Creating Global Citizens through Encounters with Asia—The Making of the Modern World Program at Eleanor Roosevelt College, UCSD

This article describes the “Making of the Modern World” program, a liberal arts curriculum in a public university. Thirty years ago Eleanor Roosevelt College at the University of California, San Diego, developed a multi-disciplinary liberal arts core curriculum called the Making of the Modern World. The history and cultures of Asia were a major part of that curriculum. As one of the developers of the curriculum, I now reflect on the program both as a success story and cautionary tale. I will recount why we developed this kind of liberal arts curriculum, how we did it, how well it did or did not work, how it has changed over the years, and what lessons this experience might have for us today. I argue that liberal arts colleges can learn from our efforts at creating such a curriculum in a large research university, but all should beware of taking on our educational deficiencies.

Herein I would like to describe this program both as a success story and a cautionary tale. I will talk about why we developed this kind of liberal arts curriculum, how we did it, how well it did or did not work, how it has changed over the years, and what lessons this experience might have for us today.

How and Why
Why did we develop this MMW curriculum? Those of us on the planning committee were committed to the idea that along with and before preparing our students for With the support of Jamie Lyon, the founding provost of Eleanor Roosevelt College, John Dower insisted that the course be multi-disciplinary and multi-media.
He included faculty from a wide range of humanities and social sciences departments and made provision for a library of slides and films pertinent to the course. Although we were a multidisciplinary group, we shared a common conviction that to understand the present, you had to understand where it came from. To understand how people think today, you have to know something about the classical exemplars that provide vocabulary and moral precedent for grappling with contemporary problems. But we also needed to know how all living traditions change over time in new social, economic, and political contexts. We also needed to know not only the histories of success but of failures: the blind spots they were afflicted with and the disasters they were complicit in. We needed to be aware of how the meaning of different traditions changes with different perspectives and how to appreciate the resources for critical reflection that can be provided by modern social sciences -as well as the limitations imposed. Such an education, as we saw it while developing the ERC curriculum, was not a preparation for success in any particular career but a resource for responding to the challenges of living well with any career that one might choose, especially in a California context that was becoming increasingly integrated into the Pacific Rim. the Mencius, the Classic of the Dao and the Zhuangzi (we used the comic book version by Tsai Chih-chung), as well as part of the Sunzi and the Grand Historian's account of the Emperor Qin. We also used selections from the Bhagavad Gita, the Ramayana, and the Kama Sutra. The faculty used slides to bring to life material culture and the arts; music and film clips were also used to help make these studies real. For Asia in the 20 th Century, for example, I included a story by Lu Xun, parts of the autobiography of Gandhi, the writings of Mao Zedong, a story by Mishima, oral histories of Japanese soldiers in World War II, a manifesto of Ho Chi Minh, testimonies of Chinese dissidents, a chapter from a novel about Indonesian dissidents, vignettes about Japanese salarymen, a movie by Sanyajit Ray, and parts of the Chinese film River Elegy.
3. The third component of the course, critical understanding, was supposed to be inspired by the professors' lectures, which tried to pull various pieces of the material together, and by the group discussions led by the teaching assistants every week in groups of 30. Besides participating in class discussions, students were to write a variety of critical essays -shorter for the freshmen, longer for sophomores-based on the material. As we passed through history, the course emphasized critical understanding of the interconnection of the classical traditions, whether via the Silk Road, the great maritime routes, or 21 st century cybersphere. Especially in the segment on the 20 th Century and Beyond, the main message was about global interdependence in triumph and tragedy. The lines between East and West, North and South, became increasingly blurred.
For each quarter in the sequence, the material was tied together by common themes. for all of us was not just to put the non-West in, but to contextualize the West so that it continued to matter but mattered in context of a true world history, so we could teach interactions between societies and cultures when the West was not even part of the conversation -like contact between India and China for instance. The main point for us was to make the rest of the world important even before the West ' discovered' it or conquered it or decided it mattered." Most of us were still fairly junior and still fairly idealistic. We really wanted to pioneer a new way of imagining basic liberal education, at least for our campus, but with implications for American academia in general. We also found it rewarding to learn from each other. I felt responsible to give at least an informal education to colleagues who were not experts on China. I learned a lot about modern art and philosophy from a colleague in European literature and about international relations from a colleague in political science, and I think they learned some things from me.
This mutual learning was important because we had to give integrative lectures that were very different from the courses we would give in our own specialties. In the first few years I often stayed up past midnight preparing the morning's lectures. They were a lot harder to prepare than my normal courses in sociology.

