The word “curriculum” has been around a good deal longer than have college curricula, and in its original Latin denoted a “race course,” which is wonderful given the pace at which college curricula change. (“The progress of [curricular reform] . . . will be directly proportional to the death rate of the faculty,” said a wise man about 100 years ago.)

According to the record, “curriculum” was first applied to a course of study in a book published in 1576. The volume’s title, as translated from Latin, is something like: Peter Ramus’s Regius Professorship, that is, The Seven Liberal Arts, set forth by him [in his position] on the Regius [royal] teaching chair in the demonstrative style of instruction and published by John Thomas Freige fully illustrated “in continual tables” for the public use of all interested in the Ramean philosophy.

In fact, whether it was Ramus who first repurposed “curriculum,” or someone coasting on the great man’s name, is today a serious question, given that the occupant of the Regius Chair happened to be a Huguenot in Paris during the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, at which time he was removed from his study and then this world by a Catholic mob. Could he have left a completed manuscript that would be published four years later?

Yes, and absolutely not, say the experts. But in the context of curricula, this seems entirely apt, given that dispute has from ancient Athens to our post-modern moment characterized the conversation about what studies ought be undertaken (and which not) on the way to becoming educated.

The most comprehensive account of that long argument that I’ve been able to turn up is The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Documentary History (University Press of America, 2010). Over the course of 496 large-format pages (not including index) the book offers selections from thinkers ranging from Plato to the University of Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum (who thinks well of Plato), with stops in between at many of the usual stations (Seneca, Aquinas, Charles Eliot, Robert Hutchins, etc.) and with sidetrack excursions to sites not as often visited.

For examples:

•  The self-justifying Historia Calamitatum (The Story of My Misfortunes), by Peter Abelard (1079–1142), in which the author recalls his adventures as a student of some of his world’s most acute theologians, the curricular conflicts and fashions of the day, and—very importantly—his own superiority to his teachers, his fellow students, and, ultimately, those who thought him brutish for enjoining an affair with his gifted pupil Heloise, said to have been 20 years his junior (her age remains a matter of conjecture).

•  An 1869 letter by Mary Fairfax Somerville (1780–1872), in which the self-taught mathematician and physicist, whose papers were much admired by the Royal Society but could only be presented to its gatherings by her husband, contends (as do her spiritual descendants to this day), “As a source of happiness as well as of intellectual strength, mathematical science and classical learning ought to be essential branches of study” for women.

•  The twinned contentions from 1903—”Industrial Education for the Negro,” and “The Talented Tenth”—essays by, respectively, Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), in which the two men argue over whether the free American Negro was better off taking up a carpenter’s square or a liberal arts degree. It was a practical as well as an ideological debate, as are so many curriculum battles—and as is its distant cousin, our time’s unending spat about whether a liberal arts education ought to provide access to a higher tax bracket or an improved soul (or both at the same time).

But if contention is a hallmark of curriculum history, so is imagination, or “the perpetual dream,” as David Riesman and Gerald P. Grant titled their 1978 study of curriculum reform movements at 3,000 American colleges and universities. “The campus,” they wrote, “has been a kind of dreamscape for utopian as well as practical reformers, some projecting their notions of an ideal community on the curriculum and extra-curriculum, and others seeing the diversity of undergraduate experience as an epitome of the American dream that education can change one’s life. . . . Those yearnings, so ingrained in a nation that believes deeply in a second (and often a third) chance for everyone, are never fulfilled but endlessly renewed.”

And right there is the poignancy that’s attached to the endless building and rebuilding of curricula—a tone of all-too-human hope that confers a certain gallantry even upon the ideological tussles, the tendentious (or worse, lifeless) committee reports, and the hours spent resolutely reconsidering ideas worn thin by human beings who have been worrying the same fabric for about 2,500 years that we know about.

Our story on the core renewal pilot program and its faculty’s hopes begins here.

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