Restructuring the University 167

Restructuring the University 167 points of view, teaching what description is about not how to work PowerPoint. THIRD YEAR IN COLLEGE AND BEYOND Now what next? After these 2 years, what will students be able to do and what should the faculty do with them? Clearly, faculty, as I have pointed out, want to teach what interests them—their own research subspe- cialties. Faculty will want to continue to insist on there being majors. Students should not have to be forced to select a major subject because majors (and, of course, subjects) are at the root of the problem. Whose needs do majors satisfy? Faculty like them because the fac- ulty can determine that to be a major in X students must know all of its aspects, and then insist that students, take obscure courses that they would not want to take. This is another way of making sure that faculty get to teach whatever they want to teach. An alternative would be to let students specialize in a cognitive process, like diagnosis, and an area where they have become knowl- edgeable to which diagnosis applies, like financial diagnosis or behav- ioral diagnosis. Every student who majors in business doesn’t really want to, or need to, know every aspect of business, and a student who majors in psychology doesn’t need to study clinical, social, animal, and developmental psychology, if what he is interested in is diagnos- ing personality disorders, for example. Let students specialize, if they want—they shouldn’t be made to, but let them specialize in processes that they might want to become proficient at. We shouldn’t force them to take courses , that in no way serve their interests. Such requirements are made using argu- ments about breadth when they are there to make sure that undersub- scribed courses get taught. Majors in computer science at Yale when I arrived there had to take artificial intelligence and numerical analysis. These subjects never interest the same people. They are as different as accounting and clinical psychology. These requirements were there because faculty wanted to make sure there were students enrolled in their course. If they didn’t, they would have had to teach something they didn’t know as well. Faculty made arguments about the well- rounded student, but students’ needs had nothing to do with it. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023913