Open Hearings
University of Delaware Faculty Senate
Coordinating Committee on Education
December 9, 1999
Official Transcript
1:30 - 3:30 p.m. 103 Gore Hall
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JUDY VAN NAME:
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I'm Judy Van Name, Chair of the Coordinating
Committee on Education, and I welcome you. This is our first open hearing
about the general education proposal, an opportunity for all members in
the community to be heard. Does everyone have the handouts? Everyone has
the agenda? We have the schedule. No, O.K., would you raise your hand if
you need the agenda, please? Thank you. There are plenty of seats up front.
If you need an agenda, please raise your hand. It's like the first day
of class. The other hand out, we're distributing at this point is from
the Undergraduate Studies Committee, and where are those? Rita has those.
Maybe you should raise your right hand if you need the agenda and your
left if you need the other. O.k. Are there extra agendas in the back? And
as long as there's an agenda per every two people, thank you. Bonnie has
agendas, so again if you need an agenda would you raise your hand? Thank
you, Bonnie. Marcia, I'm sorry - you look like Bonnie Scott back there,
sorry. Ok, so as we're getting our seats, we want to be sure that everyone
has an agenda. Marcia has extra copies and also the Undergraduate Studies
Committee recommendations. That’s the other handout, does anyone need that?
Ok, and where are those? The Undergraduate Studies Committee recommendation,
these are the hands now that the hand out from the Undergraduate Studies
Committee. Once again, welcome to our first open hearing for the general
education proposal. I'd like to introduce to you the members of the Faculty
Senate Coordinating Committee on Education. Bob Brown, from Philosophy
is Chair of the Undergraduate Studies Committee and a rep on our committee
and a member of our committee, Joann Browning, from Theater, Carol Denson
is unable to be here, Bobby Gempesaw is acting Vice-Provost for Academic
Programs, Alicia Glatfelter is our graduate student representative and
she's in Chemistry, Marcia Peoples-Halio from English, a former member
of the General Education Committee, Beth Haslett, (unable to be here) from
Communications also a member of the General Education Committee, Jeff Jordan
who is from Philosophy and Chair of the Library Committee, and there are
three committees that the Chairs serve on this committee. That’s why I
mention that. Jim Richards, Chair of the Graduate Studies Committee is
on this committee, and from Health and Exercise Sciences, Cara Spiro is
the Business and Economics and undergraduate student rep, and unable to
be here, Rita Girardi is our Administrative Assistant from the Faculty
Senate Office, and Marcia is assisting her. Karren Helsel-Spry is our other
Administrative Assistant and unable to be here. We have been discussing
the General Education Proposal in our Committee meetings this semester.
We intend to share our thinking with you this afternoon. One clarification
I need to make is in the memorandum dated December 2 to all faculty about
these open hearings. While the Coordinating Committee on Education endorses
the ten goals and four components of the General Education Proposal, the
Undergraduate Studies Committee has not done so effective at this time.
But we anticipate, or we are hopeful that it will. The four components
include a Freshman-year experience, a basic skills development, discovery
learning experience, and a capstone course, and you're probably familiar
with the ten goals and these four components. By now, you're probably aware,
that the report is available on the web at facsen/reports/genedrpt.html.
And if anyone has any difficulty I could put that on the board. We are
interested in sharing with you some of our alternative proposals for General
Education. We will proceed in the order presented in the agenda, since
there are twelve presenters, we would like you to limit your comments to
five minutes and I did bring an impartial timer but I'm going to hold back
on using that. But in any case we hope that in the interest of everyone
having the opportunity to speak and of course we're willing to stay as
long as necessary but we realize that it’s a busy time for everyone, that
we can have five minute summaries from each of the presenters. We do ask
that everyone introduce yourself first as well as your identity and if
you would save any questions for the end of the planned presentations,
at which time we will open it for questions and answers. We will follow
a similar agenda on Monday, same time, same place. So if there are others
who would like to be here who couldn't be here today we thought having
the two hearings would help. Please share your ideas and reactions with
others and especially with the members of the Coordinating Committee on
Education. We will develop recommendations, which will be passed on to
the Executive Committee of the Faculty Senate and of course eventually
to the Faculty Senate. So, Bob would you please share the recommendations
of the Undergraduate Studies Committee?
