Peter Struck has pursued a long and winding path through the liberal arts. A self-declared “classicist without a degree in classics,” Struck has never limited himself to one sector of the arts and sciences and is a firm believer in the experience of learning—what he calls “habits of mind”—instead of skill training alone. This road has led Struck, the Vartan Gregorian Professor of the Humanities, to a new role as the Stephen A. Levin Family Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, succeeding Paul Sniegowski.
Struck has expanded the Benjamin Franklin Scholars program to include a first-year curriculum and a residential component. He was also one of the first faculty members to engage in online instruction and has continued to teach a summer online course via the College of Liberal & Professional Studies; his Greek and Roman Mythology massive open online course (MOOC) has enrolled more than 250,000 students to date.
Struck has been involved in reevaluating the curriculum’s general education requirement.
“People learn skills their whole lives, and if you think of yourself as a kind of skills-acquisition machine—well, OK, it’s good to have skills—but in college, you can do much more than that. You can learn the fundamentals of how it is you think in the first place. How do you gather evidence? How do you decide whether this or that evidence is the right data to be using to solve the problem? How do you draw inferences that are fair and not tendentious? How do you see past your own blind spots to see the world the way it really is? A good education should instill the habits of mind that let you do those things, which will also give you the most prosperous future for yourself in all ways, including personal fulfillment, happiness, family life, community engagement, and professionally.”
As for the challenges of liberal arts education in higher ed, Struck says: “I think the biggest challenge the liberal arts face right now is one of messaging. The choices of major and what students study are important, but they’re important for probably a different reason than folks might think. The social scientist Richard Detweiler has demonstrated that the best indicator of future success isn’t the major, it’s the number of courses taken outside the major. Breadth is the real key.”
Read more at Omnia.
