As described above, the admission process admits students to degree programs based on their ability and preparation. Diplomas are awarded only to students who complete approved degree programs. All students must meet the University's minimum graduation grade point requirement (2.0 overall GPA at the time of graduation).
Development of NCSU's new general education requirements took over ten years of discussion and debate on the part of a series of committees and commissions. These new requirements are the first such revisions in over twenty-five years and represent the latest effort to strike an appropriate balance between the goal of breadth in general education and depth in specialized education for students in technical or applied curricula.
The new general education requirements are also the first to be adopted in the modern era of the University, when substantial numbers of students are not enrolled in technical curricula. For the first time in the institution's history, nearly 50 percent of NCSU's students are now enrolled in curricula in the arts and sciences. For these students, concern about breadth versus depth is of less importance, since their degree programs are less highly structured than those in technical areas and contain substantial hours dedicated to free electives.
The length of time taken in arriving at the new general education requirements suggests the difficulty of reconciling two laudable but sometimes conflicting goals for students in technical and applied curriculathe desire for students to have breadth in general education as well as advanced development of technical proficiency. Historically speaking, this division is as old as NCSU itself, emerging in the early days of the institution, when curricula were being developed in response to the Morrill Act's injunctions to teach agriculture and the mechanic arts without neglecting "scientific and classical studies." From its beginnings, NCSU has struggled to find the appropriate balance in technical and applied curricula between breadth in general education and depth in technical education.
Implementation of the new general education requirements is now in progress, with an effective date of fall 1994. Some time will pass before the effects of these changes will be felt throughout the institution, at which point the requirements should be assessed for their effectiveness in providing for breadth as well as depth in all of NCSU's undergraduate curricula.
The records of curricular debate at NCSU over the past century show that this issue has been revisited periodically throughout NCSU's history and will probably continue as a lively issue in curricular debates. Since the process of developing the general education requirements has reopened this discussion, NCSU should now take the opportunity to examine how its current undergraduate curricula compare with technical and arts and sciences curricula at other comprehensive land-grant universities.
Recommendation 5.12: NCSU should review the curricula and organization of degree-requirements at other universities with technical and professional degree programs as well as arts and sciences degree programs to assess how well NCSU balances the goal of excellence in technical education with the goal of breadth in general education.
The long, drawn-out character of deliberations over the general education requirements is symptomatic of what some members of the NCSU community have characterized as NCSU's "schism of the soul." Survey responses indicate that attitudes of many faculty and students continue to be split between a view of NCSU as a place to gain technical proficiency and a view of NCSU as a place to combine a broad general education with opportunities to pursue specialized knowledge in many fields of intellectual endeavor. Thus, while 90 percent of faculty agree that a broad general education is important, only 57 percent agree that NCSU's undergraduate program achieves that goal. On the other hand, over 77 percent of faculty agree that NCSU achieves its goal of effective career preparation.
This division in understanding the University's mission is perhaps inevitable, given NCSU's long history as an institution emphasizing agriculture, engineering, and other applied fields, and the historic strengths of its programs, facilities, and resources in applied disciplines. This focus has been heightened by NCSU's particular institutional history, which is unique among peer land-grant institutions.
Although in its early years NCSU followed the developmental path toward diversification of its academic offerings taken by other land-grant institutions and began to achieve comprehensiveness in the 1920s, the consequence of consolidation in the 1930s was a restriction of mission to the narrowest interpretation of the land-grant charter. By the 1950s, NCSU was the only land-grant institution in the nation not to offer degrees in the arts and sciences.
At that time, NCSU set out to join peer land-grant institutions in becoming a comprehensive university, adding in the 1950s and 1960s degree programs in the humanities and the social and natural sciences. Development of the quality and diversity of NCSU's programs in the arts and sciences were major components of long-range plans of the 1950s and 1960s and major recommendations of reaccreditation self-studies from the 1960s and 1970s. In the past thirty years, programs in the arts and sciences at NCSU have become strong enough to be compared favorably to the best programs in the Southeast region. At the moment, nearly half of NCSU's undergraduate student body is enrolled in these programs, a percentage that is comparable to the distribution of the student body at NCSU's peer land-grant universities.
Nevertheless, in responses to open-ended questions on surveys of students, faculty, and administrators, many respondents indicated they believed the institution's true strengths still lie in the technical and applied fields. A number of student comments indicate that students who view NCSU as a career-oriented technical institution are generally pleased with the level of technical education they receive. Happy to be at a place where they can gain technical proficiency, they express disapproval of attempts to make them "well-rounded."
