Values come first.
That was the mantra when the Arts & Sciences Curriculum Development Committee convened to draft a new curriculum that lays the foundation for the next generation of Trinity College students’ undergraduate experience at Duke.
“We began the process with a blank slate,” said Scott Huettel, chair of the Development Committee and professor of Psychology and Neuroscience. “We listened to our faculty and students about what is important for them in a world class liberal arts education.” These conversations revealed common themes, which the committee codified into the three values that underpin the new curriculum: building connections, cultivating curiosity and encouraging humility.
“Our core idea was coming up with our values first and then building the nuts and bolts of the curriculum around them,” said Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel, professor of the practice of Statistical Science. Cetinkaya-Rundel served on the Development Committee before moving on to lead the Curriculum Implementation Committee. Over the next two years, her team of faculty and staff will determine how best to put the exciting — and ambitious — new curriculum into action for students entering Trinity College of Arts & Sciences in Fall 2025 and beyond.
“Curricula are products of a university and its time,” said Huettel. “Curriculum 2000 had a great impact on Duke, but the world and our students have changed so much that we really needed a different, updated curriculum to best serve today’s undergraduates.”
The main values underpinning the new curriculum — building connections, cultivating curiosity and encouraging humility — will come into play as soon as students arrive at Duke and encounter the first-year “Constellations” experience.
Named for the human-conceived patterns between stars that give order and meaning to the night sky, Constellations are comprised of a set of three interconnected classes examining a single topic from a variety of perspectives.
“The first-year experience is the biggest change in our new curriculum,” said Andrea Marritt-Pabalate, associate dean of Undergraduate Education for Trinity College. Building on the success of the Focus Program, Constellations will support students in building relationships with faculty and peers during their first semester at Duke.
Marritt-Pabalate is quick to stress that the popular Focus Program will still be an available option for students. “There are two ways you can complete the required first-year experience with the new curriculum,” she said. “You can go through the Focus Program, or you can participate in First Year Constellations.”
“A central feature of Constellations is that students make personal and intellectual connections with faculty throughout the first-year experience. They become part of a cohort that examines a big idea for an entire year,” said Deborah Reisinger, dean of Undergraduate Education for Trinity College and professor of the practice in Romance Studies. Because each Constellation will have experiential learning components, she pointed out that students will be exploring outside of the classroom, whether through sharing meals, engaging with an expert guest speaker, participating in a workshop or making a site visit off campus.
In conversations with faculty and students, Huettel heard repeatedly about challenges to well-being that undergraduates today are experiencing more acutely than a generation ago. “Students who build connections with each other and with faculty — those connections are powerfully protective,” he said. “They reduce the chance of mental health problems, help students feel like they belong in a community and provide a sense of purpose through academics.”
The first-year experience will also foster connections between faculty. Because of its interdisciplinary nature, professors across academic departments will come together to design and teach a Constellation. Some of these might be long-time collaborators, but others might be working together for the first time.
“We already have over 60 faculty who have expressed interest in teaching within a Constellation,” said Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Greg Samanez-Larkin, who is charged with heading up the committee that will help faculty develop their Constellation courses.
“There are quite a few major themes we’ve seen proposed, like climate change, mind & body, and immigration,” said Marritt-Pabalate. As the ideas keep rolling in, the committee is impressed by the range and breadth of subjects, as well as the faculty’s openness to considering new teaching methods.
“The cohort-based, experiential elements of Constellations encourage creativity and pedagogical innovation,” Reisinger said. “We’ve asked faculty to explore low stakes assessments, to reduce grade pressure so students aren’t focused on having to make the ‘A.’ It’s about both curiosity and humility, teaching them that it's okay to take chances and make mistakes.”
Samanez-Larkin is hopeful that the benefits of the new curriculum development will spill across campus and into classes outside of the Constellations. “Once faculty start experimenting with different approaches in the classroom and more collaboration across disciplines, and spend more time in classrooms where students are learning for the sake of learning, why wouldn't they apply these approaches to their other courses?”
In addition to the robust first-year experience, another change in the new curriculum is a re-evaluation of the requirements at Trinity’s core.
In the current curriculum, the Trinity requirements (T-reqs) are divided into five Areas of Knowledge and six Modes of Inquiry, which form a matrix that each student must fulfill. The new curriculum simplifies this system through the creation of six categories across the Arts & Humanities, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences: Creating and Engaging with Art; Humanistic Inquiry; Interpreting Institutions, Justice and Power; Investigating the Natural World; Quantitative and Computational Reasoning; and Social and Behavioral Analysis.
Students will take two classes in each of the six categories, but they may also take up to two “Century Courses,” designed by departments to introduce students to disciplinary thinking in their field. Century courses will be introduced in 2026 and will carry two course codes, allowing students to take fewer requirements.
