Boston Architectural College had a long tradition of undergraduates taking courses at other area schools to fulfill their requirements in liberal arts. Then about five years ago, accreditors insisted the professional school develop its own curriculum in those disciplines.
Creating a new liberal studies curriculum proved quite difficult. The addition of architectural accrediting requirements that undergraduate liberal studies courses not contain any design-related content made the task of offering courses that interested the college’s population even more challenging to every faculty member who occupied the position.
A third search in three years did the trick. Dr. Diana Ramírez-Jasso arrived from Harvard University in 2010 and put together an innovative program tailored to the diverse architecture and design students at Boston Architectural College, which has open enrollment.
“It’s created this enormous excitement for learning,” says Dr. Julia Halevy, provost and academic vice president. “It’s just been tremendously successful.”
Ramírez-Jasso, born in Mexico City and raised in Guadalajara, was a doctoral student at Harvard with a deep interest in history. She recognized the architectural college, with social justice at the core of its mission, needed to do more than just duplicate the liberal studies courses of other universities.
“There is a bigger, better reason than just accreditation. We need the liberal studies to provide that larger context in which design operates,” Ramírez-Jasso says. “To entrust this kind of liberal learning to other institutions whose missions may or may not align with ours would be a tremendous risk.”
So Ramírez-Jasso went to work aligning the new curriculum. “We’re now making sure those things that we provide our students are in line with this broader mission to create designers who are socially-engaged,” she says. “They need to understand how their profession is impacted and impacts culture and society.”
