Since 1996, the Introduction to Humanities (IHUM) program has been a defining feature of undergraduate education at Stanford. Disciplinary breadth requirements have likewise been the University’s vehicle of encouraging students to engage with subjects outside of their preferred fields and to think in ways orthogonal to how they are accustomed. Now, the futures of both IHUM and disciplinary breadth requirements are increasingly uncertain. A recent report to the Faculty Senate by the Study on Undergraduate Education at Stanford (SUES) has argued for replacing IHUM with a one-quarter “Thinking Matters” course that would be smaller in size and not necessarily a humanities course. Disciplinary breadth requirements, meanwhile, would be replaced by breadth requirements based on the development of certain skills: esthetic and interpretive inquiry; social inquiry; scientific analysis; formal and quantitative reasoning; engaging difference; moral and ethical reasoning; and creative expression.

We applaud SUES for its responsiveness to students’ complaints about the current IHUM and disciplinary breadth requirements. The SUES report notes what most students probably already know: IHUM is unpopular. While many students enjoy IHUM, there is no hiding from generally low course evaluation scores and lecture attendance numbers that can become quite depressing by the end of the quarter. No matter how well individual IHUM courses may be taught, it is difficult to feed students’ enthusiasm for learning in a class they don’t want to take. Much the same arguments can be made against the current disciplinary breadth requirements, and the SUES report does not hesitate to make them.

Nevertheless, important questions remain unanswered: why would students who dislike or fail to engage with the IHUM requirement welcome a one-quarter “Thinking Matters” course? Broadening the scope of the requirement beyond traditional humanities material is certainly a step toward this goal, but the main change from before seems to be cutting the requirement itself from three quarters to one. The cumulative nature of many majors along with the stresses of adjusting to college life can be stressful for freshmen, and there is certainly a case to be made for reducing required coursework to allow such students more time to explore their academic and extracurricular interests. Make no mistake, the move from three quarters to one will mark a much greater change in the experience of Stanford undergraduates than whatever changes take place within the classroom.

The change from breadth requirements focused on disciplinary diversity to ones geared instead toward development of the above-mentioned reasoning styles lends itself to similar criticism. Will classes fulfilling the “quantitative reasoning” or “scientific analysis” requirements be substantially different from fulfilling plain-old “math” or “science” requirements? It would be rather surprising if they were. While it is difficult to see how this change will substantially improve undergraduate education, it is also unlikely to do any harm.

Over the years, Stanford has constantly reinvented the course or program that is the keystone of the freshman year academic experience. The gradual shift from the post-WWI ideal of a student grounded in knowledge of Western civilization to the current system with its focus on methodology and arguments before content represents a major shift in the inner-workings of the classes and a reconsideration of what society considers important. The round of changes proposed by SUES looks to build on this, but only in a minor way. While requirements would now be explicitly based on thinking strategies – whether in the form of the new breadth requirements or the “Thinking Matters” course – the focus they epitomize has pervaded the classroom for a long time. The promise of the SUES recommendations lies in a freshman year that affords students more time to explore classes of their own choosing at the expense of a two-quarter immersion within a particular humanities discipline, which currently features prominently in students’ winter and spring schedules. If this plan is adopted, we hope that future administrators continue to consider feedback and ways to improve it in the never-ending quest to find the best way to balance competing objectives in undergraduate education.