CASE Critical Approaches to the Arts and Sciences

CASE Critical Approaches to the Arts and Sciences (CASE CAPP) was established in Summer 2011. The requirement is described in the Bulletin as follows:

The Critical Approaches to the Arts and Sciences (CASE CAPP) requirement is intended to help first- and second-year students begin to develop an understanding of the fundamental questions asked and methods employed by the various disciplines represented in the College. Rather than focusing on depth of coverage, CASE CAPP courses introduce students to the different kinds of scholarship that take place in a university. Through these courses, students learn about the ways particular disciplines seek answers, solve problems, and organize ideas. Alternatively, these courses can demonstrate the merits of viewing a problem from an interdisciplinary or a multidisciplinary perspective. CASE CAPP courses also teach students how to seek information from various sources, evaluate the validity of that information, and construct arguments. One of the main objectives of these courses is to instill sound research and writing practices that students will employ in their future undergraduate coursework.

 The requirement is satisfied by completion of a course on the CASE CAPP course list with a grade of D- or higher. Students are strongly encouraged to complete the CASE CAPP requirement in their first or second year of study.

A critical characteristic of the requirement is that it always double-counts with a CASE Breadth of Inquiry designation. That is, CASE CAPP courses count as Arts and Humanities, Social and Historical Studies, or Natural and Mathematical Sciences.

CASE CAPP was the replacement to the College’s “Topics” requirement. The faculty established the Topics requirement in 1994. Its goals were to:

• Expose first- and second-year students to the questions asked and methods pursued by scholars within broad branches of learning (arts and humanities, social and historical studies, and natural and mathematical sciences).
• Offer a means for exploring the ways in which knowledge is organized within the university, the various approaches taken by practitioners from different fields, and the value of questioning disciplinary boundaries.

Topics was initially a single-course requirement that was also a requirement for admission to College of Arts and Sciences. The faculty later expanded the requirement to three courses before returning to a single course in 2001. Over these years and the decade that followed, various criticisms of the requirement emerged, including:

• Most students do not know why they must fulfill the requirement
• Faculty members do not themselves have a clear sense of the requirement's objectives, and they teach the course in a way that falls short of its intent
• Insufficient opportunities exist for faculty members who teach Topics courses to interact with and learn from one another
• Faculty no longer generated more than a trickle of new course proposals
• Increasing number of juniors and seniors enrolled in the classes
• A lack of clarity about how requirement “fit” in curriculum

The response to these concerns was the establishment of CASE CAPP. When the College’s Taskforce on a Twenty-first Century Liberal Arts Education in 2015, a taskforce impaneled by the then-Executive Dean Larry Singell, began to review the curriculum, they identified similar concerns with CASE CAPP:

• Courses are too often discipline-specific in focus and do not develop inter- and multi-disciplinary perspectives.
• Students regularly express their befuddlement at the purposes and goals of the requirement.
• Students too often wait until their senior year to satisfy the CAPP requirement and rail against being required to complete a 100-level requirement; faculty regularly report that such students can be disruptive to the culture of their class.

Their recommendation was to replace CAPP with Multi-disciplinary Approaches to the Arts and Sciences (MAPP). MAPP was an innovative approach that involved faculty team teaching on a single topic from different perspectives; students would spend several weeks with all three faculty members and then spend the bulk of the course rotating in smaller classes among the three faculty members. While the College conducted a successful pilot, the reality was that the model was not scalable or maintainable over time.

Meanwhile, surveys of our students validate the concerns previously identified. The Scenario Planning group empaneled by Executive Dean Van Kooten during AY23-24 identified CASE CAPP as a requirement that the faculty should reconsider. And the faculty ranked CASE CAPP among the least important of the CASE requirements in the Summer 2024 survey about CASE requirements.