Restructure the General Education Requirements

Mills College has historically been a place of innovation, and while it continues to foster it, the college could emphasize this aspect by eliminating the separation between departments and divisions, a separation that hampers creativity and innovation.

The undergraduate general requirements would be a good place to begin. One suggestion is to revamp all of them using the idea of "cross-pollination" (in other words, taking an interdisciplinary approach). Our students would fully taste the benefits of the liberal arts college if their Gen Ed requirement courses were co-taught through a whole semester.

There could be a possibility of special funding for courses co- taught by faculty from more than one division or department; a pilot program might involve only a small number of courses, with proposals judged on the basis of curricular innovation and "cross-pollination" among divisions. There might be outside funding sources for these courses.

While such a program would require a small financial investment, it could be done with relatively little expense, and if it is successful it could become a marketing tool for Mills. We would continue to make our mark as innovators by creating new bridges through various departments. These new courses, to truly reflect the "cross-pollination" concept, would have to be fully integrated into the curriculum of each collaborator.

New Interdisciplinary Science Majors

Proposal 

Think about combo science majors that build on existing resources but which, potentially, attract wider array of students (that is, that go beyond just grabbing existing students from existing majors). What we really need is leverage, changes that have non-linear effects. What's going on in science at the best small schools? The story is not always just more variety of majors, but perhaps an exciting portfolio?

Examples 

• Biophysics. One might pretty cheaply develop a new major in Biophysics: because it draws on bio, chem, and physics, would just be one or two new courses. But if we add it, it is not to attract a bunch of new students who are not looking at Mills now. It might, though, make us look stronger in general (since a school with no physics program is a red flag to some students, legitimately). One might worry, though, about trying to do biophysics when we do not really do physics. 
• X/Engineering. We do get quite a few students interested in engineering, but even a degree in engineering science (like Smith, which as you know is not totally successful) would be really expensive and possibly not worth the investment. See also:Make the 2+3 Engineering Program Really Work.  
• Another option that has come up is a strand of Environmental Chemistry.

Another innovative approach in the sciences is the 5 year degree.  Rutgers, for example, has a Professional Science Masters (4+1) Program where you can earn a BS/MBS.  We would need to ascertain how are 4+1 programs viewed by employers and graduate programs, of course.  A variation on this might be to offer a five year BA/BS that expands options using current offerings but with, perhaps, an attractive discount for staying the extra year.

Faculty Driven Trans-Disciplinary Major Pilots

Idea

What if small groups of faculty design, and get approval for "college" majors to be offered for a few years on a pilot basis.  The menu on offer would vary from year to year as lessons were learned and interests evolved.  For something similar, see the programs at Evergreen College.

Introduction 

Like many liberal arts colleges, Mills allows students to “design their own majors.” These institutions also, from time to time, consider curriculum changes including the creation of new majors and (much less frequently) the elimination of existing majors. When the two processes are contrasted, interesting differences emerge. The former leaves the inventiveness in the hands of sophomores, the latter in the hands of distracted committees, status quo bias, and turf battles. The products of the former, even if an excellent idea, are rarely repeated. The latter, even if a bad idea, are rarely repealed. The list of contrasts could go on, but the bottom line does not require it: our processes for curricular innovation leave a lot to be desired.

The future of women’s education depends on changing this. The pace of change in world of higher education is such that offering an education that is just as good as and just the same as except for women only is not likely a sustainable. If we continue to be guided by our 19th and 20th century educational legacy, we stand to produce graduates less and less well prepared for 21st century lives. This will reduce the attractiveness to new students and reduce the success of graduates and, in turn, reduce the level at which they can support the college.

Women’s colleges like Mills, if they are to serve women who will lead change in the coming decades must themselves be able to lead change in what it means to be an institution of higher education. One piece of this is to re-think what it means to “major” in something.

Majoring in the 21st Century 

What should students at women's colleges major in? For a long time we have tried to change women’s position in the social division of labor by getting more women to major in subjects that had tended to be dominated by men. In some fields, like medicine, this project has been quite successful (The Lancet 2009); in others, like computer science, quite disappointing (Stross 2008).

These efforts, while laudable, are, ironically, not very future oriented. The academic paths we encourage our students to follow in pursuit of breaking barriers and ceilings are on maps designed to solve the problems of a previous century. The time has come to think about training leaders not in terms of the legacy of disciplinary boundaries and social problems of the 20th century, but rather for the problems and opportunities that lie ahead.

In other words, what they should major in in the 21st century is the 21st century.