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BOB BROWN:
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Thank you. I'm going to be speaking from this
real small type hand out, that I put together with scissors and paste at
4:30 yesterday afternoon. I think it's important to understand the sequence
that has occurred. The Ad Hoc Committee on General Education was a committee
appointed by the University Senate, it worked for quite a long time, it
studied many different options and presented a report on general education
to the senate last spring. And the senate simply received that report,
didn’t do anything with it, except to send it this fall to the Undergraduate
Studies Committee. With the assignment to try to take the prose of that
report or at least make some steps toward turning the prose of that report
into the form of some proposals that the University community and the senate
could consider for possible action. So that’s what we did. We studied the
Ad Hoc Committee report. And because of the fact that there's a Pathways
Institute occurring in January in which people are training and preparing
to possibly offer Pathways courses we felt that particular sense of urgency
in sense of doing this and particularly in addressing the Pathways part
of that report. So what we did working very hard during the month of October
was to look at the whole report and in particular look at Pathways and
formulate some recommendation. And please understand these are our formulations
of where the best way we think one could proceed if one is going to implement
that particular report. The report of the Ad Hoc Committee, cause that’s
the task we were given to move that report toward possible implementation.
So, you have here a digest of a longer report that we submitted to the
Coordinating Committee and it's still in the Coordinating Committee possession.
And the first thing we recommended was the University officially endorse
the ten goals which don't seem to be very controversial. At least everyone
is talking about them and referring to them so they are simply quoted here
on your sheet. That was one of our recommendations.
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The second one was we address the Pathways course
component of that report and we asked ourselves if the Pathways requirement
is to be instituted at the University what would be the most feasible way
in which to do that? In other words, how to configure it so that it would
be workable. And so what we did is spend most of our time on that Pathways
element. And so you see toward the bottom of this first page of this sheet
under #2, you have the statement that a Pathways course requirement would
be in place for all associate and baccalaureate degrees. And then you have
an attempt to describe what a Pathways course would be understood to consist
of, and we simply cobbled this description together from wording taken
from the Ad Hoc Committee's report, and note the word normally that we
put there. Pathways courses normally understood so that it would not preclude
the possibility that something could pass muster as a Pathways course.
It was a little weak on one or another of these elements, but quite strong
on the others. But then we have the description that is to be understood
as a course on a broad theme, a theme that is developed by a team of faculty
collaborators from different disciplines. The course is to be taught in
sections of 80 to 100 students, sections that would break down for a discussion
type meeting of no more than 20 students in each subsection at least once
a week. Notice that these descriptions do not make any reference to team
teaching leaves open the possibility of a course being either officially
team taught or simply being collaboratively planned with each individual
teaching his or her section with a format and with the benefit of things
learned, a format jointly planned by the other faculty collaborators who
would be teaching their sections and with the benefit of things one learned
from those other people in the collaboration and planning process. So it
could be team taught. It doesn't have to be. There's nothing in the description
that specifies that. And then it lists the activities or exercises which
the Ad Hoc Committee report thought should be built into a Pathways course,
and it's a pretty formidable list of basic skills and activities, and then
refers to how the goal is to coordinate these things, so as to provide
a coherent experience. I want to point out that two things here before
we turn the page over. Of course there's a lot of concern about resources
and what would be the resources that would be required to mount a Pathways
requirement for all undergraduates and also the question of if you have
TAs. What would need to be trained to do, and how would they be trained.
And, I think, it will help to provide a little narrower focus to the discussion
if we talk about resources if you keep in mind several things. One is that,
as you'll see on the page, we recommend only one Pathways course required,
and that would seem to call for approximately 4,000 enrollments per academic
year to provide sufficient seats in classes to meet that requirement with
a little elbow room for a little extra elbow room. And that would mean
if you had sections of 80 to 100, that would mean somewhere in the range
of 40 to 50 such sections being offered in an academic year. So that's
the enrollment picture--one that we'd be looking at--and that's the number
of enrollments that presumed we would be redirected to the Pathways courses
and away from presently existing courses that serve general education students.