“The names chosen for these areas reflect our appreciation of what Curriculum 2000 achieved over the years, but also highlight how things have changed,” said Cetinkaya-Rundel.
“For example, ‘Quantitative Studies’ was an Area of Knowledge under Curriculum 2000. In the new curriculum, that area translates to ‘Quantitative and Computational Reasoning.’ Calling out ‘computational reasoning’ in the name signals what students are interested in learning — and really should be learning — as part of their quantitative studies to graduate from any university.
“The goal is to prepare Duke graduates for today’s world, as opposed to the world of 2000.”
One of the most important ways in which the new curriculum will prepare students for life after graduation is an emphasis on epistemic humility. As they navigate the first-year Constellations and engage with the liberal arts-grounded curriculum, students will be encouraged to recognize the limitations of their own knowledge, stretch beyond their comfort levels and develop skills to engage with different viewpoints in a constructive, respectful manner.
“Being able to have difficult conversations with people from diverse perspectives is the cardinal challenge of our times. It feeds into issues of climate change, political polarization, dealing with intergroup conflict — all these other problems,” said Huettel. “I can't think of a better goal for our students than to develop their ability to appreciate different perspectives.”
Huettel stresses that students can have strong opinions but should be able to interact constructively with others who hold differing views. “We tried to embed this in a few places in the new curriculum,” he said. “For example, the first-year Constellations will often be oriented around a large societal issue and students will take classes that come from different disciplines as part of their Constellation. Starting off the first year by grappling with issues from multiple perspectives will be fundamental to a Duke education.”
“Our new undergraduate curriculum, the first major revision since 2000, is designed to unlock the intellectual strengths of a new generation,” said Gary G. Bennett, dean of Trinity College of Arts & Sciences. “It centers humanistic inquiry, offers new first-year opportunities for thematic, interdisciplinary learning and minimizes complexity. It also promotes teaching excellence and provides opportunities for experiential learning, intellectual exploration and skill-building in civil discourse.”
“Curriculum 2000 was the right curriculum for that time, just as this one is right for Trinity now,” said Huettel. “I hope we treat the new curriculum as a living template that can be changed and updated and tweaked based on the developing needs of our students and faculty.”
A key component of Duke’s strong undergraduate experience is — and always has been — an unswerving commitment to a broad and deep liberal arts education. Although the specifics of the undergraduate curriculum have changed over the past 100 years, what has remained constant is the university’s mission to prepare students to meet the challenges of their times.
1924: Duke University adopts Trinity College’s curriculum, which required 70 semester hours of “minimum uniform requirements” to graduate. These included 12 hours of English, 18 hours of foreign language, 16 hours of science, six hours each of math, history and economics (which included the relatively new field of political science), as well as six hours of religion classes, reflecting Duke’s Methodist roots. Only Bachelor of Arts (BA) degrees were conferred.
Bachelor of Science (BS) degrees were introduced for engineering students in 1928 and for students majoring in science or math in 1932.
1930: Duke Women’s College opens on East Campus. Degree requirements for students in the Women’s College, from its founding until it merged with Trinity College of Arts & Sciences in 1972, were the same as for male Duke University students.
1932: The first major curriculum reform reduced the number of hours allotted to the minimum uniform requirements. English and science requirements were reduced by half, and the social sciences to six hours. This allowed an increase in the number of hours required for major and minor coursework.
By 1965, both BA and BS students were expected to take classes in the Humanities, with 12 hours required for a BA degree and six hours for a BS degree. Six hours of religion classes were still required.
By the mid-1970s, the requirements for the BA and BS degrees had become more flexible with the introduction of Program I and Program II.
Program I, the pathway most students followed, required a certain number of semester hours in each of the three divisions of Arts & Sciences: Arts & Humanities, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences, as well as a demonstrated proficiency in English composition (the forerunner of the writing requirements in Curriculum 2000 and the new curriculum) and several small-group learning experiences which could include seminars, independent studies or thesis/research projects. Program II allowed students to design their own individualized degree program.
The 1986 Curriculum, which was implemented in Fall 1988, was the last major revision of the Arts & Sciences curriculum before Curriculum 2000. It introduced six Areas of Knowledge (Arts and Literatures, Civilizations, Foreign Languages, Natural Sciences, Quantitative Reasoning and Social Sciences), with students required to take classes in five of them. It also continued to place emphasis on writing classes and small-group learning experiences, which have remained important features of Curriculum 2000 and the new curriculum.
Information in this timeline comes from Professor Emeritus Robert F. Durden’s excellent history, The Launching of Duke University 1924-1949, and bulletins of Trinity College available in digital format from Duke University Archives.