You touch on some really interesting issues. When I started teaching at the college I am at now, over 20 years ago, I was teaching intro World and American History surveys, and a handful, like literally one or two, upper-level history courses, all with fairly general themes. The colleges is a professionally focused institution with zero liberal arts or humanities majors, and most of the programs are pretty full so that students don’t have a ton of electives they can take.
About 15 years ago we swapped over to an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to gen ed, ditching nearly all the single-discipline survey courses from the general education pool and replacing them with a “Core Curriculum” consisting of courses that focused on using different areas of the arts and sciences (mostly humanities/social sciences; we couldn’t get the math or science folks to shift on their survey courses) to look at relatively broad themes. Our logic was that, with no majors for students who liked a humanities survey to jump into, and limited elective space anyhow, having students take the same sort of generic gen ed surveys they could get for a lot cheaper at a community college was not exactly a winning proposition.
The new system worked quite well, really, and we are now in the process of rolling out version two of the beast, with an even more direct focus on critical and integrative thinking competencies and interdisciplinary and experiential work. The trade off, and there always is one, is that unless a student is getting an Education degree and needs something for certification, no one takes a single-discipline survey course in the humanities at all. The courses they do take end up covering a wide variety of topics due to how individual professors tailor their versions, but there is no guarantee anyone will even be exposed to, say, American history in general, or American government, or world history, or a dedicated literature class, etc.
I taught surveys long ago at a state university, too, and personally I loved teaching them. The students, well, I found that mostly very little stuck with them from their survey courses. Students in the major usually tested out of the basic courses anyhow, and the engaged ones you had left were few and far between. The idea that students need to be exposed to a variety of different disciplines is sound, though survey classes as a way of doing this are just as problematic as the way we are doing things by focusing on intellectual skills using a wide variety of humanities subjects.
One issue too that comes up all the time in things like history, which is where my Ph.D. is for example, is that getting anyone to agree on what should go into a survey class is nightmarish. I’ve worked with faculty whose idea of a solid American history survey consisted of essentially The Golden Story Book of Great Americans, and those whose approach was so theoretical and abstract that even a grad student would faint dead away. Same with literature, poli sci, anthro, etc.
Math and science are perhaps different kettles of fish. I can definitely see how non-tech/science majors would benefit from surveys in physics, chemistry, biology, etc., and at my school they of course have to take at least one lab science. As we have no actual majors in any of those fields–though our game programmers and software engineers in general need the physics and math for sure–the surveys don’t have the same burden that intro courses might have elsewhere I guess.
