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The Liberal Arts at Penn. The College at Penn offers a liberal arts education that we believe constitutes an ideal preparation for intellectually capable persons such as you who seek productive and fulfilling lives. We have faculty and advisors, classrooms and laboratories, lectures and seminars, all dedicated to your education in the arts and sciences. To give some structure to it all, we have a curriculum, a course or path that you are invited to follow while in our company over the next four years. Actually, you might think of the curriculum as a network of paths blazed through a forest. You can explore the forest along different paths, perhaps even jump from one path to another. Many alternative paths can be taken to gain a very good understanding of the forest. You do not have to traverse every route or see every tree. The curriculum is a means and not an end, a path and not the destination. The destination is your education in the arts and sciences, defined both by the scholarship in the fields occupied by our faculty and by your developing capabilities and interests.
How a Curriculum is Created. A curriculum is often identified with a set of degree requirements. But degree requirements are not themselves sufficient to define appropriate educational goals. It would be possible to satisfy all of the requirements and yet fail to acquire a good education. It would also be possible to acquire a good liberal arts education while technically failing to satisfy the degree requirements. You are not here solely for the purpose of satisfying our degree requirements, although we certainly want you to do that. It would be better to say that you are here to follow the College's curriculum, but that is true only insofar as it leads to your becoming educated.
Changes in the world, in our culture, and in the growth of knowledge can alter the balance between prescribed requirements and curricula on the one hand, and the goals of a liberal arts education on the other. Therefore, our faculty constantly question the requirements, just as they question the curriculum and even the goals of a liberal arts education. There can be differences of opinion about the goals, about the best way to reach them, and about what requirements are needed to keep on the path. This is healthy self-examination, without which the College would surely lose its vital connection to growing fields of knowledge and to the educational needs of our students.
The Birth of the Pilot Curriculum.Over the last two years, as the faculty in the College at Penn have thought about the curriculum, they have reached two conclusions. First, they have determined that students in the College are getting a terrific education. Second, they have determined that the time to seek improvements in undergraduate education is right now, while the College is strong and healthy. To that end, they have committed themselves to conducting an educational experiment to explore certain carefully defined alternatives to the current curriculum. Hence, we have the Pilot Curriculum.
Your Participation in the Pilot Curriculum. As volunteers selected to participate in the Pilot Curriculum, you will be exempted from the current degree requirements of the College. Instead, you will be asked to satisfy a different set of requirements and indeed to follow a different curriculum. We do not yet know enough at this moment to say whether the Pilot Curriculum is easier or better than the current College curriculum. In discussions with current Penn students, we found about equal numbers saying they would prefer the current versus the Pilot Curriculum. Moreover, they were evenly divided on the question of which curriculum would be more difficult. Although individual students had preferences, in the aggregate they felt evenly disposed toward the two alternatives on every dimension we asked them to consider. Your participation in the Pilot Curriculum will help us understand strengths and weaknesses of both the Pilot Curriculum and the current curriculum.
Consider how the two curricula differ. In comparison with the current College curriculum, the Pilot Curriculum reduces the general education courses you must take, from ten courses in seven sectors of knowledge to one course in each of four categories of courses specially designed for the purpose of general education. You will therefore have six additional free electives. Consistent with this increased freedom, you will be expected to assume greater responsibility for your education.
The Pilot Curriculum will require you to develop in writing a plan for how to use your more numerous electives, and you will be required to present that plan to your advisor. Finally, the Pilot Curriculum will require you to undertake a significant research project in the context of your major. The Pilot Curriculum offers a more compact and focused learning experience in the freshman and sophomore years. This experience is designed to develop in you a reflective attitude toward fundamental issues in human conduct, inquiry and artistic expression. It will lead you to appreciate and understand the different disciplines by which many issues can be approached in a research university, and yet it will leave you the freedom that you need to pursue your diverse and demanding intellectual interests.