No, for the academic year, I said. So 4,000 for the academic year. No,
it's a one-semester course. Yes, you'll see that. So 2,000 per semester.
The other question under #3 is what would the TAs be trained to do, and
I think that a lot of people have assumed, and, maybe Carol will address
this that somehow these students were going to be in full-fledged computer
labs and taught English 110, a level composition and all that sort of thing,
and of course no TA could possibly to do that, and of course I don't think
that the report intends that this be a mini-course introduction to Computer
Science and English 100 and Public Speaking and all these other things
all wrapped up in one semester. I think the intention was simply to have
some elements or some activities of these sorts in the courses so that
students do do some writing, so some speaking and are made aware as appropriate
of how computers and mathematics are of use in studying the subject matter
of the theme. If you turn over the page to the back to put meat on the
skeleton of how we would envision the Pathways course requirement if the
University decided to adopt it would be this--a three-credit course. We
thought that four credits was not feasible--that it would cause too many
difficulties fitting into existing curricula where some students were already
at 17 credits per semester with their present curricula. And we thought
one course, not two. Some people had talked about requiring two Pathways
courses, but one. We had, of course, would have specified a date for starting
it, and having a transition period before the date at which it became applicable
to all newly matriculating students so that some Pathways courses could
be tried out on a smaller scale and worked into it gradually. The fourth,
Item D, on page 2 we thought was particularly important. A Pathways requirement,
if instituted, should not add to the total number of courses that students
presently have to take in their majors, and so we recommend it strongly
that if a Pathways is instituted, that the colleges be instructed, compelled,
required, whatever the appropriate word is, to count a student's enrollment
in that course toward some one of their presently stated general education
requirements, whichever one the Pathways course, by virtue of theme, it
dealt with, which would most nearly correspond to. And that would apply
also to students who elected to take Pathways during some transitional
year when it wasn't officially required of them. Then we suggested that
Pathways courses should be perhaps offered under a UNIV rubric, at the
100-level common rubric, which would be used, and they would, in effect,
be special topics type courses under the permanent UNIV numbers that would
be allocated to them. We suggested that there be an approval process for
Pathways courses. That they have to meet certain standards and the scrutiny
of an established body in order to be so certified, and that they would
be so identified in the course schedule booklets and on transcripts as
satisfying a Pathways requirement in a way that multicultural courses are
presently identified. And we thought if it's supposed to be a freshmen
year experience, then registration priority should be given to freshmen.
Students who do not need to meet the Pathways requirement, irrespective
to classification, should not be allowed to take seats away from those
who do, and students who delay meeting the requirement beyond the freshmen
year, should have to take a back seat behind those who are seeking to meet
a requirement in the freshmen year if it's genuinely supposed to be an
introduction to the University experience. Then we suggested that a new
committee would be needed since the Undergraduate Studies Committee has
a large workload as it is, a Committee on General Education of the Senate
that would report through the Undergraduate Studies Committee, but would
be made up of different individuals, and would not simply be a subcommittee
of members of the Undergraduate Studies Committee. And it would have the
job of certifying courses for Pathways approval and would have the job
of an ongoing assessment of Pathways courses, an ongoing study and assessment
of all University-wide general education provisions and that specifically
this committee would be charged with studying the other elements of the
Ad Hoc Committee report that we think call for some additional study before
they should be brought to the University community for possible action
as formal requirements, and those are enumerated at the end of Page 2.
And I think I'm finished. Thank you very much.
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JUDY VAN NAME:
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Carol Hoffecker will be next.
