In the introduction to Attitudes Toward History, Kenneth Burke tells a story of two friends, one of whom has struck upon a “plan for saving the world.” As they discuss it excitedly, they’re joined by a third “person,” whom they recognize as the Devil. They notice that he’s very interested in the plan, and he tells them that he thinks it would work. Taken aback, they ask, “Wouldn’t it put you out of a job?” To which, the Devil replies, “Not in the least, I’ll organize it.” Burke frames the book that follows as a meditation upon what he calls the “bureaucratization of the imaginative”:
This formula is designed to name the vexing things that happen when [folks] try to translate some pure aim or vision into terms of its corresponding material embodiment, thus necessarily involving elements alien to the original, “spiritual” (“imaginative”) motive.
Knowing Burke, he almost certainly chose the term “bureaucratization” for its ugliness (he describes it in an Afterword as “wanly comic”). He also associates it pretty closely with technology and capitalism (two forces of “instrumentalist genius”).
Attitudes is not an easy book to summarize, nor is it necessarily one of Burke’s best known volumes. I’ve always thought of it as transitional; like a few writers of that era, Burke began as more of a literary critic but ended up a rhetorician. And I think you can see some of that passage in Attitudes, but one consequence is that it’s a difficult book to parse overall, even though there are lots of hidden gems in it. “Bureaucratization of the imaginative,” in some ways, names opposite poles of a spectrum, and swinging back and forth between them (like a pendulum) supplies a certain amount of historical momentum. I know that probably sounds obscure, but think of it this way: someone starts out with a good idea, puts that idea into practice, and tries to build a system or a society or a culture around it. The original motive becomes bureaucratized—preserving/conserving the system becomes more important than the ideal itself—and the system begins to crack. Someone comes up with a great idea for addressing the problems of the old system, they implement it, and the cycle begins anew. Each era begins in part as a response to the one that came before, motivated by a desire to do things better.
[If you hear some echoes in this account of our contemporary circumstances, where tech companies scramble to hype “new” (AI) solutions to solve the (rot economy) problems that they themselves have created through enshittification, you’re not wrong. But that’s not what I’m writing about today…]
I was thinking about Burke this week because we’re in the process, at Syracuse, of revising the Liberal Arts Core, the set of courses/categories that all students in the College of Arts and Sciences must complete in addition to their major(s). In many ways, this doesn’t have much of an impact on my own department—we’ll be offering the same required writing courses under the new system that we were under the old. One consequence of this is that I’ve had the chance to watch the process (and the conversations) without feeling threatened or compelled to intervene.
Not that I don’t care about it. As a graduate of a liberal arts college myself, I’ve always been a believer in the idea that part of our students’ program of study should indeed be devoted to broad exposure to a range of ideas and disciplines. If anything, I wish that I’d cast my own net even more widely than I did when I was in college—we had a required curriculum, but I focused pretty strongly on English from the get go. So I’m pro-core. What’s fascinated me lately, though, is the bureaucratic end of things—how the idea of a liberal arts core actually gets implemented. I feel like I could do one of those “How it started…how it’s going” memes about this process, because we’re about to vote as a faculty on delaying its implementation for another full year. The original plan had the changes taking effect a few months from now, in the fall.
It’s probably not as bad as a fiery explosion, but any time you try to move from one deeply entrenched system to something new, it’s not a matter of just turning a couple of dials, or dropping a new model into the mix. There are layers upon layers of activities to account for, from entire student support offices that are used to doing things a particular way to curricular plans in departments that will need revising to the tricks and exploits that students develop over the years to deal with the old system. Maybe the best way to go about it is analogous to the way that you have to deal with your chronically late friend by telling him that the party will start an hour earlier than it actually does. In other words, some of these problems won’t become obvious until people are faced with the stark reality of imminent change. So perhaps the daunting prospect of implementing the change in 2024 will be what allows us to do so more successfully in 2025. We can hope, at least.