What Worked and What Didn't?
What did and didn't work? The establishment of the college and its global mission helped stimulate continued growth in Asian-studies related faculty throughout the university. We now have a very rich array of upper division courses on Asia, including language courses, and these lead into a wide variety of Asia-related internships and studyabroad programs. We encourage our students to take advantage of our study-abroad programs, which have now expanded to include summer sessions, single semesters, and the traditional full-year programs. A higher percentage of ERC students take advantage of such programs compared to other UCSD colleges.
Nonetheless, one needs to be realistic about our accomplishments. Most UCSD students haven't especially wanted a career in international affairs and didn't especially desire a global perspective. UCSD is renowned for its STEM departments, and most students came in wanting to be STEM majors -until they found STEM courses too difficult. They then often switched to the social sciences, especially economics and management "science," psychology, and political science. From the beginning, they found the ERC curriculum too demanding and too distracting from their career aspirations. (The first few years may have been partial exceptions, because Fifth College attracted students with a pioneering spirit who were attracted to its aspirations.) MMW became a course students loved to hate, though after graduation many nostalgically said it was their most valuable course. What Didn't The faculty who created MMW bore responsibility for creating a curriculum that some students thought to be too burdensome and irrelevant. We were all research professors, specialists in our respective fields. In our eagerness to be comprehensive, we assigned too much reading in our areas of expertise. There were tensions, as I have mentioned, between historians and social scientists; instead of thoroughly resolving these, it was tempting to simply give each side too much of what they wanted. The photocopied readers for primary class documents weighed several pounds eachand were also expensive. Some of the alumni who returned for that 25 th anniversary lugged copies of the readers back with them to laugh and marvel at how much they had had to read, or at least pretend to read. But perhaps it says something that they had kept them for all those years. It was too much reading for students to absorb, especially when they were presented with unfamiliar ways of discourse such as the Confucian analects, or for that matter, the writings of Mao Zedong. Even if we tried to unpack the meaning of the texts in lecture, there was often not enough time to do so thoroughly.
Another problem was with the teaching assistants who were supposed to lead discussions about the materials. Most of them had not studied much Asian history and philosophy, and they had their own difficulties in explaining the texts, or for that matter, keeping up with the reading during the amount of time specified in their teaching contracts. In the end, most did very well and brought inspiring creativity to presenting the material. But it took a lot of work to enable them to do that.
The purpose of a liberal education, as I see it, is not to stuff students with facts (many of which will be forgotten days after final examinations), but to lead them into mature reflection on diverse accounts from different -but interconnected - them not to become specialists like ourselves but to have the true beginnings of a global education. If MMW was hard for students to take, it was also hard for faculty to properly develop.

What Changed?
MMW has steadily changed under various pressures. The photocopied readers have gotten slimmer, the choice of readings more focused. We have developed greater skill in the training of our teaching assistants -and the teaching assistants have responded well. But change has not only been driven by the intentions of the faculty and students who were the original stakeholders, but also by external forces resulting from the evolution of the public research university.
As our university grew, it became more bureaucratized. Research became more specialized and departments more insulated from one another. Most of my own work was interdisciplinary, but that is much less the case for a younger generation of faculty. Moreover, an increasingly corporatized management has relied ever more heavily on "metrics" -especially, how many publications faculty have in journals in what ranking. The pressure on younger faculty is intense. There is less incentive for them to take time away from their specialties to develop any course that would force them to integrate realms of knowledge that are not directly relevant to their specialties, or to develop any course in a way that would create the foundation for a broad humanistic understanding rather than preparation for a specialized career. The new metrics also mean that departments are eager to increase their own enrollments and want their best teachers to teach introductory courses in their own departments rather than give time to a general education entity like MMW. Over the years, therefore, the composition of the MMW faculty has changed; now, there are almost no faculty from the social sciences. Another pressure comes from the governor and state legislature passing all the way down through the different layers of the University of California to us faculty, to reduce the time needed to obtain a degree. This happens while many pre-professional departments, especially in science and engineering, contend that they have to add courses to adequately train their students. Something has to give, and that is often general education and liberal arts courses. As a result, we have had to shorten the MMW sequence from six quarters to five, and we had to delete the requirement for one course in a non-Western art. We were under pressure to eliminate the language requirement -most of the other colleges at UCSD have already done so. However, we got around that by arguing that most of our students have taken enough AP language courses that they really don't have to take many in the university, so the language requirement doesn't slow their time to obtaining a degree. The position of the colleges within the university has been declining, and I am concerned that the distinctive MMW core curricula will be taken away in favor of a smorgasbord of department-centered introductory courses that will be easier and cheaper to implement than an integrated college curriculum like we currently have in ERC.
The university increasingly justifies itself in terms of its ability to get students started in lucrative careers. We get more questions from students and parents about

