The Academic Program
OverviewAugustana's curriculum is divided between disciplinary programs, such as academic majors, and a strong interdisciplinary general education system. The Academic Disciplines at AugustanaAugustana’s academic program is organized around six academic divisions, which function much as colleges do within a university:
Each division houses between three and seven departments. Each division is headed by an elected faculty chair while each department is headed by a chair appointed by the president after consultation with the faculty.
There are several strong academic programs (for example, Biochemistry and Women & Gender Studies) which span several departments. We offer a number of degree programs in coordination with other institutions; our Environmental Management and Forestry program is a joint-degree offering with Duke University in North Carolina. The Augustana General Education SystemThe most distinctive part of the academic program, and one in which almost all faculty participate, is AGES: the Augustana General Education System. After years of dialogue utilizing assessment data and insights about educational best practices, the faculty implemented the new general education program in 2004-05. In the summer of 2006, the College created a new Associate Deanship to oversee the program’s development. In 2007, we revised the system to streamline it a bit. Most of those modifications become effective in 2008-09. In overview, AGES has three components: Liberal Studies, which are a year-long set of first-year courses. Each term has a unifying theme (Origins in Fall, Birth of the Modern in Winter, Diverse and Changing World in Spring), a limited set of common required readings (among them, the Book of Genesis in fall, the Montaigne essay “On Cannibals” in winter) and some common cultural activities (which might be convocations, plays, or concerts). Currently, every first-year student takes four courses. One of those will be a writing course overseen by English faculty (LS 100), one will be a religion course overseen by Religion faculty (LS 110), and the remaining two will be courses from the Origins, Modernity, Diverse and Changing set (LS 111 – 113). This part of the requirement will shift considerably in 2008 and beyond. Learning Perspectives, which is reminiscent of a distributional system with this essential difference: the criteria established for inclusion in a given LP are purposely intended to facilitate the break-up of departmental and divisional boundaries by requiring faculty and students to consider how the content and methodology of a particular discipline can be applied to answer basic questions posed in each of the global perspectives. The roster of courses approved to date shows that the six learning perspectives have been generally successful in recruiting from virtually every academic program. Learning Communities, which are pairs of courses that thematically relate content from two different areas of study and are taught to the same cohort of students in the same term. Each student must successfully complete at least one LC. Augustana Foreign Terms, whose course sets have regional unity and include a writing course, also satisfy the LS requirement. By way of illustration, existing learning communities include:
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