Seated in a high-backed leather chair in his cluttered office, Provost James O’Donnell stroked the head of a stuffed rhinoceros and explained that, much like his office, Georgetown’s academics might need to be redecorated. O’Donnell has recently established two working groups to consider making changes in the Georgetown curriculum and to analyze the best ways to foster an academic culture on campus.
O’Donnell expressed concern that Georgetown may fall behind other top-tier institutions if faculty members don’t re-examine the University’s current academic state.
“What’s most important is that we haven’t successfully taken a deep breath and looked at what we do here and reshaped it in too long of a time,” O’Donnell said.
The two working groups will be the Committee on the Future of the Curriculum, headed by O’Donnell, and the Committee on Student Learning, led by Assistant Provost Randy Bass. The second working group will consider how Georgetown students learn and how to best cultivate an intellectual environment at Georgetown.
“There is a sense of complexity, overload and crowdedness that has come into the curriculum,” O’Donnell said. His working group will meet twice every month next semester and would like to publish a report on possible curriculum changes by next fall. Ideally, the group will spend the ’08-’09 school year in a loosely-defined “campus-wide discussion” to foster student feedback over the group’s findings and what to do next.
Other issues the groups will confront may include, but are not limited to, the need for more seminar rooms, the shape and size of classrooms and the culture of the admissions process, described by O’Donnell as one in which “success is determined by turning away more customers every year.”
According to Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Charles Deacon, lowering the admission rate is not Georgetown’s fault, but rather a byproduct of the increasing societal pressure for middle and upper class students to attend prestigious universities like Georgetown.
“We don’t want to be the Office of Rejection,” Deacon said. “Admission rate is one of the few benchmarks for prestige, but it’s a false benchmark, and it can be manipulated.”
The working groups will also discuss admissions recruitment, considered by O’Donnell to be “an imprecise business at best.” Faculty are interested in reaching out to demographics of students who would not normally decide to apply to Georgetown.
“Parents are spending thousands to ‘brand’ their kids for one college,” O’Donnell said. “Is the nutishness of the admissions business helping or hurting higher education?”
Data for the discussions will be collected through student surveys, a blog in which students are invited to tell their personal stories about academic life at Georgetown and objective statistics regarding financial aid.
“We succeed right now without always being able to say why we succeed, and that makes us a little nervous,” O’Donnell said. The groups will attempt to determine what gives Georgetown its distinct academic character and what areas of the curriculum and student life can be strengthened to make Georgetown an even more competitive, internationally recognized institution.
