SDSU Program Aimed at Renaissance Students

Tom Dorman is a 26-year-old Marine Corps tank commander who has read everything William Shakespeare wrote. But he wants to know more about how Shakespeare’s verse fits into the real world.

Ellie Dorman, 55, his mother and a secretary for the San Diego Unified School District, has always dreamed of going back to school. But she has never found adult education courses very satisfying, and most degree programs she has investigated are too narrowly focused for her needs.

The mother-son team will get the chance for graduate work this fall when they become members of the first class in a new San Diego State University program that allows students to earn an interdisciplinary master’s degree in any liberal arts field that interests them.

Liberal Arts Emphasis

The creation of SDSU’s Master of Arts in Liberal Arts curriculum makes the university part of a nationwide return to liberal arts education spurred by growing concern that American graduate schools are turning out a generation of unworldly technocrats and professionals.

“The feeling is that there (were) a lot of people throughout the ‘70s who went to college and got a technical, career-oriented education,” said Fred Moramarco, an SDSU English professor who will head the new graduate program.

“They came away with very little liberal arts background. They were well-prepared for their jobs, but they were not oriented toward culture and history and literature, the things people traditionally went to college for.”

The SDSU program is aimed at filling that void for people in their 30s through 80s who want to enrich their lives with more education without seeking the payoff of a degree that will move them up professionally.

SDSU will become only the second university in Southern California to offer the degree and will be the only one in the region by 1989, when the University of Southern California closes its financially strapped Master of Liberal Arts Program after 19 years.

SDSU is building a degree based around four interdisciplinary core courses, to be team-taught by professors from very different departments. For example, there will be a course on medical ethics taught by a biology professor and a philosophy professor, one on film and sexual politics offered by a telecommunications professor and a women’s studies professor, and a third on the mind taught by a physical scientist and a medical historian. In an unusual and expensive move, both professors will be in the classroom at all times.

In addition to the core courses and seminars, each student will take five graduate courses from various departments that are related to the theme the student is exploring. A final thesis or project will culminate the course work. Thirty credits are needed to graduate.

Renaissance Students

The hope is that the degree will produce some Renaissance men and women who can build on the experience they have gained during their lifetimes.

Because most students will be working full time, the classes will be concentrated on evenings and weekends. It would not be unusual to take three or four years to finish the degree, said Stephen Roeder, the program’s acting director.

“Liberal (arts) education is wasted on youth,” Roeder said. “It’s when you’re older and more mature that you realize how terribly germane this is to your life. They’re looking for something, some new meaning in their lives.”

Tom Dorman, who earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature at the University of Colorado before becoming a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, brings a love of Shakespeare and Melville to the courses.

The program “was absolutely what I needed,” he said. “My specific interest is literature. I’ve read the specific authors, but I’ve never analyzed things from an interdisciplinary point of view.”

His mother, Ellie, is pursuing “education for education’s sake,” she said.

“My life at this point is very contented,” she said. “I have no professional goals to go up the ladder. I’m settled in where I am and very happy. I’m not trying to be president of a bank anymore.

“I’ve always wanted to go back to school. I’ve gone to classes for adults, adult education, and that was not real satisfying. On the other hand, I did not want to go on and get a master’s degree to be a teacher.

“I have for years jokingly said that I could never go back to school because I could never find a parking place. I was never stimulated to do it. This program combines a variety of things that are interesting.”

Making Up for Lost Time

Another student, Martin Capp, 74, the retired dean of the SDSU School of Engineering, is seeking to make up for time lost by devoting himself entirely to his profession.

“I feel an inadequacy in the sense that my entire career has been devoted to engineering, and now I simply hope to pursue more liberal studies. I want to learn to write more effectively,” Capp said.

“It becomes very, very necessary for engineers to communicate with people, to sell ideas, to talk not just in engineering terms but in terms that people understand. Lots of times, (engineers) are looked upon as guys who can only talk in terms of slide rules and computers. And, really, we deal with some of the most basic economics and social needs that people have.”

Because few similar programs exist west of the Mississippi, and even fewer in schools as large as those in the California State University system, the SDSU venture is being watched closely by leaders of the approximately 100 Master of Liberal Arts programs around the country.

In 1974, the Assn. of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs claimed just 12 colleges and universities with such programs. But because of a nationwide concern about teaching the liberal arts, the field has grown to include about 100 programs, said David House, vice president of the association and an administrator of the graduate liberal arts program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

While the liberal arts tradition at American schools has not diminished, it has been overshadowed by the need for students to specialize in order to compete for jobs, House said. But overspecialization has brought out doubts that American workers are not well-rounded educationally, even among such specialists as scientists, he said.

“The reason people have been coming back to this in the last 10 years is that intelligent and educated people in this country really are concerned with the big picture,” House said.

“In a sense, it’s a very conservative program,” Moramarco added. “It’s an attempt to return to trying to make a university education what it used to be--concerned with literature and arts.”

Started in Connecticut

The first graduate liberal arts program opened in 1953 at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and one of the earliest West Coast efforts was at USC in Los Angeles, where the first students were enrolled in 1970.

During its heyday in the mid-’70s, USC’s program boasted enrollments of 130 students each year, said Mary Ellen Gozdecki, director of the Master of Liberal Arts Program. The curriculum includes a three-week summer course at the University of Cambridge in England that is considered the highlight of the program.

But in recent years, the program has fallen victim to low enrollment, the result of poor marketing, conflict with Los Angeles’ multitude of other attractions and, most of all, the $11,000 total cost of earning a degree at the private institution, Gozdecki said. Only 175 people have earned degrees.

Last month, the university decided to eliminate the program, effective May, 1989, when the 30 remaining students should have completed their work, she said.

At $227 per semester for as many as six units of credit, SDSU’s program probably will not have similar trouble attracting students able to pay for their advanced education. More than 200 inquiries have been made by people between the ages of 22 and 80. Twelve applicants have been accepted for a starting class that will number about 25, including a corporate accountant, a teacher, a homemaker and a former U.S. Navy payroll clerk.

Part of the plan is for them to assist in the teaching process by drawing on some of their experiences.

“What’s really different about this course is the people in the audience--the students in the class--will bring a tremendous diversity of interest to the courses,” Roeder said. “It won’t be passive students listening to the professors droning on.”