The Fall of the Faculty by Ginsberg Benjamin

Author:Ginsberg, Benjamin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2011-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

The Shadow Curriculum

A fourth institutional expression of the tacit alliance between university administrators, on the one hand, and minority groups and campus activists on the other, is the development of a shadow curriculum consisting of a mix of “life skills” or “student life” courses and a set of classes and seminars that come perilously close to political indoctrination. Many schools have long offered special curricula designed for students who were not prepared to do college-level work, such as many Division I varsity football and basketball players. In recent years, however, the concept of an alternative curriculum has expanded in response to the needs of campus deanlets and the wishes of campus activists as well as multicultural and diversity administrators. Working together, these forces have brought about the development of an ever-expanding nonacademic curriculum largely outside the faculty’s purview at many colleges and universities.

The deanlets, for their part, have created a for-credit life skills curriculum, available and sometimes required at three-fourths of the nation’s colleges. This curriculum consists of classes ostensibly designed to help students adjust to life away from home and to the subsequent rigors of “real life” off the campus. Classes in the life skills curriculum typically include lessons in budgeting and personal finance, good eating habits, and getting along with roommates. At the University of Connecticut, a special class, “Life Skills for Athletes,” emphasizes the importance of attending class while in college—a concept that may have been unfamiliar to many of the student athletes seen dozing during one of the class’s meetings.57 Even at Harvard, students may choose from among a variety of Life Skills courses including real estate, auto repair, cooking, and plumbing repair.58 These courses, to be sure, seem innocuous enough, but parents paying nearly $40,000 in tuition and fees plus probably another $20,000 in living expenses to send their children to Harvard might wonder why their mechanically challenged offspring could not take such classes for $75 at the local community college.

The deanlets and staffers who organize and often teach life skills courses view the growth of this curriculum as an affirmation and expansion of their own role on the campus. As we saw in chapter 1, as part of their effort to marginalize the faculty, administrators are fond of asserting that much education occurs “outside the classroom.” The life skills curriculum expands this outside-the-classroom portion of college and, ironically, validates it with inside-the-classroom academic credit. Deanlets and staffers also believe that teaching life skills classes strengthens their resumes and will help them win promotions or to find better positions at other schools. For this reason, most deanlets are willing to give up valuable time which they might have devoted to meetings, conferences, retreats, or even strategic planning, to participate in life skills education.

While run-of-the-mill deanlets organize life skills courses, college diversity and multicultural staffers contribute to the shadow curriculum in another way. These functionaries organize courses whose goal seems to be the transformation of students’ values and beliefs regarding matters of race, gender, public morality, the environment, and a variety of other political topics.

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