In 1967, a group of Brown students and faculty set out with the goal of improving education at Brown. The group's final report, authored primarily by Ira Magaziner '69 and Elliot Maxwell '68, led to the establishment of the New Curriculum at Brown. Today, the Open Jar Foundation is releasing a new edition of the report, which will be available at the Brown Bookstore and for free online. The following is a reprint of the new preface from Magaziner and Maxwell, to accompany the new edition.
It was more than 40 years ago that a group of students and faculty began the discussions that led to the report on Brown's curriculum that is now being republished. We are relatively sure that no one who worked on that mimeographed document expected that it would someday be available electronically to people around the world. More important, the students who sought to change the curriculum, hoping to improve the educational experience for themselves and for others, had little reason to believe that a new curriculum would lead to the remarkable faculty and students that have since come to Brown, at least in part because of its adoption. And no one could have expected that Brown's New Curriculum would remain relatively unchanged for 40 years or more.
We are pleased that the report is being made more broadly available, but not because we believe that it provides the right blueprint for a curriculum for the 21st century. The report itself anticipated that the curriculum should and would change as the times changed. We hope instead that the report will spark discussions about the goals of higher education, the role of the curriculum, ways to evaluate students, the importance of a global perspective, the impact of the departmental organization of knowledge and governance and other core questions. Such discussions would be particularly valuable today, when knowledge is exploding. After all, the Internet is providing global access to high quality educational materials and experiences, as well as massive amounts of both trustworthy and misleading information. New technologies are offering promising methods for teaching and learning and collaboration across borders. But all the while, fewer people are obtaining degrees and more people are challenging the value of a liberal education.
If this report helps initiate or facilitate these discussions, it would clearly justify the efforts that enabled its republication. It would not disturb us if people reached quite different conclusions than we did. The report's suggestion of the need to reevaluate the curriculum at regular intervals was based on our belief that the very fact of a review was energizing for an institution and would improve the educational experience. We find the absence of ongoing discussions in colleges and universities about the nature and purpose of higher education somewhat ironic.
Brown's New Curriculum has itself been reviewed several times over the last 40 years without major change. We attribute its longevity to the strength of the core principle of the report — that the student be the center of the educational experience — which we still embrace. Perhaps another reason for the Brown curriculum's stability is that, unlike at many other colleges and universities, the students and faculty at Brown understand and agree with the centrality of this principle and view the curriculum as their own.
Placing students at the center of the educational experience is not a device for reducing their obligations. It places an enormous burden on them, making them responsible for their own choices and allowing them to learn from their mistakes in a supportive environment — something that we have come to see as a shared requirement for growth, whether it be in childhood, in adolescence or as a team member in the workplace. The quality of Brown graduates is testament to the value and rigor of the experience they had, even without distribution requirements, a fixed corpus of knowledge to be studied or letter grades with pluses and minuses for every course. The report sought to encourage students to learn how to learn so that they could and would continue their education throughout their lifetimes. We think that here, too, Brown graduates provide evidence that the New Curriculum has been a success.
The late 1960s was a time of great ferment in the United States. The debate over the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, the women's movement — all were contesting the prevailing views in our country. In a smaller way, the curricular reform movement was challenging the dominant model of higher education that had its roots in the general education movement of the 1940s and 1950s. The uncertainty about the future made it an opportune time to campaign for change. We were lucky to have been part of that debate and grateful to have had great colleagues in that effort.
Now is also a time of great ferment and uncertainty about the future. What better time than today to think together about how higher education can enable us to deal with the challenges of the coming years?
Ira Magaziner '69 and Elliot Maxwell '68 led the curricular reform movement that resulted in the establishment of the New Curriculum at Brown. The Open Jar Foundation is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the performing arts and curricular freedom in higher education.
