In Spring Semester 1999 many departments, deans, chairs and individual faculty members spoke with us about general education.
Curricular integrity is something that all major programs seek to achieve.
Because majors are necessarily limited in number of course hours, they must be carefully structured to ensure that students learn what they most need to know. Since general education is similarly limited, it must also be carefully structured. In the spring of 1999 faculty and administrators told us in no uncertain terms that our current general education program is not effectively organized to provide students a good education in the liberal arts. No doubt each course in the content areas of general education explores some bit of the liberal arts well. These bits however do not add up to a whole because the program does little to ensure that any bit of knowledge learned in one general education course is related to what is learned in other general education courses.