We cannot help to start thinking that the very basic trait of governance of colleges and universities, known as the shared governance, is the process of planning and implementing change. The concept of shared governance delineates a partnership or collaborative relationship between entities, institution’s board of trustees, administrators, and faculty. In terms of academic programs, the roles of administrators and the faculty are particularly important in that administrators “coordinate and lead the institution’s academic program” and faculty “monitor existing academic programs and develop new curricula in response to environmental change” (Hendrickson et al., 2013, p.270). In highly professional organizations such as universities, a curricula…show more content… As Etzioni (1964) noted, knowledge is largely an individual property for the professional authority. Even the “application of knowledge is basically an individual act, at least in the sense that the individual professional has the ultimate responsibility for this professional decision” (p.112). With the professional authority, the task force ought to examine that the existing Core Curriculum has clear connections with general education or with prerequisite of department (disciplines) to make the Core Courses double-counted. This is important to prevent students from increasing their time-to-degree and loan repayment burden and to help facilitate community college transfers by removing credit redundancies. Also, to prevent students from thinking of the Core Curriculum as an obstacle that needs to be cleared before graduation, the task force should scrutinize current problems including pedagogies, the ways of teaching, and content. Core Courses ought to be “interdisciplinary, to be able to reflect, and to do learning beyond the classroom” aiming to “proactive lifelong learning” (AAC&U, 2010; Evensen & Hmelo, 2000, p.320) After the consensus is made to figure out which general courses or prerequisite course can be overlapped with existing Core Courses, NYI needs to organize a committee (e.g., Core General Education Courses) to move the task force’s recommendations to the level of actual curricular
