Twenty-five years ago, when Duke’s Curriculum 2000 launched, it urged students to master advanced technology. One of its documents, says Scott Huettel, who chaired the committee that designed the new curriculum launching this fall, noted how important it was for the students to gain comfort with the new tool of … email.
It’s a reminder, Huettel says: “Some things may be permanent, but the way we access our world and what we need to enter the world really does need to change.”
That’s why you rethink the curriculum. What must you learn to graduate from Duke? Languages? Programming? Climate studies? A university updates its curriculum every “let’s say, 15 to 25 years,” says Huettel, a professor in the department of psychology and neuroscience.
This year’s new curriculum has many of the things you’d expect: Trinity students will need to complete three writing courses and three courses in a single language. Regarding breadth, over their four years they’ll need to take two courses in each of six categories: creating and engaging with art; humanistic inquiry; interpreting institutions, justice and power; investigating the natural world; quantitative and computational reasoning; and social and behavioral analysis. And of course they need to choose and complete a major.
Students also participate in one of two special freshman experiences, designed to create community. One is the popular Focus program, which allows first-semester students to choose one of 19 clusters (for example, “Science and the Public” or “Geopolitics & Culture”) and share not just intimate seminars but communal housing and weekly dinners. The other freshman option is the new Constellation program, a yearlong multidisciplinary experience with courses organized around one of 16 concepts, such as “Why do we need rules?” or “What is the cosmos?” Both freshman experiences include field trips or other experiential elements.
The 1924-25 Duke course catalog explains that Duke requirements “are designed to give students such training in certain fundamental subjects as is essential for intelligent, educated citizens,” and the current curriculum pursues the same goal in a way appropriate for 2025.
“We see the curriculum as something that needs to evolve in step with the world our students are entering,” says Deb Reisinger, dean of undergraduate education. That doesn’t mean predictions: “In 2000,” she says, “we could not have imagined the role AI now plays, or the way COVID impacted this generation.” The new curriculum is less prescriptive than Curriculum 2000, which had a matrix of requirements complex enough that Huettel’s committee felt students had “gamified” it to find ways to fulfill requirements with as few courses as possible.
“What never changes is our commitment to the liberal arts education,” Reisinger says. “Students will always engage deeply with ideas, ask hard questions, and learn how to communicate clearly.”
Huettel agrees. “It’s really easy to construct a list of things a student needs to know to be educated,” he says, “and then you suddenly realize that a curriculum is not a list of things you need to know.” A good Duke curriculum, he says, is “a guide to help students navigate all the riches of somewhere like Duke.”
Huettel stresses that the curriculum is a faculty process, not an administrative one: "Our curriculum was not something the dean pushed on the faculty. The faculty own the curriculum."
In the mid-twenty-teens, an attempt at a new curriculum collapsed in faculty frustration. To prevent that this time, the committee spent its first year, starting in 2022, doing little more than listening: “I did not allow people in the committee to say, ‘I think we should do this’ until we had already listened to our stakeholders and put forward statements about what we’d heard and about our values.” It worked. With the committee’s focus on listening, the faculty vote to adopt was almost unanimous.
Most satisfying to both Reisinger and Huettel, though, are the values underlying the curriculum. “We spent a lot of time talking about the fundamental values we wanted to support,” Huettel says. And the landing page of the new curriculum lists the values with which the faculty think Duke students should graduate: connections, curiosity and humility.
“Humility is a wonderful thing,” he says. Duke’s commitment to cross-curricular connection is its calling card, and curiosity seems like job one for a student. But humility: “You’re not an expert,” he says – students should understand that they don’t understand everything. “And the important thing about humility is that it's critical in this world to realize the limitations of your own knowledge and to be able to work with others to acquire knowledge that you don’t have.”