Lessons for Liberal Arts Colleges
What lessons does this hold for you in liberal arts colleges? One lesson is that many of us in big public research universities may have good ideals about maintaining the promise of a liberal arts education, and we may sometimes do innovative things to realize those ideals, but we are not very good at sustaining them. The ever-increasing pressures to specialize, to publish, and to bring in research grants, though based on the imperatives of modern scientific research, have colonized the social sciences and even humanities. Many professors genuinely want to be good teachers, but can't get tenure and promotion based on strong teaching only. Insofar as liberal arts colleges place more of an emphasis on creative teaching, they have a genuine comparative advantage over research universities -an extremely important role for liberal arts to play in American academic culture. They can learn from some of the good things we did in places like UCSD, but no one should be seduced into taking on our educational deficiencies. Research should be required; that is important for intellectual creativity.
But aim for a better balance between research and pedagogical creativity. Perhaps place greater value on the kind of integrative research that can give us all a better glimpse of our place in the larger society, and that even hints of how we might work toward a common good.
When it comes to introducing Asia into the liberal arts curriculum, one lesson to be gained from our experience at Eleanor Roosevelt College is that most of the faculty who teach the curriculum don't have to be specialists on Asia. It is important to have some specialists, as we had when developing The Making of the Modern World, even though specialists tended to load the curriculum with more material than students could handle. The experts can teach the non-specialists, but the latter might help experts curb their enthusiasm and also give useful advice on how to integrate Asian materials into the comprehensive purposes of the course. That purpose is how to give students a vision of the similarities as well as differences advancing to the next stages in their careers. The esprit de corps faded. Even those faculty members formally affiliated with ERC rarely take part in its activities. The common purpose gets embedded in routines whose meanings get forgotten. There is now little time to take part in the common discussions among diverse faculty, which gave the original MMW its tension-filled coherence. The smaller size of most liberal arts colleges provides more opportunities to keep the sense of common purpose alive and to continually renew it. Even so, renewal takes constant effort. Smaller liberal arts colleges might also allow for more of a sense of common community among students and interaction between students and teachers, which would enable informal learning to take place.
For big universities and small colleges alike, there remains pressure from the job market on the ideals of a liberal education. Students and parents alike want to know how education will pay off with a good job. For us at UCSD, this has led to emphasis (by administrators and students alike) on majors like engineering that can lead directly to well-paying jobs. As more resources are put into these majors, general education programs with liberal arts ideals feel under siege. We may argue that the liberal arts can help develop the broader perspective that will make any job meaningful and, indeed, as the case of Steve Jobs shows, may lead to work that is extremely successful. Especially on the West Coast, the rise of Asia is a palpable phenomenon, and it is easy to see that no education that neglects Asia can adequately prepare students for the future.
Even though they are greatly pressured by the demands of the job market, liberal arts universities have a rich tradition for making the case for a broad general education. Outside of the West Coast, however, away from this palpable feeling of being integrated into the Pacific Rim, faculties might feel less urgency to integrate studies of Asia into such an education. It may require some effort to convey to them that knowledge of Asia is critically important for any generally educated person, not just specialists. At this juncture, attention to the job market may stand us in good stead. Almost every major American corporation is deeply enmeshed with Asian markets either through imports or exports. All branches of American government and the military must constantly pay close attention to Asian affairs. Obtaining careers in any of these institutions will require at least some knowledge of Asian cultures and societies. For purely pragmatic reasons, every university should assist in providing graduates with entry to such career paths. And what begins with a pragmatic, utilitarian motivation can lead to -and in the long run has to be at least partially sustained by -a deeper appreciation of the intrinsic value of participating in the great civilized conversation with the cultures and societies of Asia.
We can all take heart from this conversation reported by a colleague: "After a lecture on Ramayana and (the) place of women in ancient Hindu and Indian society, I had a student come up and politely ask me why she and others needed to know all this. She really was quite polite and seemed earnestly curious. I said 'Are you a biology major?' She lit up and said 'Yes -how did you know?' I said -'Because I get a lot of biology majors asking that question and the reason you might want to know some of this is because you will no doubt be working in labs or clinics or other settings in which people from all over the world and from many cultural backgrounds will be present. So knowing how they see the world and what their cultural heritage is can help you be respectful and communicate with them.' That was the best I could do at the time. Near the end of the quarter this student came to me after a lecture and said -what did you figure out?' And she said 'You are teaching us to think.' I loved that." And it is indeed such thinking that is a necessary foundation for The Great Civilized Conversation.