Chapter 9: Required Courses

The spring semester arrived with the specific quality of a second chapter — the same setting, the same cast, but with the accumulated context of a first chapter behind it that changed the meaning of everything. The apartment was the same apartment. CREOL was the same building with the same equipment and most of the same faces. But I had been in it for a semester now, which meant I understood its actual structure rather than its presented one, and the difference between those two things was, as it generally was with institutions, significant.

The curriculum planning session happened on a Saturday in February, at the kitchen table, with the course catalog open on my laptop and the degree requirements document beside it. This was a task I had been anticipating since the previous semester, when the shape of the four-year program had become clear enough to analyze: which courses were genuinely necessary, which were necessary in the sense of being required without being educationally essential, and which were required without being either necessary or educationally essential, which was the category I had taken to thinking of as the institutional overhead — the courses that existed for reasons that had more to do with the institution than with the student’s professional development.

Patrick was at the table with his own degree requirements, having apparently arrived at the same planning moment through independent parallel reasoning, which was the way most of our shared activities arrived — not by arrangement but by the natural alignment of two people whose thinking moved in similar directions at similar speeds.

He looked at the civil engineering requirements for a moment and said: how much of this is real.

I said: what’s your definition of real.

He said: directly applicable to the work a civil engineer does in practice, or to the foundational understanding that makes the applied work possible.

I said: by that definition, probably sixty percent of the required courses. Possibly sixty-five.

He said: I got fifty-eight.

We compared lists. The overlap was substantial — we had independently identified most of the same courses as genuine and most of the same as overhead, with a few disagreements at the margins that were interesting precisely because they were marginal. He valued a history of engineering course I had discounted as peripheral; I valued a materials failure analysis course he had dismissed as redundant with what the core curriculum already covered. We each made a case and each revised our assessment slightly, which was the specific pleasure of an argument where both parties are oriented toward accuracy rather than winning.

The overhead courses had a consistent profile, which I had noted while making the initial list and which Patrick confirmed when I described it: they satisfied distribution requirements that existed at the university level rather than the program level, they were taught by departments outside our programs, and their connection to photonics or civil engineering was a stretch that required a specific kind of institutional imagination to maintain with a straight face. A mandatory course in cultural studies for a photonics student. A mandatory course in oral communications skills for someone who had spent four years managing client negotiations in a context where imprecision had actual costs.

Patrick looked at the oral communications requirement for a moment and said: I have given situation reports in combat conditions.

I said: the course syllabus includes a section on effective use of visual aids in presentations.

He said: yes.

We looked at each other with the shared recognition of people who have encountered the same thing from different angles.

I said: this is Pournelle’s Law operating at the curriculum level.

He set down his coffee cup.

I said: the distribution requirements exist because the departments that teach them need enrollment to justify their budgets and faculty positions. The academic bureaucracy — the committees that design and approve curriculum — is populated by people whose institutional interest is the university’s internal economy rather than the student’s professional development. The courses that survive the committee process are the ones with departmental champions, not necessarily the ones with educational merit. Over time the curriculum accumulates requirements that serve the institution’s internal needs rather than its stated purpose, which is to produce graduates with genuine professional competence.

Patrick said: and the people who actually understand what professional competence requires — the practitioners, the industry partners, the alumni who do the work — have progressively less influence on the curriculum than the people who administer it.

I said: the ABET accreditation process is supposed to correct for this. Industry advisory boards, outcome assessments, competency verification. But the accreditation process itself is administered by an institution, which means it’s subject to the same dynamic.

He said: so the correction mechanism has the same failure mode as the thing it’s correcting.

I said: yes. It slows the drift rather than reversing it.

Patrick was quiet for a moment. Then he said: the Marine Corps had the same problem. The training pipeline was designed by people who had operational experience when it was designed. Over time the administrative layer grew and the operational voice in curriculum decisions shrank, and the training started optimizing for metrics that were measurable by the administrative layer rather than outcomes that mattered in the field.

I said: did it affect the training quality.

He said: in specific ways. The things that were easy to measure and document stayed rigorous. The things that were hard to measure — judgment, adaptability, the specific quality of decision-making under conditions the training couldn’t fully replicate — those degraded. Not eliminated. But the ratio shifted.

I thought about this. The photonics curriculum had the same ratio problem, though in a different domain: the courses that were easy to assess — problem sets with correct answers, lab reports with defined formats — were designed and maintained with genuine rigor. The courses that were trying to develop something harder to measure — scientific intuition, the ability to recognize when a standard approach was inadequate, the judgment to know when your data was telling you something unexpected — those were present in the curriculum as stated objectives and absent in the curriculum as experienced.