New Yeshiva College Curriculum Highlights Interdisciplinary Courses Yeshiva College is unveiling a new core curriculum to take effect in the Fall 2012 semester, featuring a wide range of interdisciplinary courses, more advanced classes within individual majors, and greater freedom for students to craft an education that complements their interests and aspirations and maximizes their opportunities for employment in their field. The change marks the first major overhaul of the curriculum since 1928. Over the last 80 years, Yeshiva College’s general requirements have followed a distribution model, encouraging students to take a variety of courses in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences—a model that Yeshiva College faculty and students increasingly felt was outmoded and out of synch with the modern professional and academic landscape, where innovation and invention are of high value and all fields are becoming increasingly entwined. The new curriculum, which will require fewer credits than the old general requirements, will allow students to gain greater depth in their major field and build individual knowledge and skill sets by choosing electives. It will also offer faculty the opportunity to teach major-specific introductory courses within their fields, allowing them to cover more material in greater depth. Students admitted to YU before Fall 2012 have the option to choose the new curriculum or the previous general education requirements. For these students, AP credits will not apply toward core courses under the new curriculum, but they will still satisfy major and elective requirements. In 2006, the YC faculty began to develop a new curriculum designed to enhance both the educational experience for YC students and their prospects for professional employment upon graduation.  Emerging curriculums from top colleges across the country were studied. After years of careful deliberation, research and testing, a new core curriculum was constructed, designed to cultivate the creative thinking, global awareness and multidisciplinary array of problem-solving tools that will best prepare Yeshiva College students to engage, influence, and flourish in the modern world, personally and professionally. “The new curriculum imbues our students with a sense of citizenship in multiple communities by sensitizing them to our core values and the diversity of cultural traditions which have molded us, thus imparting a sense of belonging and responsibility to humanity as Jews, Americans and world citizens,” said Yeshiva College Dean Barry Eichler. “The most exciting developments currently are happening at the interfaces of disciplines,” said Dr. Raji Viswanathan, associate dean of academic affairs at YC. “Whether it’s the interplay between biology and psychology in the emerging field of neuropsychology or the impact of sociology on political science and economics, it’s critical for our students to cultivate an understanding of how these ways of thinking mesh so they can contribute to the cutting-edge developments unfolding around them and become educated citizens of the world.” To hone the critical communication and analytical skills necessary for professional success and to engage with the larger community in any field, incoming students will take two new courses, “First Year Writing” and “First Year Seminar,” in their first year on campus. “First Year Writing” will focus on the art of writing and provide students with the tools to create critical and analytical works, while “First Year Seminar” will offer them the opportunity to apply those tools in writing-intensive courses across a variety of disciplinary fields, from art to sociology. These courses will be capped at 15 students to create an intimate learning experience and ensure personal attention for each student. The new curriculum will be rounded out with additional courses in six new categories designed to highlight the connectedness of all methods of intellectual inquiry. Click here for more information on the new categories. Click below for examples of how students with very different interests and career goals might shape their education at Yeshiva College.

• Biology major with a year of Israel credit, no APs, no summer courses
• History major, biology minor with AP Bio, no summer courses
• Student who decided on Psychology in his second semester, no APs, no summer courses

“The new curriculum will really enable students to explore a variety of disciplines early in their undergraduate careers to provide more choices for in-depth study later on, as well as provide opportunities for cross-talk between the disciplines and faculty, and model that collaboration for students,” said Viswanathan. “Rather than being isolated within their majors, a mixture of students of varying fields and interests will study together in classes that expose them to a breadth of perspectives and give them a sense of what each discipline, from the humanities and social sciences to Judaic studies, currently values and finds exciting.” “The cultural synthesis of the new curriculum gives students integrated exposure to the basic disciplines that underlie the intellectual traditions of western society in a way we hope will excite and stimulate them,” said Dr. Lawrence Schiffman, vice-provost of undergraduate education and professor of Jewish studies at YU. “This approach, which is a reflection of the cultural and social factors that are necessary to understand the world today, is being taken by first-rate institutions around the world.” So far, 16 new courses have been proposed in the new core categories for Fall 2012. Sample titles include “The Idea of Self” (CUOT category); “Race, Ethnicity and Religion” (COWC); and “Recognition Plots Across the Arts” (INCR). “Once upon a time, general education consisted of courses in canonical texts,” said Dr. Adam Zachary Newton, YU University Professor of English, Ronald P. Stanton Chair in Literature and the Humanities, and Chair and Professor of English at YC, who will teach the INCR course above. “Students were introduced to great books and great authors and cordoned off or separated in various disciplines. A course like the one I’m offering is an opportunity to think topically or thematically about something in a way that enables students to engage different disciplines and move across them.” New Course Categories “Interpreting the Creative” (INCR) courses will seek to develop students’ knowledge and appreciation of primary creative works in the visual, literary and musical arts. In these classes, different artistic genres will be framed in dialogue with each other, fostering interpretive abilities through engagement with aesthetic theories, forms and techniques, as well as the cultural contexts in which the works were produced and received. Courses with the “Cultures Over Time” (CUOT) designation will examine human achievements of pre-modern periods, from antiquity to the turn of the 20^th century. They will offer a breadth of focus, chronologically and thematically, and stress the distinctiveness of the past in relation to the present by studying older cultural products or artifacts and using them to investigate values, traditions, modes of thinking, and modes of behavior. “Contemporary World Cultures” (COWC) will spotlight the diverse voices of various ethnic and cultural groups, through a medley of political, social and scientific expressions as well as scholarly, literary and artistic sources. These classes will also foster research projects that involve students in cross-cultural analysis and the use of a foreign language where applicable. Courses in the “Human Behavior and Social Institutions” category (HBSI) will create a medley of social science disciplines and employ a team of professors from varied departments in a critical study of human behavior and social institutions across time and space. Aspects of history, philosophy, political science, psychology and sociology will all be part of these courses’ purview as students consider the evolution and intricacies of social groups, from nuclear families to international relations. “The Natural World” (NAWO) category aims to foster scientific literacy and methods of thinking among students. Rather than serving as survey or introductory courses for particular majors, NW courses will integrate core principles of the physical and biological sciences and feature faculty from multiple disciplines. Cutting-edge research will be a main focus in these classes, with topics that will include everything from how information is coded and controlled within cells in the human body to quantum mechanics, each taught by an expert in that field. A discussion-based aspect of these courses will also offer substantial opportunities for interactive exploration of questions and issues and enable students to relate scientific concepts to life beyond the classroom. In a similar vein, “Experimental and Quantitative Methods” (EXQM) course will combine components of the worlds of mathematics and logic with natural and social sciences to demonstrate not only how quantitative and mathematical tools are applied within these fields, but also how to understand how they function in daily life, the media and public policy. Students will design and conduct experiments and learn to interpret data and articulate their findings. In lecture, they will be exposed to an array of skills that range from the application of statistical tools to the presentation of data in mathematical and graphical forms. Enhanced language options will also offer students unique ways to meet the new core curriculum requirements. Specifically designed upper elementary and intermediate language courses, currently in French and Spanish, will focus on cultural factors, literary interpretation, and therefore fulfill the COWC, CUOT or INTC requirement.