talk about a text.
“Smaller classes are more pedagogically fruitful,” Contino said. “You can converse with each other, get to know each other [and] get to know the professor.”
For the past 20 years, the Humanities Division has provided 40% of all Elkins classes, Givens said. Professors will now have to adjust their curriculum to smaller class sizes, he said.
“My course evals always suffer in comparison to my small classes,” Givens said. “A third of my yearly teaching load was in Elkins, so that will have to be adapted to something else.”
The Drawbacks
Corrado said with students taking different GEs from one another, they won’t share the experience of learning the same content. She said this is a drawback of the program because students will be able to graduate without the core knowledge of U.S. history or Western culture if they choose to opt out of those classes.
“Hopefully, you’ll have the skills,” Corrado said. “But, there won’t be that common foundational knowledge. That’s a loss; so, hopefully, there’ll be other gains.”
Contino said he wants students to see there is an integrated way of understanding the Humanities. He said the Humanities works in tandem with other disciplines, and he hopes the new program still allows students to look at these subjects through a broader lens.
“I hope that the new curriculum is as holistic as good education aspires to be,” Contino said. “Let’s look at philosophy texts, let’s look at literary texts, let’s look at paintings, let’s look at music and of course, at history — all of these are part of the Humanities.”
Although students will have more flexibility in their course schedules, they will have to make difficult choices between equally important classes, Contino said. While Contino will be teaching Foundations of Reasoning in the fall of 2024, he said hopes students will still consider enrolling in Pepperdine’s Great Books Colloquium.
Foundations of Reasoning is part of the new GE program that focuses on reason and critical thinking skills. This class will be taught by faculty from across Seaver College.
“It’s a weird kind of bifurcation to me that you’ve got students coming into Pepperdine who will say, ‘Do I take “Humanities” or do I take “Foundations of Reasoning?” After all, the roots of human reasoning are to be found in ‘the Humanities,’ and I hope that the Humanities will remain integral to a Seaver College education,” Contino said.
The implementation of a new program means many unknowns, Contino said. He said the program is in the beginning stages, and the faculty is interested to see how it plays out.
“There are all kinds of really practical questions that one has to ask at this point, and I think people are asking them,” Contino said.
The changes to the curriculum will begin with the Class of 2028, but all current students are under the existing GE requirements. The Humanities sequence will be available until the Class of 2027 graduates.
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Email Ava Heinert: ava.heinert@pepperdine.edu
