Breaking down the barriers

[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/herb_book_launch.jpg” caption=”From left, Michael Ross, Barbara Ferrier and Herb Jenkins in the Class of ’54 Oasis Garden, located between Hamilton Hall and Alumni Memorial Hall. Photo credit: John Bugailiskis”]For Anne Dahmer '90, her early school years didn't exactly offer a nurturing environment for someone who liked to speak their mind. The admittedly outspoken student said she recalls spending many hours standing in a corner, or writing lines after school because she couldn't stop talking or arguing. “Not everyone was thrilled to see my hand go up in class,” she says.
Thankfully, that drive to ask questions and develop her own opinions eventually found a refuge when she entered McMaster's Arts & Science Program in 1986.
“I knew from the first day that this was the place for me,” says Dahmer. “Arts & Science was the place to ask questions. We even had whole classes devoted to the art of making cogent arguments.”
After graduating, the student who couldn't stop talking and posing questions met her match — she embarked on a career as a kindergarden teacher. “No creature on Earth has more questions than a five-year-old.”
Damher's memories of McMaster's Arts & Science Program are just one of many from graduates that have found their way into a new book that celebrates the program's success in developing a broad-based liberal education. The book, Combining Two Cultures, a McMaster University Arts and Science Programmer: a Case Study is edited by Herb Jenkins, Barbara Ferrier and Michael Ross. The editors and other contributors offer insights into the challenges of planning and establishing such an innovative program, which began in 1981.
Jenkins was the founding director of the Arts & Science Program and subsequently of the Engineering and Society Program at McMaster University. He says that while the value of a liberal education is widely acknowledged, few have ever tried to give an account of creating and managing a cohesive degree program of this kind in a research-intensive university.”
“Barbara Ferrier and I decided, after talking with colleagues in the Arts and Science Program, that we wanted to produce a reflective and critical history of McMaster's experience in creating and managing this new kind of undergraduate program,” says Jenkins.
“We believed at the outset, and still believe, that an account of this University's success in breaking down the barriers that have for so many years kept students from a balanced education across the arts and sciences, will encourage other educators to break away from the tradition of sorting all students into a degree program in science, social science, or humanities.
“We know that there are university leaders who want to move in that direction,” says Jenkins, “but for many reasons, including the hegemony of faculties and departments in modern research-intensive universities, have not succeeded in doing so.”
He says the new book demonstrates that even in research-intensive universities, there are excellent teachers who want the opportunity to teach broad-perspective courses in their discipline. It is also possible to have a core set of courses spanning the arts and sciences and still allow sufficient depth of specialization to prepare for graduate work in many disciplines.
The book illustrates that students who graduate with a degree in arts and science go on to have a wide variety of satisfying careers. They include the major professions of law, medicine, and teaching, as well as academic careers spanning disciplines from astronomy to art history. And they include careers in business, with non-governmental organizations, and with government.
The case study includes a critical discussion of the place of the teaching of inquiry in undergraduate education.
“We now have over two decades of experience with this approach and therefore have something to say about what it can and cannot do for undergraduate education,” says Jenkins. “The book provides a unique account of the planning and conduct of a program of liberal education for these times.”
The book's other two editors also have a long association with the Arts & Science Program. Barbara Ferrier was the second director of the Arts and Science Program, and for many years led the first-year inquiry course. Michael Ross was the first instructor of the course, Literature, in the Arts & Science Program.
Brief personal reflections from many of the program's graduates, first-hand observations from current students, and instructors' accounts of their experiences give a vivid sense of what the program has meant to its participants.
In producing the book, Jenkins says he worked very closely with Ferrier and Ross as well as the book's many contributors. “The other contributors are all teachers in the program, and their accounts of how they planned their courses, and how their courses evolved as they worked with students, is really a very heartening story of what a university is, or should be, all about.”
You can celebrate the launch of the book this Friday, Oct. 29, in the Skylight Room in the Commons Building, from 3:30 to 5 p.m.