In 1913, Henry Ford dreamt up the assembly line; never before had cars been built so fast. A century later, modern times are still rewarding expertise in a sole industry or task, and education is shifting to teach said overspecialization. UNC seeks to balance this by mandating exploration through the IDEAs in Action curriculum, with perhaps the most over-hated requirement being the Triple-I.
After criticisms of the admittedly unmanageable first-year requirements, UNC plans to scrap Triple-Is, turning them into smaller classes with less than three professors, essentially transforming them into another first-year seminar. Much of the student body agrees Triple-Is sound promising, but fall apart in practice, suffering from lack of coherence, heavily weighted assignments and varied levels of difficulty. Though this is often true, there are Triple-Is that have done an incredible job of melding three subject areas into a cohesive think piece about our world. Workshopping rather than scrapping this requirement could ensure an interconnected curriculum at UNC.
Our professors are some of our best resources, and Triple-I introduces us to three — many of whom have been teaching higher-level classes for specific majors and are now condensing that otherwise niche information and extending it to a wider audience of students. Accessing a variety of insights and office hours from professors and TAs gives students a better sense of how their fields may actually be, rather than guessing at what post-college looks like. When a Triple-I is done right, each professor relates their portion of the course to the other disciplines by capturing the attention of the students' varying interests.
Triple-I is the only general education requirement which feels inherently UNC-y. At a school where students change majors overnight and effectively every type of interest can be explored somewhere, an overarching lecture-style course taught by three instructors fits right in.
Because of the converging material covered in the class, these courses can also be great vessels for freedom in writing. The readings, essay topics and written components are found challenging by many students, but by implementing standardization and subjectivity in grading, they can provide good exposure to less rigid, more academic writing. In classes with a large array of information and for those entering college with less writing experience, this could be a lower-stakes introduction to creating written work one is passionate about.
Academic writing is becoming inaccessible to those outside the field it was published in. Physics is inseparable from philosophy, but the engineering industry is mainly concerned with whether their workers know their equations. UNC’s Triple-I is a multifaceted and feasibly helpful solution to our future’s polarization by housing courses where one of your future avenues is connected to others. Musicians affect social scientists, mathematicians affect religious scholars, epidemiologists affect anthropologists — and all this is able to be explored in this first-year interdisciplinary requirement of our first year of college.
This is the crux of the Triple-I, its true raison d’être. Preventing the harm of others relies on our ability to be multifaceted. Today, one could pursue their career with horse blinders on, interacting with as few communities and industries as possible. Due to how current career decisions lack cross-labor knowledge, our ethical choices in careers matter more. If we fail to see our interests through the lens of others, we are incapable of making the best decisions. You should know the nuances of how your knowledge affects others, regardless of how far your discipline's jurisdiction seemingly falls.
