Creating a Fundamentally Different Curriculum
"'T"' .1 he most exciting and important change" to come about during the late '60s and early '70s, says]. Ronald Spencer '64, was the "open curriculum," which remains at the core of the Trinity academic experience. Spencer, currently associate academic dean and lecturer in history, had returned in the summer of 1968 as a lecturer in history. He arrived at the same time as President Theodore Lockwood, who had been dean at Union College, and Lockwood's assistant from Union, Robert Fuller, who became Dean of the College. Lockwood announced the new curriculum in April 1969; the Class of '73, which matriculated in September 1969, was the first to study under it. The open curriculum had no College-wide requirements-no more math, foreign language, or physical education requirements; students only needed to fulfill the requirements of a department .for the major and complete 36 courses to graduate. The new curriculum was the application in the classroom of an attitudinal change that swept Trinity and other colleges across the country, an attitude that asked students to take more personal responsibility for their academic and non-academic experiences, including working out disputes where "moral collisions" occur. As Vice President Thomas Smith wrote in an essay in the Tripod of December 14, 1971, "the development of personal moral standards is each student's responsibility .. .! would not expect, nor would I encourage, the college or the university to resume its attempt to assume moral custody for students." Over the years, curricular innovations approved by the faculty
have been reintroduced; a new general-education curriculum took effect with freshmen entering in fall, 1988. Students today fulfill a distribution requirement by taking one course in each of five areas (Arts, Humanities, Natural Sciences, Numerical & Symbolic Reasoning, and Social Sciences); and an integration of knowledge requirement, usually by completing a five- or sixcourse interdisciplinary minor; and before graduation, they must demonstrate proficiency in writing and mathematics. Despite this, much of the thrust of the open curriculum remains in place today. Open semesters to pursue independent projects came into being with the open curriculum. Open periods in both the Christmas and Trinity terms date from October 1969, and pass/fail grades were first discussed and adopted during this period as well. There was a move by some to go to a complete honors/ credit/fail grading system, a move that was crushed by graduate schools unwilling to accept such a system. It was also during this time that new academic programs were launched, including the Individualized Degree Program for nontraditional students, and the Urban and Environmental Studies (now Public Policy Studies), American Studies and Religion majors. Interdisciplinary departments were created, such as comparative literature. Black studies classes were created and merged into the "non-Western studies" program to create a new Intercultural Studies Program. The creation oflntercultural Studies was important for a black community struggling to find its voice. Since then, Intercultural
Studies has gone through two more incarnations, first as Area Studies and today as International Studies. Study of Mrican nations resides here, while Mro-American studies was passed in the 1980s to the American Studies department, which has moved from its original focus on the myth-andsymbol school of thought about American icons to what is described today as "the study of a culture in the process ofbecoming." In 1969 the first rumblings of American Studies began at Trinity, and one of the four women transfer stude'nts who graduated in the Class of 1970, Judy Dworin, majored in American Studies. She brough~ the Smith College program with her, and for her thesis created a staged interpretation through dance of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The years 1969-1971 also saw the development of Urban and Environmental Studies from a small think tank to a full-fledged academic program. Perhaps most surprising, given Trinity's historic attachment to the Episcopal Church, 1969 was when the College first sanctioned a major in religion. The new major, unencumbered by a tradition of comprehensive exams, rigidly prescribed courses of study and other vestiges of the academic version of in loco parentis, created a major with a junior seminar, a senior colloquium, a faculty adviser and an educational philosophy described to the Tripod by Alan Tull, then college chaplain and associate professor of religion, as: "The way of learning is provided by the department, but what is learned is determined by the student." •
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