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CAROL HOFFECKER:
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Hi, I'm Carol Hoffecker. I chaired the General
Education Committee, whose report Bob Brown has been speaking of. And I
want, first, to thank the Coordinating Committee on Education and its chair,
Judy Van Name for holding this hearing and inviting us all to discuss this
report, and I want to thank the Undergraduate Studies Committee and Bob
Brown for the good work that they have done in moving this forward and
massaging somewhat and making it really a better proposal than it was before.
And I particularly want to thank those people in this audience who are
members of the General Education Committee for two years and who found
time to come today as we discuss this report. I'm going to be very brief.
I suspect that later on points will be raised that I'll be asked to address,
so I don't want to take up too much time now, and maybe if I'm lucky, I
won't have to do anything afterward. Hey, one can always hope. I was asked
to talk about a couple of things that I know are going to be in the minds
of many of you. One is the phase in of Pathways. At the time that we wrote
the report, there seemed reason for us to believe that the administration
of the University wanted us to implement, if it was going to be implemented,
to implement it all at once. Since that time, I think we're all glad to
be able to see that the administration has rethought that model and has
now is perfectly content with the notion that this can be phased in, and
it can be phased in at whatever speed the Senate, the Coordinating Committee,
and the natural evolution of faculty coming forward who want to participate
in this program makes possible. Now, as already been mentioned, we're going
to be having a workshop, I would call it. It has this fancy name of institute,
but I'd think of it as a workshop. The week of January 24, and we invited
people proposals to teach Pathways courses, and those who submitted proposals
are invited to participate in the workshop. We got quite a number of proposals.
We're going to have somewhere between I'd say in the vicinity of 25 people
participating in the workshop. Some of them are planning to work in teams
with other people to develop their courses. Others are planning to do this
all on their own. Clearly in the way that this is really working out, in
the real world, folks are naturally falling into one or another of those
categories that seems appropriate to them, and that makes a good deal of
sense. Now this team-teaching concept, I take folks are a little bit worried
about because the image that they have is that you're going to tie up several
faculty members sitting in a room with only a certain number of students.
The image that we had on the committee, and we aren't wedded to this. I
mean this was the way we imagined it, would be that faculty in various
units would work together to develop a particular thing, but they would
teach the courses individually. They would not teach them as a team. Although
they might very well be guest lecturers in one another's courses. In some
cases, I think those of us who are on the committee hope that turns out
be the case, because there are some good opportunities there throughout
the University for collaboration. But it certainly isn't something that
is absolutely necessary. The thematic concept is the important thing, and
if one is a sufficient polymath, to be able to do this all on one's own,
more power to you. And there are certainly people out there who can do
that. Now, the resource issue and this business about TA training is also
something that keeps coming up, and I admit it is a bit of a thorny issue.
You may know that Deborah Andrews and some other people in the English
Department are working on a project called "Writing Across the Curriculum."
The idea being that courses throughout the entire curriculum of the University
ought to include a component of writing, and that students ought to know
that they are going to be expected to improve their writing and to be graded
on their writing or at least to some extent on their writing in courses
that are not specifically designed to teach writing, like E110. What better
time to get students into the knowledge that, hey, this is the way the
University works, than in the freshman year when they're taking what we
hope will be one of the very first courses that they take at the University.
Similarly, with skills such as using mathematics. The idea that after one
has passed the math requirement in one's particular unit, one can then
literally forget everything in math they have ever learned and never have
to use it again except to balance their checkbook, is not a good idea.