An even larger number of respondents among students, faculty, and administrators argue that NCSU still falls short of full and mature development in the arts and sciences, and that this fact impedes full institutional development as a comprehensive university and public recognition of institutional excellence. Over 20 percent of respondents to surveys of faculty and administrators lamented what they believe to be a lack of institutional support for the humanities and social sciences and the basic natural sciences. These respondents believe that the campus culture still views these disciplines as not yet having attained recognition for their distinctive contributions to the University's intellectual climate or for their role in supporting the University's mission of teaching, research, and public service. These respondents believe that the campus still views the faculties in the arts and sciences as important to the University only for their historic "service-only" function for the technical and applied curricula.
All data indicate that students' and faculty's sense of affiliation is to individual programs or disciplines or colleges rather than to the University as a whole. As one respondent put it, NCSU lacks the ability "to meet diverse needs collectively."
Dual-degree programs offering degrees in the humanities and social sciences and in engineering (Benjamin Franklin Scholars), textiles (Eli Whitney Scholars), and agriculture (Thomas Jefferson Scholars) make a contribution to overcoming this separation of the campus community between students in the arts and sciences and students in technical curricula. Yet much remains to be done in developing a sense of NCSU as a university, not a collection of colleges or curricula.
In pursuing its aspirations to preeminence, NCSU needs to address this matter of institutional identity, for the University's comprehensiveness in disciplines and its distinctive mixture of basic and applied disciplines and research programs, together with outreach and extension activities, are what identify NCSU as a land-grant university and place it at the heart of the land-grant tradition in American higher education. This institutional configuration represents an achievement toward which the University has worked and planned for decades, and which it deserves to celebrate. Strong faculties, programs, and facilities in agriculture, engineering, design, forest resources, textiles, education, and management, together with strong faculties, programs, and facilities in the arts and sciences are all essential to the future excellence of NCSU and constitute the foundation of our aspirations to preeminence as a comprehensive research-intensive land-grant university.
The combination of programs on the NCSU campus offers students special opportunities for undergraduate education. NCSU is a university where students in technical or applied disciplines can be well and broadly educated, able to assume leadership roles in their chosen professions, and where students in the arts and sciences can become technologically educated, able to understand and participate in the new ways of learning and creating that technology makes possible.
As NCSU's Mission Statement notes, NCSU's context as a land-grant research-intensive university shapes its undergraduate program. Research and the commitment to service can become integral parts of undergraduate education, where new understandings of human history and culture, including its technology, can be discovered, articulated, and explored. The annual Undergraduate Research Symposium, sponsored by Sigma Xi and the University Honors Council, which brings together undergraduates from all disciplines displaying the results of their own research, is an example of NCSU at its best. A study of NCSU's effectiveness in enhancing undergraduate education with research and service is underway. This commitment needs to be continuously monitored.
Recommendation 5.13: NCSU should determine the overall contribution of research and extension to its undergraduate education program and strengthen those areas where weaknesses are discovered.
Responses to open-ended questions on surveys of faculty and administrators indicate that many believe NCSU is at an important crossroads, with great possibilities open before it, precisely because of the mix of basic and applied disciplines the campus now offers. From this perspective, NCSU can be a leader in innovation and the transformation of knowledge because it is able to bring the faculties and students of both the basic and the applied disciplines together in a creative relationship. If there is tension and the need to achieve an appropriate balance, the tension needs to be a creative tension, and the search for balance one that affirms the value of all disciplinary approaches to knowledge and the search for understanding.
NCSU great potential will not be realized if the faculties in applied fields believe that growth and development of the arts and sciences at NCSU can come only at the expense of the applied disciplines. Nor will it be realized if the faculties in the arts and sciences believe that the University regards them essentially as providers of general education courses rather than as professors and scholars of disciplines essential in their own right to fulfillment of the mission of North Carolina State University.
Because disciplinary divisions at NCSU are reflected in University organization through the division of the campus into schools and colleges, the questions raised here often reveal themselves in internal debates over resources, degree requirements, and program proposals. In responses to open-ended questions on surveys of faculty and administrators, there was broad concern that campus leadership at the highest level was needed to overcome internal division in the name of a common vision of North Carolina State University.
Recommendation 5.14: NCSU's faculty and administrative leadership should articulate a vision of institutional identity in which faculty and students can recognize the importance of the endeavors of all disciplines to the larger institutional mission.
In implementing the former of these two principles, NCSU has strengthened its programs in the arts and sciences substantially in the past two decades. This strength is demonstrated by such measures as the number of NCSU faculty who have been awarded nationally competitive fellowships in the humanities and research grants and contracts in the social and natural sciences, the number of NCSU undergraduate students who have received admission and fellowship support to attend prestigious graduate and professional schools, and the increasing success of the faculties in arts and sciences in pursuit of authority to establish a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.
