
Curricular Review: Redefining a World-Class Education		39:41
History, Structure, and Content of American Academic Culture
	Introduction: American Academic Culture	7:13
	The Shaping of the American Curriculum	6:57
	Building an American Academic Culture	8:57
	Theories on the Contemporary Curriculum	6:41
	Conclusion: The Challenges of General Education	3:46
	Audience Question & Answer	8:05

	Introduction: American Academic Culture
	Introduced by Harvard College Dean Benedict Gross, guest speaker Professor Thomas Bender of New York University explores the history, content, and structure of American academic culture since World War Two.<br> <br> Addressing a Harvard audience of deans, faculty and selected students involved in the review process, Professor Bender’s address was part of a day long symposium to ask how changes in culture, society, and the organization of knowledge during the last half-century bear on Harvard College's future curriculum.<br> <br> The American research university is described as an unstable compound consisting of a marriage between a German research university and the English liberal arts college. The source of many of the tensions of American higher education for more than a century can be linked to this marriage of these two components pulling in different directions.<br> <br> Julie Reuben’s book, entitled <i>The Making of the Modern University</i>, emphasizes the importance of the triumph of secularism in the course of the 20th century university. For roughly a century following the introduction of serious research into American universities in the 1840s, the notion of inquiry was unified by an often unacknowledged faith in an orderly world. Since World War Two, as William F. Buckley complained in his book entitled <i>God and Man at Yale</i>, the principle of coherence has been absent. It has meant disciplines have become increasingly autonomous and self-justifying. <br> <br> Professor Bender espouses that with such autonomy, not much holds together the academic commons, which is skewed farther by the winner-take-all salary system in universities and elsewhere in our society. Instead of a commons, the university is a site for an aggregation of nodes of global career sustaining disciplines, all striving for autonomy and self-realization.<br> <br> More recent developments in cultural politics and post-modern ideologies, have made the problem more challenging. Professor Bender concludes, "We make a mistake if we lay the whole blame on these recent developments.... The longer historical sequence needs to be considered."<br> <br>

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