Paula Berggren, a Professor of English at Baruch College, provided this analysis of the CUNY Pathways program and its impact on the curriculum at Baruch College. I have posted it with her permission:
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Comments on Effective & Efficient Degree Pathways
Rather than spend all our effort on efficiency, which is the main objective of the Draft Resolution, let us not forget the deeper importance of the effectiveness of Baruch’s General Education core. This College has spent more than a decade working to enhance our core courses. We take learning goals seriously and continue to revise our offerings to further our students’ educations.
Comments on the Draft Resolution
I would like to take this opportunity to reaffirm the centrality of Baruch’s literature requirement as the heart of its General Education offerings. In response to the following ruling from TIPPS —
“Effective Fall 2000, students who have earned a City University Associate in Arts (A.A.) degree will be deemed to have automatically fulfilled the lower division liberal arts and science distribution requirements for a baccalaureate degree. However, students may be asked to complete a course in a discipline required by a senior college’s baccalaureate distribution requirements that was not part of the student’s associate degree program.”
–the Office of the Provost at Baruch designated Great Works of Literature, ENG/LTT/(now CMP) 2800 or 2850 as the single course required of all students who seek to earn a bachelor’s degree.
This is a course that was built from the ground up with the needs of our students in mind. In 1991, supported by the NEH, we published Contexts and Comparisons: A Student Guide to the Great Works Courses, which functions as a supplementary anthology and a course outline. Twenty years later, it remains in use and is now available as a digital text on the Baruch Library’s site. Ours is an ambitious survey of world literature, and when it became the single required course in literature at Baruch, we took pains to inform other colleges in the CUNY system of the new prominence of ENG/LTT 2800-2850 in the Baruch Curriculum. For several years, we held CUNY-wide workshops designed to inform our sister institutions of the kind of literature course we thought essential for Baruch students, and in response, some campuses revised their own literature courses so that seamless transitions for students seeking to transfer to Baruch are possible, if students receive timely advisement from their original schools. We have always been sensitive to the needs of transfer students and take great pains to allow them to use the coursework they have done elsewhere by providing supplementary assignments that, when possible, will complete the literary study they have undertaken elsewhere and allow them to receive credit for Baruch’s courses without having to take a second literature course here. We think that our courses provide a model for all CUNY schools to emulate; indeed, a graduate student in Comparative Literature who is now teaching in the Great Works program chose to apply to teach at Baruch because she had reviewed the General Education literature requirements throughout the CUNY system and concluded that ours was the most impressive. It would be a shame to devalue a course that we have so devotedly worked to improve and keep current.
Other Comments/Concerns
Subsequent to the 2001 ruling that recognized the Great Works program as a source of cultural literacy providing intellectual coherence for an extraordinarily diverse student population, ENG/LTT (now CMP) 2800-2850 were further strengthened by adding a Communication Intensive component. Thus this program provides an opportunity for students to work on their writing and speaking at an intermediate point in their careers; for many of the transfer students who do not have to take our composition sequence, this is an indispensable value. Moreover, reading so wide a range of literary texts written originally in other languages helps our international students focus on the problems involved in transferring meaning across linguistic boundaries.
Our learning goals make the different aims of these courses apparent:
Students who successfully complete the Great Works courses should be able to
- interpret meaning in literary texts by paying close attention to authors’ choices of detail, vocabulary, and style
- discuss the relationship between different genres of literary texts and the multicultural environments from which they spring
- articulate a critical evaluation and appreciation of a literary work’s strengths and limitations
- present their ideas orally
- write critical essays employing
- a strong thesis statement
- appropriate textual citations
- contextual and intertextual evidence for their ideas
We respectfully wish to maintain the rigor and the range of this program as a central requirement for Baruch students and a model for others to match.