What would this mean? Even without crystal balls, we can guess that the leaders of tomorrow, in technology, arts, and politics, are going to be boundary spanners, most likely not the "interdisciplinarians" that we have talked ineffectively about for the last few decades, but rather "transdisciplinarians" whose tool kits ignore boundaries and who possess the ability to collaborate with colleagues with alien skill sets.

It won't do to reprise previous efforts at top down, monolithic, a priori curriculum reform. We need to eschew the old approach of appointing committees and voting up or down wishy-washy consensus plans based on what we wish we had studied in college. In its place we need an infrastructure that will facilitate faculty experimentation and curricular reconfiguration in ways that do not depend on university committees, decanal decrees or foundation grants. In effect, we need to import some of the virtues of “startup culture” into the academy.

We should explore how women's colleges can reinvent themselves not to prepare women for traditionally male occupations but for a world that is not yet here and to do this in ways that other institutions will want to emulate. It will focus on ways to build an innovation infrastructure that encourages, facilitates and rewards faculty for engaging actively in this process.

A Preliminary Vision 

What if small groups of faculty design, and get approval for "college" majors in consideration of

1. existing intellectual and pedagogical resources, 
2. an analysis of future problems and challenges in American and world society, 
3. an assessment of the opportunity structure in the graduate school and employment markets (to optimally match “novel” majors with career paths likely to be open to them). 

Faculty would commit to a given sequence of courses and advising students for a set number of years. Faculty would then be in the position of “selling” the program to entering students; if there were no student interest, there’d be no program. Similarly, faculty and students would evaluate such programs on an ongoing basis, making changes or even eliminating the programs as indicated. Programs that are particularly successful could be institutionalized in majors “on the books” if desired.

We expect that novel programs like this will prove attractive to excellent students and to outside funders currently desperate to find student oriented new ideas. The institutionalization, not of particular "majors," but of this process, can lead to a general institutional nimbleness that is rarely seen in organizations like liberal arts colleges.

Opportunity

Amid the litany of problems facing women’s liberal arts colleges like Mills lies opportunity. Contrary to the position some have taken, the project of educating women can be called a success without saying that it is over. According to the National Center for Education Statistics women will continue to earn about 60% of the bachelor's degrees awarded in the U.S. each year – over one million per year – during the next decade (National Center for Education Statistics 2010). This is not a small market. But to enroll these students women's colleges need to take the lead transitioning from "just as good as but different" to “different and better.”

Colleges like Mills tend to be small, under-resourced, and have relatively low rates of staff turnover, all factors that make innovation challenging. These same factors can make it possible to create an environment in which small experiments can flourish. We should attempt to take advantage of these characteristics and this demographic trend to expand our impact on society.

Works Cited 

1. National Center for Education Statistics. 2010. “Degrees Conferred by Degree-granting Institutions, by Level of Degree and Sex of Student: Selected Years, 1869-70 Through 2019-20.” http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_279.asp. 
2. ———. “Digest of Education Statistics, 2007.” 
3. Institute of Education Sciences. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_258.asp. 
4. Ryan, Dan. 2012. “Majoring in the 21st Century.” http://majoring21.blogspot.com/. 
5. Stross, Randall. 2008. “What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?” The New York Times, November 16, sec. Business. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/business/16digi.html. 
6. The Lancet. 2009. “Women in Medicine—a Future Assured.” The Lancet 373 (9680) (June): 1997. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(09)61088-6..

(Re)Create a (re)New(ed) Communications Program

History

Until about 12 years ago Mills had a very vibrant major in communications.  For reasons we need not rehearse here, we got out of that business just as the shape of the field began to change radically during the first internet bubble.  Around this time schools of library science morphed into schools of information science, fields like sociology, psychology, politics, and computer science all started paying more attention to "communication" writ large.  To make a long story short, we sold at the bottom of a market that's been rising ever since.  And it probably has a long way to go so it would not necessarily be a bad idea to get back into it now.

Resonance

There are obvious resonances with existing programs. Some of Burke's courses are legacy of old major.  We left film studies on the table last year.  We hired recently in marketing in GSB.  There is interest in psychology (Ruch teaches visual thinking which was a part of the communications major) and Sociology (Ryan works in "sociology of information" and teaches network analysis used in social media studies).  Sociology has been fielding course in mass communications recently.  Dovetails nicely with our public radio reporting program and our journalism minor.  Social media analysis related to "big data" in social science. Although the fine arts version of intermedia is more on the creative end of the spectrum than the scientific, there are plenty of resonances there too.