The Plaid Curriculum

When I worked at the Boston Architectural College¹, one of the fundamental rituals was the weekly Directors’ Meeting. Turns out that for a college of a thousand or so students, there were a lot of directors.

There were four directors representing the four disciplinary divisions: architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, and design studies. Those were the four academic/professional fields in which one could get a degree, the warp threads that were fundamental to setting up the loom. But every weave also has its weft threads that cross the entirety of the fabric. At the BAC, they were Design, Design Media, Design History and Theory, Technology and Management, Liberal Studies, and Professional Practice. No matter which of the four degree strands you were engaged in, your path would cross each of the six topical areas.

(There were also directors of Admissions, Advising, the Learning Center, and Financial Aid. Without getting too far into the weeds, there were a few others as well, mostly historical artifacts and loyal long-term employees who’d grandfathered their security as the school had changed around them. True in every workplace ever.)

Let me oversimplify a little bit, but not much. The degree strands weren’t fully owned by the College. More fundamentally, they were owned by the professional accrediting bodies that granted the College the right to offer degrees with the respective words attached. The National Architectural Accreditation Board, the Landscape Architectural Accreditation Board, and the Council for Interior Design Accreditation all visited the school every six or eight years and made sure the franchisees were adhering to corporate standards. (Design Studies had originally come about as an exit ramp for students in the three professional strands who weren’t going to make it professionally but who had invested time and money and deserved a college degree of some kind or another. It’s become something far beyond that now, but it isn’t part of a larger national cohort.)

It was really the lateral bands that defined what made the College distinct. They were one school planting its flag in the sand and saying no matter what discipline a student is part of, this is what every one of them will experience.

When I taught at Duke, Writing 20 (Introduction to Academic Writing) was the ONLY COURSE that was required of every single undergraduate student. For twenty years, it was a fundamental hallmark of what it meant to be a Duke student.

I find, now that I’ve left higher education behind, that I have very little interest in the disciplines. (I didn’t while I was inside, either. I was just curious, and had my own questions that I needed to satisfy.) With almost five thousand colleges in the US, it seems to me that it’s the horizontal curriculum that declares a college’s institutional mission. Complete this statement for yourself: no matter what you major in, at our college you will… That’s the sentence that makes your college worth choosing over any of the others. It ought to be fully distinguishable from all the rest. Write it carefully, and live it fully.

1. 2006-2103. I have no idea what they’re doing any more. ↩︎