Grinnell markets itself as an institution where free inquiry and the open exchange of ideas pioneer the way towards success. The College’s promise of creative, interdisciplinary education exists — but accessing it depends on timing, department, and often, luck.
“Course innovation happens almost entirely through special topic courses,” said Belinda Backous, interim registrar and assistant dean of academic success.
Special topics classes, those numbered 195, 295 or 395, face less oversight than regular courses. Faculty can propose them, get departmental approval and have them running within a semester or two.
“You get two tries to run a special topic, and then you have to make it permanent,” said Nick Phillips, associate dean of curriculum and academic programs and associate professor of Spanish.
Not all special topics are experimental. Phillips said that the category includes both experimental classes and standard courses in the pipeline to becoming permanent fixtures. “Sometimes it’s just a new faculty member, and they’re getting their courses under the books,” he said.
A faculty member’s teaching load at Grinnell faces a structural question rooted in how faculty workload is calculated. All Grinnell faculty teach five courses per year under a “3:2 teaching load” — three courses one semester, and two the next.
Each four-credit course counts as one credit of teaching load. Some positions, like the curriculum committee, personnel committee and department chairs, carry course reductions and teach a 2:2 load.
When two professors co-teach a course and split the credit, each receives half a credit of teaching load.
“For a lot of faculty, it’s hard to make up that half, because most faculty don’t teach two-credit courses,” said Phillips. Lab courses in the sciences count as 1.5 credits, which creates some flexibility.
Phillips said he had conversations with academic deans of other institutions where both co-teaching professors receive full teaching credit for the course. At Grinnell, implementing that model would mean faculty teaching fewer total courses.
“You’re doing less work, but you’re doing a different kind of work in that class,” he said.
Phillips said that adapting a similar model at the College could incentivize faculty to collaborate with each other more.
Currently, co-teaching exists primarily in special programs, like Grinnell-in-London or the Faculty-Led Global Learning Program (FLAG), where external funding makes it possible. “For the most part, there’s not a lot of incentives,” Phillips said.
Students often notice courses that seem relevant to multiple departments but aren’t cross-listed.
Both Phillips and Backous discourage cross-listing, despite its apparent appeal for interdisciplinary work.
The main barrier is accreditation. “If something’s cross-listed with art history and biology, are they qualified to teach a course that’s listed as biology?” Backous said. For example, she said that a Spanish professor teaching a course about medical practices in Latin America can create educational value, but can’t be credentialed to teach a biology course.
Cross-listing also creates administrative work. “Our system is really just resource-intensive when it comes to cross-listing,” Phillips said.
The solution Grinnell has incorporated is what Backous calls “cross-counting.”
Instead of cross-listing a Spanish course with Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies (GWSS), the GWSS program simply counts that Spanish course toward its major. “Both [departments] have to agree, but it’s much easier than a cross list,” Backous said.
Many major requirements now allow courses from outside the department to count, but students must petition individually.
“That does put the [responsibility] on the student and the department to make those individual decisions,” Backous said. She advocates for departments to list all eligible courses explicitly to ensure transparency for students.
Community-Engaged Learning (CE-L) courses, Course-Embedded Travel (CET) and the Global Learning Program (GLP) represent some of Grinnell’s most visible innovations in curriculum. They also require resources that shape how they function.
CE-L courses connect academic coursework with community partnerships in the region. Rose McClain `27, a student in the CE-L class POL/ PST-320: Applied Policy Analysis, works with Neighborhood Finance Corporation, a nonprofit that builds affordable housing for low-income residents in Des Moines.
Her research group was given the prompt of defining what a healthy neighborhood is according to the public. “In the coming weeks, we’re going to Des Moines to survey people about what they think makes a healthy neighborhood,” McClain said.
Phillips taught a CET course on detective fiction in Spain in 2022. “It was my entire spring break, 14 full days,” he said. The course required extensive time to organize travel and partnerships on the ground.
“There has to be a recognition of how much extra work this is for faculty,” Phillips said. He said he received a very small stipend, without any other compensation.
These courses exist because of funding through the Institute for Global Engagement (IGE) and donor support. “They are great, but they are not classes that we could easily expand across the curriculum,” Phillips said.
The timeline creates additional considerations — faculty must apply for GLP courses two years in advance. For Grinnell-in-London, applications for faculty to teach are already open for the 2028-29 academic year.
These challenges stem partly from Grinnell’s deliberately open curriculum. “Grinnell is extremely decentralized,” Phillips said. “These are departmental decisions.”
Each department autonomously decides what courses to offer, who teaches them and what counts toward the major. “The faculty own the curriculum,” Phillips said.
Scheduling happens departmentally, year by year, without much long-term planning. Phillips suggested a two to three year roadmap to create space for experimentation and to anticipate where some space exists to try different things.
Both Phillips and Backous said that they’re still learning their roles, each being in the third semester of their positions. They’re still gathering data about curriculum patterns, bottlenecks and inconsistencies.
Backous said she wishes Grinnell had a position that focused solely on curriculum rather than rotating associate deans every few years.
“It requires us to be really, really good partners across campus,” she said, speaking to collaboration between the registrar, dean’s office, IGE, Center for Teaching, Learning and Assessment (CTLA) and individual departments
