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First-year Vanessa Tieman, who is already planning to attend graduate school, said that a liberal arts education will serve her well by not tying her down to a specific field.

First-year Andy Knudsen agrees č at least on one point.

“It is always necessary to have a broad range of studies,” Knudsen said, “because if one only considers one area to focus on, one is permanently skewed in one’s perceptions and realities within social relationships.”

But while Knudsen himself believes a variety of classes are important in education, he said that Hamline presents many obstacles to students looking only to complete a specific major.

“[Students] are forced, in order to graduate, to take many classes that ultimately do nothing to help them achieve their major and are, therefore, no use in achieving one’s desired career,” said Knudsen.

Observations like Knudsen’s are what frustrate physics professor Andy Rundquist. Rundquist serves on the Academic Affairs Committee (AAC), the committee responsible for writing and revising the Hamline
Plan, the backbone of the college’s commitment to providing students with a liberal arts education.

“A college-educated student should understand Shakespeare, they should understand evolution, and they should understand theory and harmony,” Rundquist said. “It’s a literacy issue.”

“Compartmentalized information doesn’t do you a lot of good in this world,” he added, “and neither do deep thoughts without context.”

And the Hamline Plan assists college learners in all these areas, he said.

The Hamline Plan was designed and put into place in the mid-’80s, and, at the time, it was hailed on a national scale.

“It was revolutionary in higher education,” he said. “We had schools like Harvard and Yale checking it out.”

The Hamline Plan isn’t as well recognized now, Rundquist said, in part because it may be outdated. This is why he and the AAC, which also includes as members professors Van Dusenbery, Nancy Holland, and members of the dean’s office, are in the lengthy č and constant č process of revising it.

Lengthy, Rundquist said, because it will typically take the committee a year to evaluate and revise each plan requirement. Last spring, it finished making changes to the Disciplinary Breadth (DB) requirement, the aspect of the plan students question most.

It includes the natural science (N), social science (S), the fine arts (F) and the humanities (H) requirements. Students must take two classes in each of these categories.

Students often complain that they can’t transfer in these requirements, nor can they fulfill them by taking
ACTC classes. This is because Hamline has no way of monitoring how professors teach at other institutions, Rundquist said.

“A physicist looks at a battery differently than a chemist does,” Rundquist said, and that, he stressed, is the point of any DB requirement, which is teaching a DB class from a variety of disciplinary viewpoints.
Students taking classes at other institutions would receive entry-level instruction in their chosen subject area, but no instruction in how to apply the given information to other disciplines.

Rundquist said he knows that there are still č and may always be č students who look at the Hamline Plan as “putting pegs in holes,” but he said that’s the wrong approach.

“The question isn’t ‘What classes are you going to take?’, but ‘What experiences do you want to get out of [a liberal arts education]?’” he said.

Rundquist, who graduated with a B.S. from St. John’s in Collegeville, Minn., strongly credits the liberal
arts for his successes.

“As a physics major, I felt I could go into a philosophy class and open my mouth,” he said.

When he entered graduate school, he said, he didn’t have the coursework or experience as some of his peers, but he had superior communication and teamwork skills, as well as the ability to take information from one discipline and apply it to others.

His liberal arts education was a well-rounded education, he said, and “a well-rounded education is the 21st-century ideal.”

Turning credits into cash

Rich Manke, Career Development Center (CDC) director, said that employers are increasingly demanding in naming the skills and aptitudes they want in college graduates. It is no longer acceptable for even a qualified applicant to seek a position, he said, without explaining to the employer why he or she wants the job and would do well in the position.

But despite the rising competitiveness, Manke is confident that the liberal arts education is key for finding post-graduate employment.

“The economy is driven by information, globalization, and service, and all of those descriptors draw upon liberal arts skills,” Manke said.

“I think we’re moving into a time of a golden age for liberal arts graduates,” Manke said, “but it’s a huge mistake for students to think that the degree is all they need. They need to graduate with focus and related experience.”

However, the skills covered in the Hamline Plan, including the LEAD (W) requirement, where students can gain job and internship experience, are ones that Manke said employers look for in potential employees.

Manke said the structure of the Hamline’s education system is the most beneficial to students.

“What I appreciate about Hamline is the Hamline Plan,” he said. “Hamline has been very thoughtful in terms of understanding itself in terms of a liberal arts degree. And as imperfect as we may be at that, we’re far ahead of other places.”

A few remaining kinks

Some students, including Klappa, still aren’t entirely happy with the Hamline Plan, though. Klappa said that the plan’s requirements make graduating with a focus difficult. He is working on a major that requires courses with labs, and he is finding it hard to fit in other graduation requirements.

Rundquist acknowledges that there will always be problems with the plan. The requirements of some majors, in terms of both credits and time commitment, are much different than others. A student majoring in psychology needs to take 10 classes, including a capstone seminar. A student in one of the biology major plans takes 15 classes č plus, of course, the labs associated with most of those classes.

And there’s still what Rundquist calls the “procrastination effect” when it comes to taking plan requirements.

“Too many students are trying to cram them in as juniors and seniors,” he said.

Rundquist admits, however, that fault doesn’t lie solely with students.

“It’s a resource problem,” he said. “There are science classes that students are just told not to take as first-years or sophomores, because it’s a given they won’t get into them.”

But at least small-scale resources are improving. The Bridges program, a new CDC program funded through the Wesley Center, allows first-years a way to explore vocations using hands-on experience, planning, research, and meetings with both the CDC and their adviser.

And even if the students don’t immediately discover what they want to do out of college, the program will still help them reach what Rundquist said is his definition of a liberal arts education.
“Broad exposure.”