LETTER: Blame student attitude, not curriculum

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by Tom Jagiella

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I read Jenna Christensen's letter regarding the Rice curriculum with great interest. Because I hold a B.A. in History, an M.S. in Environmental Engineering and am currently pursing certification as a professional engineer and my Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering, I feel that my perspective may be of interest regarding the long-standing S/E vs. Academ curriculum debate. I offer the following in response to Ms. Christensen's points:

* Not allowing engineering to be a preprofessional degree is absurd. Most people like to get jobs after they graduate. I'd love to see Rice abandon ABET accreditation, as I've heard that Caltech has done. Nevertheless, Rice must maintain standards of excellence at least as high as ABET's or our degrees would be meaningless.

* Encouraging the B.A. option is a bad idea. To my knowledge, there is no job market for people with B.A.'s in engineering. A B.S. in engineering is not vocational training; it is training in the application of theory. A B.S. in engineering is no more or less rigorous than a B.A. in pure science; it just has a different focus.

* A pass/fail freshman year does nothing to encourage students to pursue a broader education. Why not advocate a pass/fail curriculum? Grades mean something, including freshman grades. How they're interpreted depends on the sophistication of the reviewer. Rice can't control that.

* The problem with equalizing graduation requirements is that it overlooks the fundamental general difference between pursuit of knowledge in the sciences and the liberal arts.

A history major should do no less work during four years at Rice than a physics major. True, the physics major will pursue about 137 semester hours of laboratories and courses, while a history major will pursue about 120 semester hours of courses. But the history major will spend countless hours in the library, traveling, attending lectures, being active in relevant social movements, etc. To understand the humanities, you have to do more than read books and write papers. You have to do things which don't directly translate into semester hours (like writing letters to the Thresher ).

* A core curriculum is a horrible thing. The last thing Rice needs is a fruitless debate over what to force students to learn. Presumably, the humanities faculty at Rice would settle on an extensive course of indoctrination in the crimes of white European males against the rest of humanity. Rice has conveniently avoided such foolishness by maintaining a distribution requirement in which students and their advisors decide what a well-rounded education must include.

* I am personally tired of hearing all the whimpering about the quality of science instruction at Rice. Science, like philosophy, can't be learned from attending a lecture. You have to read it, think about it, work through hypotheticals and attend lectures. I agree that science instruction would be improved if a more relevant context were provided. But I strongly disagree with what appears to be a common misapprehension that Rice's science faculty are poor teachers. Many of the teachers frequently trashed in the Thresher are among the finest I have ever had.

Rice does have a problem. It has not, and apparently does not, provided an intellectually stimulating environment in a broad sense. I will never forget in 1986 or so traveling to Hoffheinz Pavilion at the University of Houston to hear Bishop Tutu speak about events in South Africa. The lecture was well-publicized, but only about 20 or so Rice students, and only a handful of University of Houston students, went. The place was empty.

Nevertheless, we as individuals must set our own priorities. If Rice undergrads prefer to spend their time making sure that every homework is exactly 100 percent correct before turning it in, instead of doing good work, learning and moving on to something new, then that's our problem, not the faculty's.

Rice is what the students, not the faculty, make it. Rice's workload becomes overwhelming more often due to students' competitiveness than to unreasonable faculty expectations. Some profs are totally unreasonable and endeavor to pulverize young egos while imparting little knowledge. But, overall, campus life at Rice is most poisoned by young people who do not value a thought-provoking conversation or a stimulating extracurricular lecture. Changing the curriculum won't change that.

Tom Jagiella

WRC '88

This item appeared in the Opinion section of the March 31, 1995 issue.

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