Major review underway for general req.

Student input to be sought The College of Arts and Sciences has begun a review of the General Requirement, which promises to leave no stone unturned and no voice unheard. College Dean Matthew Santirocco said the distribution requirements, which were created in 1987, are going to be the target of a major review which looks at curriculum aspects and general policy concerns. The General Requirement currently consists of 10 courses that must be distributed among six sectors and a seventh category, called "Science Studies." The Committee on Undergraduate Education and the Curriculum Committee for the School of Arts and Sciences will be charged with researching the performance of the General Requirement. The two committees will work through the fall and spring semesters, in hopes of submitting a report, complete with recommendations, by spring. Santirocco said student input will be a major source of the committees' data. Issues ranging from whether a history major should be required to take the history/tradition distribution to whether more than one freshman seminar should be counted toward the requirement will be considered. Curriculum Committee Chairperson Larry Gladney said that when the requirement was created, the College mandated a review after five years. "We're going to be seeing how well the coherence of the sectors have maintained over time," he said. "We may suggest that sectors be rearranged or reassign the courses within the sectors." Gladney said the curriculum committee will review all aspects of the requirement in order to produce a comprehensive report for the faculty on how the committee will proceed. Student groups, ranging from the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education to the Undergraduate Assembly, will be asked for their input, Santirocco said. He added, though, that he wants input from unaffiliated students as well. "Now is the real chance for student input to make a difference," Santirocco said. "Is it intelligible to the students? Do they understand the shape of it? Is there an intellectual coherence? I want to know all of these things." The newly-created Dean's Forum – an Internet newsgroup which allows College students to communicate directly with the dean – will help Santirocco reach even more students. "I want to give the committees a huge stack of student input to factor into their consideration," Santirocco added. Jonathon Pitt, a College senior and president of SCUE, said he is glad the administration is undertaking the review, but added he believes there are major flaws in the General Requirement. "It's a system which does not work right now," Pitt said. "I praise efforts that are aimed at revamping the requirement, at changing the requirement, and at trying to give more backbone to it, to have the requirement make sense." He added that SCUE has undertaken its own study of the requirement, which will be released in the next month. "The General Requirement is a system with little, if any, philosophical justification, and which makes little, if any, intellectual sense in its current form," he said. "The decision to put certain courses on the sector lists seems to be backed by administrative and political aims, and not by a sound educational philosophy." Santirocco said that in addition to wanting to hear students' opinions, he wants them to understand the requirement and its purpose. To this end, he designed a brochure this summer, which students can pick up at the College office, explaining the goals and history of the recommendation. "[The General Requirement] is designed to be assembled into what may be pictured as an intellectual scaffolding around the vast and varied enterprises of the University," the brochure states. "From the vantages offered by that framework, students can develop an overall acquaintance with landmarks of human intellectual achievement and the varied shapes of modern scholarship." Santirocco is also encouraging all College departments to participate in the review and to look internally at the courses they offer for the requirement. Committee on Undergraduate Education Chairperson David Brownlee, an associate professor and graduate chairperson of History of Art, said his committee will try to determine how to make the General Requirement more workable and adaptable to the changing character of the University over time. "One of the things we need to look at is whether there are ways to administer the requirement in a way which gives it more shape and maintains the integrity of the sectors," Brownlee said. He added that nothing is beyond review. "There are no questions that are off limits," he said. "But there is some consensus that there should be some form of a general requirement, so I'd be surprised if there would be much debate over its existence."