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How Innovative Courses Get Started

If one looks at the conditions present for the launching of highly viable curriculum innovations, and at the factors absent from the launching of the failures, it seems clear that money and allocatable human assets are needed to start innovative projects. Probably, in the past, support of the administration played an important part, also. Because of the time lapse between the events, it seems clear that a Little Memorial Lecture by a leading industrialist, or the attention of the administrative leaders, or individual department offerings managed by people wielding considerable power and controlling considerable resources and possessing impressive titles, or Faculty committees mandated to find and promote innovation without financial resources or the ability to allocate human resources, can not generate the development of innovative curriculum. However, in the same environment and culture, the addition of $1.5M allocated in amounts of $50K together with administrative entities to provide staff support -- such as the Science Teaching Center -- innovation can thrive. One sees in such an environment the burgeoning of innovative projects such as UROP, ESG and Concourse. The coincidence of all these factors in 1967-71 is too exceptional not to draw the conclusion that they are causally related.

In this context it should be noted that until the Whitehead funding the administration jealously guarded the most productive funds raising fields. That changed with Whitehead, it would appear. So Department level fund raising was given a boost and funds and human resources at the department level are arrayed to harvest money for department engineered projects. So innovative projects supported at the department level are possible, given the willingness to allocate to the projects funds generated by the department development office and human assets supported by those funds.


next up previous contents
Next: Acknowledgements Up: Bibliography Previous: The How of UROP

M.W.P.Strandberg's Home Page: Top ...
Malcom W. P. Strandberg
2000-01-07