Gen Req classes thought up

More than 60 faculty members brainstormed course topics for a proposed pilot General Requirement at a workshop held Tuesday afternoon in Logan Hall, according to Committee on Undergraduate Education Chairperson Frank Warner. The meeting follows a summer of brainstorming on a College of Arts and Sciences pilot curriculum that was developed at a faculty meeting last April. At that time, 33 professors in the School of Arts and Sciences endorsed the idea on at least an experimental basis, with the stipulation that the 14-member committee return in December with a more precise and detailed plan. Plans for the pilot curriculum presently include reducing the number of required courses from 10 to four. The proposed experimental College curriculum would begin with interested participants from the Class of 2004 and would not affect current students. CUE invited between 80 and 100 faculty members to Tuesday's workshop as a chance to share course ideas. Warner, a Mathematics professor who moderated part of the workshop, said that currently, the "most important" task is to develop courses in the four tentatively titled interdisciplinary categories, numbered one through four respectively -- "Freedom, Equality and Community," "Science, Culture and Society," "Earth, Space and Life" and "Imagination, Representation and Reality." Physics Professor Philip Nelson said that a "smattering" of the roughly 20 informal proposals for categories two and three included "Minds, Computers, Language and Cognition," "Genome, Disease and Ethics" and "Evolutionary Biology and Social Behavior." The courses in each category would be team-taught by faculty from several departments. According to Warner, randomly selected members of the Class of 2004 who express interest in fulfilling alternate requirements would be enrolled in the experimental program, which would offer one or two courses per category during the first year and two or three courses per category in subsequent years of the pilot. If adopted for the whole student body, Warner said around six courses would be offered per category with at least four of them offered in each category each semester. Class sizes would range from 50 to 100 during the first year and from 70 to 100 students later in the pilot. Some professors, particularly in the natural and physical sciences, have argued that the pilot curriculum's four categories are too confining and time-compressing, College Dean Richard Beeman said over the summer. Beeman,who has fully endorsed the proposal, stressed yesterday that faculty -- not the College administration -- will decide the future of curricular revision and reform. "[These matters] are fully in the authority of our faculty," said Beeman. Next week, undergraduate department chairpersons and other interested faculty will meet to develop an evaluation process that would determine, among other things, a selection procedure for interested students.