There are a lot of different pieces of this that I could address, but I’ll focus on a fairly recent one, just to give you some taste of how complicated this is. Our old system was/is primarily based on having students take a certain number of courses (four) from each of three broadly disciplinary categories: humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences/math. (There are other parts of it, including the writing requirement, but the 4/4/4 is the body of the Core.) Under the new system, students will take 2 courses each (resulting in 10 courses rather than 12, which was one of the considerations) from 5 transdisciplinary categories:
Arts, Literatures, and Cultures
Politics, Ethics, Historical Perspectives, and Society
Natural Sciences and the Physical Environment
Mind and Cognition
Quantitative Reasoning, Data, and Numerical Literacy
So far, so good. One of the things that we had to do this past fall was to go through all of the courses that we offer, and then tag those courses according to which categories they might fulfill (including rationales, sample syllabi, etc.). It was not a quick process. But each department did this, and submitted their recommendations to the curriculum committee, who was responsible for adjudicating, following up, etc. Each category carries its own rubric that asks what a course should cover/accomplish in order to be counted as part of that category. I imagine that this was neither a simple nor easy process.
I’d heard some of this already, but at a recent meeting, the faculty saw some of the results. The biggest headline was that these areas weren’t evenly distributed among the courses that our College offers. In fact, more than 50% of the courses were tagged with “politics, ethics, historical perspectives, and society” while only 6-7% were tagged “mind and cognition.” (I don’t have the exact numbers or breakdown because I’m working from memory.)
This creates some problems, as you might imagine. It will be very easy for students to find courses that fulfill that larger category, and much more difficult in the latter case. And that means that the departments identified with mind and cognition (psychology, philosophy, I’m guessing) will need to accommodate a large influx of non-majors into those courses, shifting resources away from major courses (for various reasons, this new Core is supposed to be resource-neutral—departments won’t be getting more faculty to accommodate the shifts). It may also mean that other departments, who had a relatively consistent number of non-majors in a given year, will see those numbers drop. Different departments, it’s probably obvious to note, have different ratios between majors and non-majors. (Because of our required writing courses, our ratio is exceptionally low; the vast majority of the teaching we do is to students who won’t major in Rhetoric and Writing.)
This might not sound like a big deal, until you realize that, in order to create a workable schedule of courses that includes instructors and spaces, the process begins in early fall semester for the following year. That doesn’t mean that everything’s set in stone, but making changes is difficult, and moreso if we’re talking about courses that a department’s majors need to take in order to graduate on time. And many of our students double major, which often means that they’re planning out their schedules 2-3 semesters in advance, and relying on courses being offered when we say they will be. Even a small change to that can ripple through students’ schedules. (I ended up teaching an independent study last fall for 2 students who wouldn’t have been able to complete a minor in our department without the course, and that was just a small, unforeseen instance. Multiply it by dozens or hundreds of students, and chaos would ensue.)
Part of the point of a core curriculum is that it should be taken across a range of departments, and so students aren’t allowed to have more than 3 of the 10 courses they take come from any single department. So it’s not a matter of making sure that those categories see even representation in individual departments. We have to manage this at the College level, in such a way that it doesn’t have an oversized impact on any individual department’s enrollment.
As challenging as it is to come up with a bullet list that adequately maps out a liberal arts core (and there are other elements as well that aren’t included above), and that itself took a year of committee meetings, debates, and workshopping, applying that map to a territory of departments, interdisciplinary programs, and research centers is even more fraught. As we’ve learned this year, the hard way, it’s not just a matter of coming up with a “better” system. Although some of the goals for the new core have been accomplished (getting rid of some “categories” that had become nearly meaningless), we’ve still got a ways to go for something that was originally intended to be implemented next year.
It’s not anyone’s fault, and I hope that I’m not coming across as though I think there’s a better way to do things. If I had to bring this around to the topics that I deal with on this site, I’d describe this as a perennial issue with any sort of large-scale organization. In order to coordinate the activity of thousands of people (admin, faculty, students, staff), the complexity increases exponentially in relation to the size. Such that when a butterfly flaps its wings in Physics, a tornado rips through Sociology. The more levels of scale that you incorporate into the system, the more difficult it is to enact top-down change without setting off a host of unintended consequences. And this is a group of extraordinarily smart and dedicated people who all agree that “A curriculum in the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences imparts a shared knowledge base that empowers graduates with the understanding and skills to navigate novel situations and formulate effective responses to complex problems.”
But the devil, we might say, is in the details.