We think that once you have mastered this math, you ought to be finding
occasions to apply it, and so we would hope that introducing the use of
rather simple math in the Pathways courses, we would be again we would
be putting something in people's heads that, yes, they can expect that
they may have to do percentages, make graphs and do things like that in
other courses down the road. Another issue that has come up, thanks to
our new Dean of Arts and Sciences, Tom DiLorenzo, who comes to us from
the University of Missouri, which has a freshmen interest group program,
as they are often called, FIGS. The University of Washington also has a
similar program. Our committee looked at FIGS, and we liked very much the
concept. In fact, we like it a great deal. The one thing that we were a
bit shy about, with respect to FIGS, had nothing to do with the College
of Arts and Sciences, where they make splendid sense, but rather had to
do with some of the other colleges, and particularly the engineers and
the nurses, who have very constrained curricula, even the freshman year
because of all of the courses that they absolutely, positively have to
take in order to get certification. So, I think that, as far as speaking
for myself, and certainly it isn't a matter that we discussed recently
in the Gen Ed Committee. We have not met in the Gen ED Committee since
we handed in our report, nor do we intend to do so. But, certainly there
is everything in the spirit of our report would contribute to the idea
that freshman interest groups would be a very very good thing. Wherever,
the curricular design for particular majors make them possible, I suppose
that if in the spirit of the report we wrote, which doesn't necessarily
govern anything, we finally came to the conclusion as a committee, that
meant issues such as that, should be left up to the individual colleges
to determine. And I suspected other members of the Gen Ed Committee would
continue to concur in that fundamental idea that if there are differences
throughout the University that have to be honored in curricular matters.
So, those are the really, the principle issues that I was called upon to
address and if there are other things that come up later I will be happy
to address them I just want you to know that not only do we have a bunch
of enthusiastic participants, in the forthcoming institute in January,
we also have a very good program based on the free time being offered by
a number of people in this room right now, Beth Haslett is going to teach
people how to get up on their two feet and give a little talk, and she's
probably grading me on mine right now. So, I'm sure that one of the things
is that you've got to get off the stage in five minutes. So here I go.
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JUDY VAN NAME:
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Can I ask for a show of hands of how many here
are going to participate in the Pathways Institute? Ok, thank you, and
Dean DiLorenzo is our next speaker.
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DEAN DiLORENZO:
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Thank you, Judy. In the spirit of saving some
time, I really don't know if I have much to add beyond what Carol eloquently
put together there, I really support the work that the committee has done
in the past, they've really done a marvelous job. I support the ten goals,
the four components, I really support the notion that we look at conceptually
what we're interested in, and then allow other groups to work out the implementation
pieces, so I really don't have much to add beyond that except to say that
in the freshman interdisciplinary experience as Carol laid out, I would
just hope that we could be as flexible as possible, and I think she was
saying that as well. There's a diverse group of faculty who may want to
implement a variety of different themes, thematic themes, if you will,
in this freshman experience and some of the Pathways's courses that have
been proposed really look exciting to me, I think there's other ways that
we could develop these experiences as well, and I'm most familiar with
the freshman interest group concept. So, having said that I prepared a
one page overview of what a freshman interest group is and I'll pass that
out, or I'll give it to Judy to pass out and end with that. Thanks, for
your presentation, Carol.
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CAROL HOFFECKER:
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Thank you for coming and adding a new dimension
to it all.
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JUDY VAN NAME:
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Ok, and now Jim Richards will say a few words.
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JIM RICHARDS:
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Hi. It was my job to summarize the current understanding
of the Coordinating Committee in terms of the common grounds between all
the various groups involved in creating the Gen Ed Proposal. After our
first speakers, this is going to sound like a report from the Department
of Redundancy Department. The Committee listened to comments from representatives,
from the Gen Ed Ad Hoc Committee from the Undergraduate Studies Committee
and from the Panel of Deans and Named Distinguished Professors. Based on
those comments, there are specific components of the Gen Ed proposal that
are quite common to all of the interests of each of those groups. First
of that, all of the groups have endorsed the goals set forth by the Ad
Hoc Committee, and we all know what the ten goals are by this point. All
groups have endorsed the four major elements of general education including
a freshman year experience, the acquisition of specific skills, a discovery
learning experience, and a capstone course. All groups have supported the
creation of an implementation an oversight committee for governance of
the Gen Ed process. And finally, all groups have recommended an implementation
strategy that introduces the four elements of Gen Ed individually, starting
with the Freshman Experience. Additionally, the pilot implementation of
each element should be followed by a period of assessment, evaluation and
if necessary, revision, prior to elevating the element to the status of
a requirement. To date, there is consensus among groups studying the Ad
Hoc Committee report that the establishment of a timetable for the pilot
implementation phase of each element is essential, and that is what we
have at this point.
