“I think that they should have their own choice to deal with those things that were already there … but, there’s gonna have to be an established government in place …”
It’s a typical give and take comment among seven College of General Studies students discussing their Capstone project. Words and phrases like “democracy” and “international outburst” cloud their meeting — the one they try to have everyday, as they attempt to reach a narrower conclusion. But they’re not getting close yet.
“I think that’s gonna be at least our last, like, fifteen pages … like every single section is gonna say what we’re trying to do … well, we have to cover a lot of stuff before we get to that.”
They’re talking about Iraq, and how to retain its culture through globalization. They’re producing a 50-page policy report with a conclusion based on intensive research. It’s week two of the Capstone project, CGS’s final sophomore group project, worth 25 percent of each of the students’ final class grades, and they still don’t know how to narrow it down.
“I think we’ll be narrowing it down ’til the day before,” said Jacqueline Cohen, who is researching Iraqi education.
Cohen and six others — Brendan Baker, Audra Callo, Ashley Deplitch, Yankel Polak, Kim Reyna and Danielle Shepherd — are a group attempting to slay the CGS Capstone, just as so many have attempted before. The research and writing lasts four weeks, and although it’s four weeks without CGS classes, many agree it’s the most demanding four weeks of their educational lives.
“We’re all realizing how much work it actually is,” Shepherd said. “We didn’t realize the hours that are supposed to be put in it. As second -year college students, [Capstone is] something that everyone should probably experience.”
IN A FIX
Sitting in his small office on the fifth floor of CGS, Robert Wexelblatt doesn’t look like a man who could influence generations. He’s skinny with thin hair and his clothing choice — a green sweater and khaki pants — is hardly threatening. But he is important, because he’s the reason CGS sophomores have been realizing “how much work it actually is.” Wexelblatt is the reason for Capstone.
In 1976, with two sophomore final projects down the drain, CGS needed a new plan. Its administration looked to the skinny professor of humanities, the first tenured professor under Dean Brendan Gilbane’s administration.
“Independently that year,” Wexelblatt said, “[Gilbane] called me in and said, ‘the project has collapsed. I’m assigning it to you, the only tenured guy. Fix it.’
“The same week, my department chairman called me in independently and said, ‘the sophomore humanities course is broken. The students on their evaluations said they don’t like the course; the faculty don’t want to teach humanities to freshmen.
“Fix it.'”
His plan to improve both the year-end project and the humanities department wasn’t without its share of problems. For one, Wexelblatt needed to figure out how his idea for a project would stand the test of time; second, he was facing an old guard of CGS professors who, according to him, “hated each other.”
“I had to figure out a political way to get everybody to support my idea,” Wexelblatt said. “If I presented it at a meeting and anybody said they liked it somebody else would get up and say they didn’t.”
Thus, Wexelblatt sneakily proposed his idea to each sophomore professor individually. Once he received support from one, he went to the next. After receiving full support, he called a meeting with the entire sophomore faculty. By this time, no one objected to the new project.
“It went off pretty well,” Wexelblatt said.
Capstone was born. It emerged from the ashes of, first, the Utopia Project, a 1960’s hybrid that made students create their own Utopian society in seven weeks, and second, the City Planning Project, a disastrous project in which groups had to write a 100-page paper about an “imaginary” city that they found through supplied data. The problem was that this imaginary city turned out to be Boston: Quick visits to City Hall led to dozens of boring 100-page reports.
Wexelblatt’s Capstone, which began with the sophomore class of 1977, keeps the group dynamic, lasts four weeks, is 50-pages long and combines aspects from all three CGS courses: humanities, natural science and social science. Groups have a choice to write either a policy report focused on a topical issue or write an adversary-style report where their members take opposing views on a topical issue. The format and idea behind it hasn’t changed much at all since CGS’s early days.
It’s just been fixed.
A HELLISH TIME
“Writing the thing is hellish on the students,” said CGS Social Science department chairman Jay Corrin.
Corrin has been with the college for 29 years and has taught sophomores and the Capstone more than 10 times. Though he knows students have to struggle to complete a quality Capstone, he thinks the knowledge they gain from completing is important.
“It shows students what they’ve learned here can be applied to real-life situations,” Corrin said.
This is why many of the Capstone topics focus on current events. Each year the topics change, and many of the topics reoccur according to the evolution of the topic. Corrin feels this aspect of Capstone is important, as it allows students to understand the issues they will soon be dealing with on a professional level.
“It’s up to [the students’] generation,” Corrin said. “It’s a way for you youngsters to fix the things we old guys screwed up with.”
On average, the Capstone syllabus contains between 19 and 22 topics, and groups of up to eight students must select one of the topics for their project. Once groups form and select topics the four-week process begins – and CGS classes end. Typically, groups devote the first two weeks entirely to group meetings and intense research and the final two weeks to writing and collaboration.
Shepherd said her group knows full well the intensity of Capstone research.
“I actually think there’s too much information,” Shepherd said. “So it’s a matter of sifting through books and articles and finding what’s really gonna be helpful. You can find the same thing over and over in a lot of books. There’s so much, you just have to pick what’s important for a 50-page paper.”
“We can probably write 50 pages on each section,” Polak said. “Two years ago we would’ve been like, ’50 pages?!”
Too much information has led this group to wondering how they’re going to narrow down their Capstone.
“Our professors gave us a hard time about this,” Shepherd said. “Globalization and culture is too wide … we have to specify our subject.”
So their specification continues.
HELL HAS A REWARD
Since Capstone tackles timely and usually political issues, it isn’t uncommon for some Capstone projects to influence or mirror the politics of their time.
Wexelblatt recalled a policy report in 1977 that attempted to solve the political problems between Israel and Egypt. The group researched the long-standing problems between the two Middle East nations and concluded something that seemed quite simple.
“Land for peace,” Wexelblatt said. “It was that easy. What does Egypt want? More settlements. What does Israel want? Peace.”
To complete the strange case of foreshadowing, Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed the Camp David Accords in Sept. 1978 under the terms “land for peace.”
Another Capstone group conducted research about the use of Ritalin on children with ADHD, and concluded continuous use of the drug will harm children with ADHD over a lifespan. Moreover, they found that the same changes in behavior that can be achieved with Ritalin could also be achieved through simple dietary changes.
The group sent the Capstone to a Maine school district, and as a result, the school district decided to change its prescription policy.
But these heady results aren’t the norm.
“You won’t expect earthshattering results when you give students four weeks to do a project such as this,” Corrin said. “We don’t have four years.”
THE ESSENCE
OF CAPSTONE
At the end of it all, groups must present their findings orally to their faculty members. The oral defense is two hours long, and it features faculty queries, a discussion of the research and an evaluation of the group, both by the faculty and by the group’s members.
“The essential model of all of this … goes back to the medieval thesis,” Wexelblatt said. “You’d go before the faculty of the university and you’d propose a thesis, like, ‘Nothing Aristotle says in any of his books is true.’ And then you would defend the thesis before the faculty, and they’d say, ‘What about — you know — in his book on the soul here, that seems to be true.’ ‘Well, no sir, actually it isn’t.'”
This formal defense, while it contains medieval elements, is for many CGS professors the moment their teachings come out in full view. It’s a moment where students, now experts in their field of research, seem to outsmart — and impress — the professors.
“[It’s] a joy for me, watching students become experts,” Wexelblatt said. “It’s a general education school, we do survey courses, and I love the courses, it’s a good program. But there should be someplace in the program where students have the experience of intensive study and real mastery, and that is the Capstone.”
