There are celebrities on campus and everyone knows about them. At Yale, they are not sports stars, but famous professors and they, like their departments, are considered the best in the country.
With this backdrop of world-renowned scholars and programs, strengthening undergraduate academics has been one of the hallmarks of president-elect Richard Brodhead's tenure as Dean of Yale College. Amidst innovative scholarly research, he has fought to protect the centrality of undergraduate teaching and the breadth of the undergraduate curriculum.
"There's so much freedom in undergraduate education--and there should be--but it isn't right for schools to turn people out who have used their freedom simply to render themselves stupid and incompetent in all domains of human experience," Brodhead said.
Yale's top-notch departments--which offer majors, yet no minors--coupled with an emphasis on learning for the sake of education deter many students from studying abroad during the school year.
"There's so much to do here that anyone who goes abroad does it during the summer," senior Kelly Heinz said.
With the rigor and strength of Yale's departments--top ranked in almost every field--compelling students to stay on campus, administrators want to ensure they receive a solid intellectual foundation from their Yale education.
The recently-issued Report on Yale Education, a comprehensive analysis of Yale's undergraduate academic program, underscored the school's commitment to liberal arts education--even at the expense of pre-professional training.
"In our judgment, the student best equipped for [the] future will be a person fitted with multiple skills that can be brought to bear in versatile ways on changing situations," reads the document, which Brodhead largely authored.
The Report noted, however, that encouraging students to obtain such a liberal arts education has been difficult. Unlike Duke's recent curricular report, which found Curriculum 2000 requirements too stringent, Yale's analysis concluded that its breadth requirements, which are intended to provide students with a well-rounded education, were too vague, and many students were opting for the easiest classes possible in areas outside of their majors.
"I feel like I got a pretty liberal arts education, but you don't have to," said senior Alexandra Epstein, a women's studies major. She added that several of her friends had never read a fiction book for class.
Classes are divided currently into four groups--languages and literatures, humanities, social sciences and natural sciences and mathematics--and students are required to take three classes in each group. Beyond the distributional requirements, students take an average of 12 additional courses to complete their major.
As a result of Brodhead-led reforms, Yale's requirements starting in 2006 will resemble a less extensive version of Curriculum 2000. Under the new system, students will take two classes in each group, must complete two classes in both writing and quantitative reasoning and analysis courses, and face a more stringent foreign language requirement.
Administrators took great precaution to allow students considerable freedom in choosing classes, and to ensure universal standards also recommended that interdisciplinary centers assign writing and quantitative reasoning credit. Brodhead said the committee worked to make sure it would not "be an exercise in checking off boxes."
Even though Yale's curriculum is not constructed as a game of fulfilling requirements, some students reported that getting into classes at the beginning of the semester often is.
Although once students declare their majors, they get priority registration for classes in their departments, no seat in a course is guaranteed. For oversubscribed classes, particularly seminars, students must submit 100-word statements of how they can contribute to the class and why they want to take it.
Then they wait on edge during the first few weeks of classes for postings and e-mails from professors, announcing whether they have, or have not, made the cut. In the meantime, no one enrolls in classes until the end of the two week shopping period that precedes each semester and students are occasionally left without the seminars they anticipated.
"It's been rare that the semester turned out the way I planned it," said junior Lee Ngo, a sociology major.
Fulfilling a major at Yale is a time-intensive process. Some majors even require applications for entry and all require students to write a substantial senior thesis, unlike Duke. As a result, many sleep-deprived seniors lock themselves in the library after spring break, scraping to finish their scholarly documents. But few complain, regarding "senior essays," as they are euphemistically called, a fact of life.
It is the science classes that draw the complaints.
Although many Blue Devils bemoan an early morning trek to the Gross Chemistry Building, Yale's science buildings and laboratories are even further from where students live--and on a hill.
This, combined with many students strong interests' in the humanities, leads to a split among the student body with regard to science and mathematics courses.
"There's somewhat of a divide between science classes for the humanities and science majors," said freshman Wesley Greenblatt, an economics and a molecular biophysics and biochemistry major.
The university recognizes that some classes take more time than others--giving students an additional half credit for labs and beginning language classes--but the scheduling leaves these students without time to explore other options.
"It's very difficult to mesh problem sets with paper writing," said Gaurav Sajjanahar, a sophomore majoring in electrical engineering and computer science.
And although many professors--celebrity and rising stars--are regarded as "absolutely amazing" and "what you come to Yale for," students describe teaching assistants--students' primary point of contact in lectures and labs--as sub-par.
"The TAs in science are not so good," said sophomore Jennifer Shields, noting that her teaching assistants in other disciplines have been better. "They aren't trained teachers."
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