Requirement poses challenge for faculty

Faculty members of the School of Arts and Sciences must grapple with defining a new requirement after agreeing to reconsider a decision that many thought to have been settled in the spring.

The SAS faculty voted last Thursday to approve the long-debated Cross-Cultural Analysis Requirement, which will make cultural study mandatory for College of Arts and Sciences students.

But in approving a last-minute resolution presented by Art History professor David Brownlee, members also agreed to consider the study of U.S.-based minority cultures in a so-called "United States Cultural Analysis Requirement" -- an apparent victory for student and faculty protesters, who presented over 200 signatures at the meeting in support of the USCAR.

What this will actually mean for the College curriculum, however, SAS officials cannot yet say.

"We're a long way from having anything definite," said College Dean Dennis DeTurck. "The road we've started down now ... [involves] a lot of listening on the part of" the Committee on Undergraduate Education, which helps design requirements.

Since SAS faculty will not vote on the U.S.-based requirement until April, it would not be ready until the fall of 2007 at the earliest -- but DeTurck said that he is willing to put in as much time as necessary to work out the details.

"I'm much more interested in getting it right than getting it done," he said.

And officials say a U.S. requirement may not be easy to flesh out.

"It is a difficult thing to design," Brownlee said. "There may not be enough pre-existing courses for the U.S. requirement."

DeTurck said he believes enough courses may already exist to satisfy the requirement depending on how it is defined if approved by faculty.

"We'll look at classes we've already got, what their enrollments have been over the years and what their capacity is," he said.

While it is unclear if the U.S. requirement will become part of the curriculum, Brownlee said that the foreign cultural requirement -- which will definitely debut this coming September as a one-course mandate -- will not drastically change the College curriculum.

"I doubt there will be any difficulty at all in finding a variety of really good courses that explore foreign cultures," Brownlee said. "I'm sure that there will be some classes that will be created for it, and that's a good thing, but the University already offers a good amount of courses" that could go toward the requirement.

Brownlee added that the new requirement will likely fit seamlessly with existing ones, such as those for a major.

College junior Shakirah Simley -- who helped organize last Thursday's petition -- said that the U.S. requirement is a vital means of preparing Penn students for the real world.

"We have to look at ourselves not just as joe-schmo Penn students ... but as participants of a democracy and what that means," Simley said. "You have to be open-minded."

Brownlee said that he expects the U.S. cultural requirement will be passed for the fall but cautioned that the hardest parts of adding to the curriculum are still ahead.

"It's a difficult thing to design," he said. "It took a long time to define the international requirement, just to get the wording to a point where everyone agreed on it."

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