Nevertheless, continued programmatic initiatives in undergraduate education are essential to the vigor and creativity of NCSU as it seeks to fulfill the broader teaching, research, and service mission of a comprehensive urban university in a time of rapid social, technological, and cultural change. NCSU should always strive to serve the needs of undergraduates for personal learning and professional development. Now that a number of undergraduate degree programs in the arts and sciences are well established, NCSU should review the range of its degree offerings to identify new degree programs needed for diversity and comprehensiveness in the arts and sciences.
Such programs would help fulfill the University's essential mission of providing appropriate educational opportunities for students so that they will be able to understand and appreciate human achievement and develop their fullest potential as effective citizens. Such programs would also contribute to the University's mission of addressing the needs of an increasingly complex, interdependent, and international society. Disciplines that might prove to be candidates for new degree programs include anthropology, selected fine arts fields and arts studies, and Japanese and German, among the foreign languages.
NCSU should also review undergraduate programs in applied disciplines to identify areas in which new degree programs would complement and enrich current offerings and respond to changing economic and social conditions in North Carolina and the Southeast region. Here NCSU's new College of Management and such programs as the Parks and Recreation Management program in the College of Forest Resources will have key roles to play.
Recommendation 5.15: NCSU should broaden its disciplinary coverage at the undergraduate level in the arts and sciences and in appropriate applied fields to meet students' needs for richer disciplinary opportunities for learning, personal development, and professional achievement and to meet society's needs for greater effectiveness in understanding and responding to changing social, economic, and cultural circumstances.
Some of NCSU's most innovative developments in the last twenty years have come in interdisciplinary areas. In 1993 almost every college at NCSU can point to innovative programs that began as interdisciplinary and experimental efforts and now provide needed creativity and diversity within traditional curricular boundaries and the production and discovery of knowledge.
Since the last self-study, the creation of such interdisciplinary departments as the Department of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences has challenged old disciplinary assumptions and pointed the way toward new configurations of knowledge. The Division of University Studies has become a unit of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and has changed its name to the Division of Multidisciplinary Studies, providing an administrative home for many interdisciplinary programs and enhancing students' ability to plan unique and innovative interdisciplinary-degree programs.
In 1992 new undergraduate degree programs were established in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences by establishing new courses and coordinating course offerings of departments in several colleges. In these programs, participating departments develop concentrations built around a common core of academic work supplemented by specific offerings in the various departments. Emphasizing foundation coursework in mathematics and the natural sciences, these programs enable students to major in such diverse fields as ecosystem assessment, soil and water resource systems, and marine and coastal resources.
One major contribution to the rise of interdisciplinary courses and program initiatives has been the relatively recent authorization of academic minors, which have proliferated in the past decade. The minors program encourages a student to major in one college or department and minor in another, promoting interdisciplinary perspectives and strengthening intellectual ties across the campus.
Although most minors are in traditional disciplines, minors in interdisciplinary areas have also flourished. Such minors as women's studies, African-American studies, film studies, and arts studies combine course offerings in different departments and encourage development of new and innovative courses. Such programs can serve as a developmental stage for new departments or disciplines, and they have already promoted enhancement of current curricula, enrichment of disciplinary offerings, and transcendence of old disciplinary boundaries.
The development of interdisciplinary research centers has also furthered disciplinary transformation and promoted faculty and student creativity. The richness of NCSU's interdisciplinary activity in the past twenty years demonstrates the wisdom of the 1973 self-study recommendation. That recommendation deserves renewed support.
After all campus approvals are obtained, curriculum proposals must be approved by the UNC General Administration and the UNC Board of Governors. The Board of Governors is ultimately responsible for approving the number and types of degrees; the number and nature of departments, divisions, schools or colleges; and the extent to which the University offers graduate work and off-campus programs [4.1.3.7]. The Board of Governors requires documentation that the proposed program does not unnecessarily duplicate programs already available at NCSU or at other institutions in the UNC system.
The review process has clearly defined procedures for assessing the needs and resource requirements for new programs. The procedure for developing a new curriculum is described in North Carolina State University Undergraduate Curricular Policy and Procedures (Provost's Office, 1988) and in the revised Guidelines for Developing or Revising Undergraduate Courses (Provost's Office, 1990) [4.1.3.3; 4.1.3.7]. Although new NCSU degree programs require approval of the UNC Board of Governors, new tracks or concentrations within existing, previously authorized, degree programs require only the approval of the UNC General Administration.
In each department offering a degree program, members of the faculty are designated to provide degree-program oversight and coordination, curriculum development and review, and coordination of advising [4.1.3.5]. Course-review forms require a list of faculty having responsibility for the course. At least one full-time appropriately qualified faculty member must have a primary teaching assignment in each major or concentration [4.1.3.6].
Pre-professional programs at NCSU require that students major in an established degree program.
The Undergraduate Catalog describes the procedures for students to follow to obtain the pre-professional experience. NCSU's pre-professional programs include law, and medical and veterinary sciences.