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JUDY VAN NAME:
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David Colton is our next speaker.
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DAVID COLTON:
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Thank you Judy, and I would like to thank everybody
also for giving me the opportunity to say a few words here. For those who
don't know me, my name is David Colton, I'm UniDel Professor of Mathematical
Sciences and I'm speaking on behalf of the named professors. We got together
at a meeting to discuss the whole proposal. For those who didn't come to
the meeting, we've had various correspondence by email and personal conversation.
And, so far, the people I've talked to, it’s a very strong consensus backing
the comments I want to say to you right now. I think its remarkable, probably
that the named professors got together to agree on anything. So the fact
that they came together to actually speak on this, is the first time in
my twenty-some-odd years at the University of Delaware where such a group
has done that, and I'd like to see that go on in the future, but I want
to emphasize that it means that from this group of people anyway we have
certain concerns which we consider to be particularly important, and we
want to speak at about it at this moment. Our concern is both of the implementation
and the content of the Pathways courses. There's already been several comments
on implementation so I'm not going to speak on that, I'd assume in the
discussion today and tomorrow if there are further comments on that, it
will be discussed. I want to rather talk more about the intellectual aims
of the proposal and the content of the Pathways courses. I'm only going
to address the Pathways part, not the rest of it, just the first beginning.
The comments we have we made in a letter to Professor Huddleson, and in
that letter we said basically we support the basic goals of the General
Education Proposal. However, as I just said we do have some specific concerns
about the Pathways proposal. I'll say these very briefly now and leave
you be. And I'm sure others will say other aspects as we go on. The difficulty
I have at the moment, or I should say we have as the shared Professors,
is that its difficult to evaluate the proposed courses because they're
just ideas at the moment, in particular, just to remind you, they have
the ideas that the concepts of oceans, justice and equality, food, money,
bio-ethics, death and dying and the future are suggested types of courses
which will be given in this Pathways. We're not quite sure what will go
into that, so in order to evaluate that, we have to look in the paragraph
before that, look in the motivation behind it. What's the rationale behind
these courses? The first one that we come across is the idea of interdisciplinary
work, and in particular it says a little later on that students work both
individually and in groups to solve problems just as researchers do. Now,
we assume that this is not meant to be taken literally because its without
having a knowledge of any discipline is very difficult to do interdisciplinary
work. In particular, I do do interdisciplinary work in both mathematics
and physics and some basic knowledge is required of each one of those areas
in order to actually do anything that could remotely qualify as interdisciplinary
work. At that level, the concern of the named professors is that the feasibility
of trying to actually do interdisciplinary work is questionable. It's certainly
desirable later on in the program, you know, in subsequent years, but to
ask that of a freshman to do that, we question whether that’s possible.
Again, basically because you have to know something before you can cross-fertilize
it. The other concern we have is the, which I have a particular concern
I want to mention, is that they would use basic mathematics to solve problems.
And later it suggests that the M114 would be a possibility for such a course.
I'd like to say as far as the sciences are concerned, and this is in support
of all named professors in Science and Engineering that we've spoke to,
M114 is simple not sufficient to do interdisciplinary work in science.
It's just not. I mean, this takes more. Therefore, if you try to do it,
your gonna have to go later in the curriculum, later in the subsequent
years to try to accomplish that goal. It's very worthwhile to accomplish
that goal, but the possibility to do it at that level is not possible.
