History of Randolph-Macon College

Curriculum Change

Considerably more difficult to capture are the qualitative changes occurring in the academic world of the college. The universal official assumption mixes together scholarly degrees with scholarship and scholarship with teaching. To what degree this is true in practice is a question most committees on tenure either wrestle over as individuals come up for tenure or establish a priori and then agonize over the consequences. Certainly more was involved in the changes between 1945 and 1967 than simple growth of numbers. The curriculum became richer.

The tendency in the disciplines of the nineteenth century such as English, mathematics, and the sciences was toward enlargement of staff and a greater number of specialized courses. In the later forties mathematics had a staff of three; by 1967 - 68, it had risen to seven. English, over the same period, went from four to eight. Latin and Greek remained the same: one each. Romance languages went from two to three. It is in the areas of the fine arts and the social sciences that the most noticeable changes occur.

Arts, unrepresented in the curriculum down to the thirties, had a staff of three, including part-timers, in 1968. In 1946-47, one man taught history and government. By 1967, political science was a full-fledged department of two men, while history had grown to six (one of whom was part-time). One man in 1946 had taught both economics and sociology; in 1967, there were three men in economics and two in sociology. The one man who had taught philosophy and English Bible had been replaced by two philosophers and three theologians. Psychology as an independent department had appeared with Noble McEwen in 1948 and by the late sixties had three men. By 1963, the school had its own great calculating engine and was offering a course in Introduction to Digital Computation, better known now as computer science.

The proliferation of courses constituted a qualitative change as well as the obvious quantitative change. The tradition of hand cultivation that had characterized the Blackwell era could not be continued in the same form in a college with two or three times as many students and four or five times as many faculty members. The effort of the faculty to resolve the problem between such an ideal and the reality ultimately produced a curricular solution, or more properly, a series of curricular solutions. Although the philosophy is not clearly articulated in these terms, the effect of change in the period 1947 to 1967 was to make the academic program the means of controlling the student's intellectual growth, rather than the consensus of faculty opinion. The press of business, the increasing complexity of problems, the extension of meetings of the faculty by virtue of a greater number of opinions being expressed allied to seeking answers to individual problems outside the meeting of the whole faculty. The evidence from the minutes suggests that far from being the result of a consciously expressed philosophy, this change occurred in bits and pieces. The old traditional practice of academic oversight yielded reluctantly and gradually to a new method.

Previous | Contents