Yet questions of canonicity lurk not only behind curricular and hiring debates, and not only in the ever-lengthening shadow of our Crisis in the Humanities but also under the ideology of accountability, which increasingly requires literature programs to measure pedagogical outcomes.
What students should learn has always stirred hot debate, and curricular requirements are about as constant as skirt hems.
The survey cites a late-19th-century debate over a proposed curricular reform that would replace ancient Greek and Roman writers with such newfangled moderns as Dante, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Bacon and Shakespeare.
The panel, which will begin meeting next week, includes several prominent players from both sides of the ongoing debate over whether recent curricular reforms provide students with enough mathematical rigor while also fostering a deeper understanding of the subject.
Even the debate over the Common Core curricular standards centered less on what should be taught than on perceived (or misperceived) federal intrusion into states' and districts' jurisdiction over their schools: the perennial question of who has control.
The school is famed for its vast array of extra-curricular activities: literary, drama, debating, over two dozen sports and 30 different groups of music, from junior woodwind to senior orchestra.
This debate has important consequences in the particular curricular domain of science education, but the general issue arises in virtually every curriculum domain.
But for veterans of higher education -- those who taught from classrooms and labs for decades before the current online boom came on scene -- the current debate sounds a bit like earlier discussions of the complementary roles of curricular and co-curricular work.
And this emphasis on being articulate is reinforced in the many extra-curricular activities that surround every liberal arts college -- theater, debate, political unions, student government, protest groups.
