GenEd Expectations

These expectations have critical implications for administrators and faculty, as well as for students. First, we need to continue to offer a curriculum that has substantial, exciting, and attractive opportunities for problem centered, collaborative, interdisciplinary study. This work needs to continue to offer opportunities for students to work together, to engage across significant differences and apply their understandings in meaningful ways to the world in which they live. Over the past 30 years these opportunities have helped our students develop qualities of intellect, imagination, and engagement. Our successes have led to our national leadership position in undergraduate education. Maintaining and strengthening the potential for interdisciplinary work and active engagement with the community should be a continuing high priority.

Beyond this, however, the deans and the faculty need to find ways to build on our strengths in the education we provide for our students. This can be done in three crucial ways. First we need to enhance and organize the processes of advising for students as they make their way through the institution. Second, we need to provide broader exposure of our graduates to arts and sciences for students who do not wish to concentrate in these areas, and to ensure over the whole curriculum a more consistent engagement with quantitative reasoning. Third, we need to find ways for students to demonstrate their accomplishments not only within specific programs but over the whole of their Evergreen education.