The way that we figure is particularly important, not only for the University
of Delaware, but to put our students in Science and Engineering in a competitive
place for graduate school and careers after they graduate is to allow them
to take more basic core courses first, so then we have the possibility
of later doing interdisciplinary work. And that's where the concept of
the Fig proposal, that the Dean of Arts and Science has just proposed to
you, fulfills that criteria. It allows this to happen. We're not saying
that in other areas, for example right at this point outside of science
and engineering that maybe some concept like that is possible but in science
and engineering that flexibility needs to be allowed in our opinion. Not
only needs but must be allowed in our opinion to maintain the intellectual
integrity of this science and engineering curriculum. So what we propose,
and we say in our letter at the very least, the Pathways course should
not be a required course for everybody. We feel that would undermine the
aims of the Science and Engineering courses particularly. Now, if its not
required, and I think its been suggested several times that its not necessary
for it to be required, that would go a long way towards giving the flexibility
that’s needed so people who do know what they're doing and when to do it
and when to pursue those areas could do so. It should not be imposed on
all freshmen coming to the University. That’s our opinion. So, one thing
I did learn in my ump-teen million years as a Professor, that it's always
wise to end before your five minutes is up. You'll be loved and thanked
forever and ever, which I hope you will do now cause I'm ended. Thank you
very much.
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JUDY VAN NAME:
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O.K. Ray Wolters.
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RAY WOLTERS:
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Thank you, Judy and Committee, colleagues. I've
come in from sabbatical leave. I'm trying to write a biography of W.B.
DuBois. I'm preoccupied with the man at the moment. So I thought I would
begin with a story he tells in his autobiography, "Dusk of Dawn." He describes
the situation of a man who is encased in a box of glass that was so clear
that passers-by did not realize that the man was in a glass box. DuBois's
purpose was to suggest what it's like to be segregated in America. But
my purpose is a little different. It is to suggest that some of us who
have reservations, criticisms really of this Pathways proposal simply aren't
being heard. The man in the box would speak courteously and persuasively,
but since he was in a glass box nobody could hear him. The man talked evenly
and logically but noticed that the passing throng did not even turn its
head, or if it did glanced curiously, and walked on. Finally the man in
the box realized that the people passing did not hear, that he was separated,
cut-off. Then he became excited, he talked later, he gesticulated. Some
of the passing people stopped out of curiosity but they could not hear
him. And the gestures seemed pointless, so they laughed and walked on.
Then the man in the box became hysterical. He screamed and hurled himself
against the glass but that only made him seem ridiculous to the passing
world. I mention this because I wonder if anything anybody, in particular
the members of this Coordinating Committee, are really hearing what is
being said about Pathways or if they're hearing what I'm hearing. I have
discussed this over the semester with any number of people and all I hear
is criticism of the proposal. And yet, it seems to move forward. I've heard
criticism from the grounds that it can't be implemented at the college
parallel program. I've heard that it won't accommodate disabled students.
I've heard that it doesn't possess sufficient rigor to qualify as college
credit, et cetera. Now, a few weeks ago, Dean DiLorenzo, excuse me, Tom,
recommended a modification of the proposed Pathways. And to my way of thinking,
the Dean's proposal is sound and offers a way to save what is valuable
in the report of the Ad Hoc Committee. The Dean's modification I think
is a lifeline. I hope this Coordinating Committee will grab it, but again
I wonder if people are listening. So, in an effort to get your attention
I want to make a statement that is a bit more candid than is customary
in faculty meetings. I don't want to leave the impression that my principle
objection to the proposed Pathways stems from the impracticality of implementing
the program. My principle objection is to the philosophy that underlines
the proposal. I take particular exception to the way that the Ad Hoc Committee
has redefined the term General Education. As used by the Ad Hoc Committee,
the term not longer applies or refers to the knowledge that should be common
to all students. I realize this when the Chairperson of the Ad Hoc Committee
told me that the introductory survey course in American History would not
be a Pathways course. Now, if the introductory course in American History
does not qualify as common knowledge that all students should have, then
I wonder what does count as general knowledge, as general education. And
the answer, Professor Colton just mentioned, is in the report of the Ad
Hoc Committee. A course on justice and equality will count. So will a course
called "Death and Dying," and a course called "Oceans," and a course called
"Money." As envisioned by the Ad Hoc Committee, I think, General Education
courses will be courses of surpassing generality. The courses will be interdisciplinary,
but in the sense that the courses would involve a team of professors who
are authorities in different specialties. Rather, the courses will be taught
by a single professor, a generalist, who has a passing acquaintance with
the pertinent scholarship. In "Death and Dying," for example, the professor
need not be a specialist in physiology, but should be one step ahead of
most students on that subject. He or she need not be a specialist on the
psychology of bereavement, but again, one step ahead of the students. So
it goes. The University already has a good, outstanding economics course
called "Money and Banking." But that's not what the Ad Hoc Committee has
in mind for General Education. The professor who teach money and banking
have spent years studying discount rates and open market operations and
reserve ratios, but that knowledge is too specialized for what is now being
called General Education. If you read between the lines of the Committee's
report, you will detect a bias against focused, disciplined learning and
a preference for what used to called dilettantism, but has now been re-christened
as General Education. Now, this strikes me as highly problematical. You
try to require that a thousand students take a course on "Death and Dying."
