The three hundredth anniversary of the University’s founding is an appropriate time to take stock of current strengths and take sightings for a future course. With this in mind, I am appointing a Committee on Yale College Education to assess the adequacy of the current undergraduate program and to consider changes and improvements. The Committee will look at many particulars, but a common question will direct its inquiry: What will an educated person need to know a decade or two from now, and what steps can Yale College take to ensure that students are given the best preparation for the future world?

The Committee, which Richard Brodhead, the Dean of Yale College, has agreed to chair, will deliberate in the academic year 2001-02, during which time it will consult widely with Yale faculty, students, alumni, and educators elsewhere. I have asked the Committee to make a preliminary report available for community discussion in the fall of 2002. It is anticipated that the final recommendations, revised in light of this discussion, will be delivered in the spring of 2003.

Several factors make this review especially timely and will contribute to set its direction. At this moment, Yale is embarking on a series of ambitious initiatives that will strengthen the University in major ways. One task for the committee will be to think how these projects can yield maximum benefits for the students of Yale College. As Yale undertakes a half-billion dollar rebuilding of the University’s science and engineering facilities, for instance, we will want to ask how science education can be most effectively conducted and how undergraduates can be most effectively involved in scientific research. The creation of the Center for Globalization Studies and the expanded activities of the Center for International and Area Studies make it similarly opportune to ask how we equip students to understand and act in an increasingly interdependent world.

As these cases remind us, at Yale the college is surrounded by a virtually unparalleled array of intellectual and cultural assets—graduate and professional schools, research centers, library and museum collections, and the rest—that are far less closed off from undergraduates than at many other schools. Given the richness of these resources, a further task for the Committee will be to ask how Yale College can take full intellectual advantage of its setting in the larger university.

Though I would encourage the Committee to expand its agenda as it sees fit, to make its work purposeful, I would ask that its deliberations focus initially on four areas of education.

The research discoveries being made in the biological sciences have created radically altered prospects for individual lives and the life of societies. One task force of the Committee will acquaint itself with the University’s resources in the biomedical, bioengineering and public health fields and envision ways to build on the strength of current programs. In particular, the Committee will ask how science students can be afforded the most stimulating opportunities to participate in front-line research. It will also ask how the implications of contemporary discoveries can be fully and searchingly explored in Yale College courses.

Given the increasing role that science and technology play as determinants of modern society, at the same time that Yale strengthens opportunities for students specializing in the sciences, we must afford all students the education they will need to be intelligent, effective citizens of their world. So in addition to seeking ways to strengthen research opportunities in the physical sciences and engineering, the second task force—working in close coordination with the first—will study science and technology education for non-science majors. This domain ranges through the classical science and engineering disciplines into newer interdisciplinary fields, like the study of the environment and of the social consequences of the digital revolution. There has always been valuable teaching in this area but there has been an ad hoc quality to the offerings available to non-majors. This group will be asked to envision a comprehensive, powerful plan of science education for non-specialists and to suggest how we can implement such offerings in a regular way.

To understand the whole of what the University has to offer, these two groups need to look across the borders from Yale College to neighbors that might enrich the experience of undergraduates—notably the Medical School and the Nursing School, the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and the Peabody Museum.

“Globalization” is a name for the fact that societies are in continual interaction with other societies. In the contemporary world, these interactions have grown more rapid, more deeply transformative, and inclusive of more and more dimensions—political, economic, cultural, religious, environmental, and technological. A third working group will be charged to look at Yale’s offerings in the study of societies and their interconnections. In addition to reviewing existing programs, this task force will ask what benefits could be derived from Yale’s constellation of assets in the area of international and social studies: the Schools of Law and Management, the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, the Center for the Study of Globalization, the Economic Growth Center, the Institute for Social and Policy Studies, the Center for Comparative Research, and others. This committee will have the task of trying to define what constitutes an adequately “international” form of education and how Yale can provide it. This project will require review not of academic offerings alone, but also of the relation between formal on-campus study and experience abroad.

The fourth group will consider the education Yale College gives in the history of human expression and self-reflection. Yale College is unique in having its undergraduate school bordered by professional schools of Art, Drama, Music, and Architecture, in addition to an extraordinary array of further resources: the Divinity and Law Schools, the Whitney Humanities Center, two major art galleries, the Beinecke Rare Book Library, the Film Study Center, and the Digital Media Center for the Arts. Yale College derives benefit from these neighbors but we have not thought systematically about the role they could play in undergraduate education. In addition to reviewing instruction in Humanities departments and interdisciplinary programs, this committee will be asked to envision ways to make appropriate use of these adjacencies—an exercise that I hope will stimulate new thinking about the role of creative arts and performance in the Yale College plan of study.

A Coordinating Committee made up of representatives of the four working groups will coordinate the larger review. The Coordinating Committee will circulate larger questions and suggestions among the working groups and shape emerging recommendations into a coherent whole. Early in the process, the Coordinating Committee will seek opinions of the strengths and deficiencies of existing programs from faculty, masters and deans, students, and recent graduates of Yale College. It will also press the working groups to suggest ways to reach certain general goals. These include: protecting and strengthening close intellectual contact between faculty and students; multiplying opportunities for students to engage in serious supervised research; increasing faculty participation in undergraduate advising; paying sustained attention to the development of student powers of expression; and enhancing the educational role of the residential college.

In these larger deliberations, the Committee on Yale College Education will draw on the work of a further constellation of existing committees: the Yale College Course of Study Committee, chaired by Robert Harms, which is considering the role of independent study projects; the Committee on Teaching and Learning, chaired by Charles Bailyn, which deals with academic advising and the evaluation of teaching; the Committee to Review the Residential College Seminar Program, chaired by John Rogers, which is studying the colleges as a base for intellectual activity; the Committee on Writing in Yale College, chaired by Linda Peterson; the Language Study Committee, chaired by Harvey Goldblatt; and the Project Advisory Board for the Center for Media Initiatives, convened by Philip Long.