Book: Fairhaven College embodies the future of higher education

Western Washington University’s Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies is one of four colleges praised for embodying the future of higher education in America in the new book “Fixing College Education: A New Curriculum for the Twenty-First Century” by Professor Charles Muscatine of the University of California at Berkeley and published by the University of Virginia Press.

Muscatine predicts new roles for students and faculty, redefines educational breadth and depth, and calls for deeper assessment of learning and teaching. He points out that Fairhaven has pioneered the curricula and pedagogy he proposes and notes that its model of education anticipated by decades the list of “best practices” recently identified in the report of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, “College Learning for the new Global Century.”

This book and report argue that Fairhaven’s educational style – one strong on attributes such as intensive advising and mentoring, self-designed and negotiated majors, independent learning contracts, rich narrative assessment of student work, small writing-intensive seminar classes, inquiry-driven interdisciplinary course design, collaborative learning teams, critical- and creative-thinking skills, and social and personal responsibility – is better able than traditional models to produce good scholars and good citizens for the twenty-first century.

“We’re proud to have a past record that charts best practices for the future, and we intend to continue evaluating what we do and to experiment with new and better ways of learning and teaching,” said Roger Gilman, dean of WWU’s Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies.

For more information, contact Amy Keeling at (360) 650-3811 or amy.keeling@wwu.edu.