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The University of Michigan Undergraduate Chemistry Curriculum 1. Philosophy, Curriculum, and the Nature of Change

In 1989, we instituted a new undergraduate chemistry curriculum designed to capitalize on the strengths of mechanistic organic chemistry, a powerful model that allows chemists to make predictions about reactivity for an astonishingly large number of substances. The organic chemistry faculty at the University of Michigan have taken responsibility for instructing first-year students in a two-term course called Structure and Reactivity, the first term of which serves more than 1200 students each fall semester. This course satisfies the introductory organic chemistry requirement for chemical science majors, biology majors, and premedical students. Approximately another 1500 students who need an introductory chemistry course, especially engineering students, enroll in a one-term course called Chemical Principles that can precede entry into the Structure and Reactivity courses. By using the model of contemporary mechanistic organic chemistry, students in the Structure and Reactivity courses are immersed in a mature subject area of chemistry that uses a rigorously defined descriptive basis for relating observed reactivity to molecular structure. Our instructional objective is to have students come to know the powerful conceptual unity that allows professional chemists to understand unfamiliar results according to a few well-refined principles and give them enough examples from which to create analogies. In our view, incoming university students who demonstrate some degree of chemical literacy do not need a year of introductory physical “general” chemistry followed by a year of “sophomore organic” chemistry. Many important concepts typically taught in general chemistry come up during exploration of the structures and reactivity of organic compounds and of the inorganic species that interact with them. Isn’t it possible to teach bonding, VSEPR, polarity, physical properties, the periodic properties of elements, acidity and basicity, oxidation and reduction, energetics and kinetics using organic as well as inorganic structures? Oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, silicon, boron, the halogens, and many transition metals are very much a part of “organic chemistry”. What is necessary is a context in which this rich chemistry can be explored in ways that revisit a few important themes throughout an entire year and which provides opportunity for students to practice these themes with increasing understanding and sophistication. Such a context is found in mechanistic organic chemistry because it is the area where a structural molecular approach and mechanistic rationalization of reactivity are most highly developed. The idea that such a context be used to introduce chemistry is not new (1). J. S. Guy at Emory University