Crossroads
(The General Education Pilot)

Brief History of the Program

In the early 1990s, UNC’s General Education Council decided to try to design an alternative to the then existing General Education program that would improve on it in a number of ways. The result, after a couple of years’ hard labor, was a proposal for a program—eventually known as Crossroads—embodying a core curriculum, designed to run for five years as a pilot. The Council described its motivation in proposing this program as follows:

Review of courses by the General Education Council reveals that General Education at present contains very good courses. Unfortunately, these courses tend to have little to do with one another and fall short of forming an actual “program.” In fulfilling General Education requirements students can now bypass contact with significant areas of knowledge. We believe General Education can do more to offer students experience with various areas of knowledge while at the same time fostering an understanding of the connections among different knowledge bases. We also believe that General Education can serve as a more significant companion piece to the major than our current program does. We recommend this pilot as a program that will provide students with a solid and challenging general background and that will nurture in them both breadth and depth of understanding as they specialize in a major field. (“Proposal for a Pilot General Education Program” 1)

Although the Council readily succeeded in securing the approval of the Faculty Senate and the faculty, implementation turned out to be a very different matter. Implementation was repeatedly put on hold, and it wasn’t until the fall of 1998 that the program finally got underway. For a variety of reasons, the experiment was extremely short-lived, being cancelled in May, 1999, at the end of a single year.

Despite this program’s early demise—and indeed, in part even because of it—the Commission might do well to study its brief history and learn what it can from this ill-fated attempt. In addition to the original proposal for the program, the program has an archived Web site that may be worth a look.

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