Note the following is reproduced from a preliminary report by the SUBCOMMITTEE ON GENERAL EDUCATION of U.B.'s Middle States Self-Study Team. Report was prepared in the Summer of 2002.

GENERAL EDUCATION at U.B.: A Brief Introduction

Standard #12 in Middle States’ Characteristics of Excellence in Higher Education provides that an institution’s curriculum should be designed so that students “acquire and demonstrate college-level proficiency in general education and essential skills.”According to the Guidelines, the “fundamental elements” of general education include:


•a program of sufficient scope for students’ intellectual growth, with at least 30 credit hours;

•a program where skills and abilities are applied to study in the major;

•a program that incorporates study of values, ethics, and diverse perspectives;

•requirements that assure proficiency in communication, scientific and quantitative reasoning. technological capabilities, and information literacy (including critical reasoning);

•requirements that are clearly and accurately described in official University publications; and

•assessment of general education outcomes, and evidence that such assessment results are used for curricular improvements.

UB has had a longstanding commitment to general education for its undergraduate population, and over the past two decades it has expended effort and resources, with substantial faculty involvement,to refine and strengthen the outside-the-major experience of its students.General education at UB is delivered through a combination of (1) certain specific courses developed and established for the general education program; (2) several distribution requirements; and (3) with particular reference to the goal of information literacy, by an environment that actively encourages and facilitates the use of information technology.These requirements and resources address both the objective of inculcating essential knowledge and that of developing essential skills.For most students entering the University in Fall 2002 or later, the formal general education requirements total 45-49 credit hours.

In early 2001, UB and SUNY executed a Memorandum of Understanding as a key component of UB’s mission review process.(Exhibit __ )That document, among many other things, commits UB to providing “a well-defined, quality general education,” pursuant to the expectations of Resolution 98-241 of the SUNY Board of Trustees.(Exhibit __ )In that regard, general education at UB is a work in progress.Although the general education program that UB had in place at the time of the adoption of Resolution 98-241 satisfied most of the specifications of the Resolution and the Implementation Guidelines that followed (Guidelines in Exhibit __ ), some changes in the existing program had to be made.UB is still in the process of perfecting the changes in order to reach full compliance with the SUNY mandate, and in some cases the changes will be phased in over a period of time.The Middle States self-study, however, focuses on the program as it applies to incoming students in and after Fall 2002.

Recent History of General Education at UB

The faculty of the University at Buffalo has been refining its approach to general education for decades through various vehicles.In the 1970s, there was a campus-wide General Education Committee, composed entirely of senior faculty, and tasked with developing and administering a set of structured requirements to replace the very loose standards that had come to characterize many university curricula in the previous decade.In the 1980s, a broader-based entity called the Undergraduate College was created, headed by a University-wide Dean, which more firmly anchored general education in the University administration.In the 1990s, the University established its College of Arts and Sciences, a consolidation of the Faculties of Arts and Letters, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences and Mathematics, which took on the primary responsibility for general education, among other things.For purposes of this narrative, we will begin with the status quo at the time of the last Middle States self-study in 1993, which summarized the situation as follows:

The Undergraduate College has developed an extensive general education curriculum for arts and sciences undergraduates, which received Faculty Senate approval in Spring1991.The program covers all four years of the undergraduate curriculum, and the college shares with faculties and departments responsibility for offering courses and assessing the impact of the program.The Undergraduate College operates on a wider scale than suggested by the original objective.

By 1994, most of the general education program passed by the Faculty Senate in 1991 (see various documents in Exhibit __ ) had been implemented for arts and sciences students who had entered the University as freshmen, including the following elements:


•        a writing skills requirement (two semesters of English composition or equivalent);

•a library skills requirement (completion of a workbook);

•a two-semester mathematical skills requirement (from an approved list);

•a two-semester course in World Civilizations;

•a one-semester course in American Pluralism or equivalent;

•intermediate proficiency in a foreign language (equivalent of three semesters);

•a one-semester course in literature or the arts (from an approved list);

•a one-semester course in the social and behavioral sciences (from an approved list);

•a two-semester sequence in the natural sciences (one of which must have a laboratory);

•an advanced course in the natural sciences, including as an option a newly-developed course titled “Great Discoveries in Science.”

Students transferring into the University, as well as all students in the professionals schools, were initially subject to different requirements, based largely on clusters of courses called “knowledge areas.”Over the next few years, the then Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Dr. Nicolas Goodman, worked with the professional schools to bring their general education requirements into greater conformity with those applying to arts and sciences students.By 1998, students in the various professional schools who had entered the University as freshmen were incorporated into the arts and sciences program with some variations, most commonly a waiver of the foreign language requirement.Transfer students remained substantially exempt from the requirements, largely because of insufficient resources to mount the necessary course sections to absorb these students.

In 1998, the Trustees of the State University of New York adopted Resolution 98-241, establishing learning outcomes requirements in ten “knowledge and skill areas” for all undergraduates, and also calling for the infusion of two “competencies” (critical thinking and information management) throughout the general education program.These were the ten knowledge and skill areas specified by the Trustees:

•mathematics

•natural sciences

•social sciences

•American history

•Western civilization

•other world civilizations

•humanities

•the arts

•foreign language

•           basic communication

The following year, UB embarked on an effort to evaluate the extent to which its existing program already satisfied the requirements of the Trustees’ Resolution, and to determine what changes had to be made for the campus to be in compliance.A major challenge was to extend the requirements to those student groups, especially transfer students, for whom the requirements had been relaxed or waived altogether.What resulted from this review is a program (detailed in Exhibit __ ) that applies to all students entering the University in Fall 2002 and later, with various “grandfather” requirements for continuing students.The program for new students, which reflects the University’s commitment to general education going forward, includes the following requirements:


•writing skills (one or two courses in English composition, depending on placement);

•library skills (completion of a workbook);

•mathematical sciences (one course from an approved list of courses);

•a two-semester course in World Civilizations;

•a one-semester course in American Pluralism or equivalent;

•basic proficiency in a foreign language (equivalent of two semesters; certain students exempted);

•a one-semester course in the humanities (from an approved list of departments);

•a one-semester course in the arts (from an approved list of departments);

•a one-semester course in the social/behavioral sciences (from an approved list of departments);

•a two-semester sequence in the natural sciences (one of which must have a laboratory);

•a “depth requirement,” consisting of a third semester of foreign language, OR a second course in mathematical science, OR an advanced course in the natural sciences.

At this writing, SUNY has approved the specific courses in the program as meeting the learning outcomes requirements set forth in Resolution 98-241; the waiver of the language requirement for students in the professional schools; and a temporary waiver of immediate implementation of the program for transfer students.(Exhibit __ )

Another SUNY initiative relevant to general education is one on Campus-Based Assessment.(Exhibit __ )Under this initiative, SUNYcampuses are required to undertake a systematic assessment of both their general education programs and their academic major programs.UB’s assessment plan for general education was submitted to SUNY in April 2002 (Exhibit __ ) and is discussed more fully below.

[The rest of the material that follows in this document has been deleted for the purpose of this course]

 
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