'Unknown unknowns' in your course catalogue

Members of the Classes of 2013, 2014 and 2015 won’t remember this, but the course catalogue used to arrive in print in Frist Campus Center mailboxes twice a year. It was sort of like a nerd’s version of Santa Claus stuffing presents in your stocking; I once spent an entire afternoon in the Frist TV lounge reading it, conjuring up a million different class combinations.

So it was with a twinge of nostalgia that I filled out a Princeton course enrollment form for the last time this week. Fellow-senior friends of mine have talked, with some relief, about how wonderful it will be to have a light course load this spring. I couldn’t disagree more: there are 10 or 15 courses next semester that I’d kill to take, and 30 more that seem fascinating.

And though there are unique pearls offered in the spring of 2012 — with titles like NES 362: Blood, Sex and Oil, AAS 314: Model Memoirs and FRS 108: How Not to Go to Africa — there are a set of classes that you won’t find in the online course catalogue. These don’t exist because they haven’t been created yet, and they fall into an array of little-known categories outlined in the University’s Undergraduate Announcement: Reading Courses, Student-Initiated Seminars and Off-Campus Study — Field Study. Even less well-known are the Princeton-sanctioned opportunities to design your own major, concentrate in a department your sophomore year, suspend the academic rules as part of the University Scholar Program, take courses at Rutgers, Princeton Seminary or Westminster Choir College and study full-time at another college, at home or abroad.

In general, the University makes little attempt to advertise any of these options — and that should change — but, on top of that, the Office of the Registrar should actively encourage students to pursue them and lower barriers to entry as part of a drive to foster student-led academic innovation. There are three reasons why.

First, the University course catalogue isn’t all-encompassing. Princeton doesn’t regularly offer classes in Vietnamese, Tagalog, campaign organization, biomedical engineering, agriculture or Canadian culture. The history department hasn’t had a Civil War specialist since the retirement of legendary professor emeritus James McPherson years ago. Even enormous departments like the Wilson School have gaps that can be filled by student-organized courses, or courses taught at peer institutions in New Jersey or elsewhere.

Second, there are real benefits to the poorly advertised opportunities offered by the University. Working one-on-one with a specialist in your field who researches exactly what you’re interested in is infinitely more valuable than taking a seminar which spends only a week or two on your specific interest. And if Rutgers or Princeton Theological Seminary has a better specialist than Princeton does, you should be encouraged to go there instead.

Finally, encouraging students to design their own curricula and majors or to go off-campus could provide the University with valuable information about the demand side of the course enrollment equation: which courses students are interested in taking. Course enrollment statistics are only so helpful since undergrads enroll in classes for a huge variety of reasons. Just a few of these include the professor teaching the class, its reputation, reading load, perceived easiness or difficulty and distribution area. The course topic is only one factor.

If, for example, a student interested in journalism in Africa found a professor and designed a class and then 40 students applied to join, that would signal to the University that establishing an African journalism class in the course catalogue would be beneficial. Each discipline here has a set of required classes that it expects all concentrators to take. That makes perfect sense — it would be foolish to give economics degrees to concentrators who hadn’t taken macroeconomics. But plenty of upper-level classes are topic- or issue-specific, and the University doesn’t solicit much information from students about which topics or issues those should cover.

Implementation would be extremely easy: The Registrar’s office should send out an email at the beginning of each academic year and during each course registration period reminding students that chances for academic innovation exist and encouraging their use. On top of that, the Dean of the College should print up a brochure advertising them and include it in the information packet sent to incoming freshmen each summer. Why is it, for instance, that the University advertises freshman seminars so strongly but never mentions the University Scholar Program or off-campus field study? I took a (highly informal) poll at dinner the other night, and only one of the 10 people I was eating with knew that field study exists.

By and large, the University does a fantastic job of creating courses that students want to take. I’m not suggesting that we become Brown and throw out the rulebook. But some student-led academic innovation would be a tremendous asset to the undergraduate experience. There are 1,183 courses offered next semester. Make your mark and add one more.

Charlie Metzger is a Wilson School major from Palm Beach, Fla. He can be reached at cmetzger@princeton.edu.