One of my major projects this year was to help rethink and rewrite Hamilton College’s Educational Goals as part of an ad hoc committee appointed to this task. This was an extremely fun assignment, motivated in part by the two-year-old Mellon Curricular Leaders’ study of the Open Curriculum at Hamilton both internally and in comparison to other places. My focus in this study is on Creativity and Performance, while my colleagues are studying Writing and Research, Quantitative Reasoning, and Curriculum and Advising. The visits we made last year to other schools with open curricula, Amherst and Brown, impressed on all of us the need to further develop Hamilton’s vision as expressed in our educational goals.
We worked on these goals for the most of this past year, and happily the faculty approved the new Educational Goals earlier this month. They are now posted on Hamilton’s website with their full descriptions. Here are the goals in short form:
- Intellectual Curiosity and Flexibility
- Analytic Discernment
- Aesthetic Discernment
- Disciplinary Practice
- Creativity
- Communication and Expression
- Understanding of Cultural Diversity
- Ethical, Informed, and Engaged Citizenship
In order to help make these goals more fully understood and useful, I offer my take on the internal logic of these goals and their significance for Hamilton’s vision of the liberal arts.
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Tags: Craft, Ethics, Expression, Liberal Arts