I think you're asking for trouble. I think you're asking for protests,
when those protests eventuate, I would predict that the public would not
regard the protesters as hysterical, ridiculous creatures who, for no reason,
are throwing themselves up against an impenetrable glass wall. What should
be done? I think that by endorsing Dean DiLorenzo's modification, his FIG
proposal, this coordinating committee would avoid the problems I have mentioned.
Of course the Dean's modification will allow students to enroll voluntarily
in courses that I might think insufficiently rigorous to warrant college
credit. But that's the price that I'm willing to pay. The Dean's modification
will allow the Pathways courses mentioned in the report of the Ad Hoc Committee.
The disadvantage of the proposal, as I read it, is that it will not allow
the combination of choice and focused concentration that the Dean's modification
permits. Well again, I have spoken more candidly than usual in these meetings,
but I thank you for your attention and time. Thank you.
-
JUDY VAN NAME:
-
I'm not sure how to pronounce Cindy's last name.
Is Cindy here? Oh, I'm sorry. Jan Blits?
-
JAN BLITS:
-
Thank you Judy, and the Committee, and colleagues.
I'm Jan Blits. I'm Vice President of the Delaware Association of Scholars,
and I too would like to talk about the Pathways courses. In particular,
I would like to raise some questions about what Carol just called the thorny
issue of TAs--staffing for those courses. While the Gen Ed Report gives
a lot of attention to the faculty for the proposed Pathways courses, it
gives almost no attention to the TAs, who will be involved in those courses.
Much of the Pathways success rest squarely on the TAs. In fact, more will
be asked of the TAs than is asked perhaps of any senior faculty member,
including the faculty who will be teaching Pathways courses. Besides sharing
the responsibility for introducing greater coherence into the undergraduate
program, TAs will responsible for teaching writing and public speaking,
quantitative reasoning, critical thinking and other skills, and according
to the Gen Ed report, each of the TA's 20 students will "write several
reports that will be graded both for content and writing, and each student
will give at least two oral presentations that will be critiqued for effectiveness."
That's not all though. TAs will also be teaching subject matter outside
their fields of graduate study. Where will the University find enough TAs
to cover approximately 200 discussion sections a year. And where will they
find TAs who are sufficiently qualified to accomplish one, let alone all
of the Pathways goals. The writing component is an obvious problem. At
a previous open hearing, someone said that a good number of the TAs could
come from English. But, in fact, the English Department would not be able
to staff any of its E110 courses if the graduate students were channeled
to any other work. The English Department has a difficult time enough staffing
its various service courses with its S-Contract people. In fact, somebody
in the English Department who knows about these things said the loss of
even one grad student would be serious and material. Well, perhaps then
the TAs might come from other graduate programs and be given training to
teach writing as well as the other things. Here again, however, there seems
to be an enormous problem. Graduate students teaching English courses receive
at least one semester of master's-level training in the teaching of composition
before going into the classroom. The Gen Ed proposal, however, would require
only "a training period of three to five days in late summer to prepare
TAs for all of their obligations, not just for writing. We heard Bob Brown,
just a short while ago, respond to these questions by saying that the Pathways
courses would, in fact, be watered-down courses, not the level of MATH114,
not the level of E110 and so on. Would they really be college-level courses?
What would the students, in fact, learn. I suspect that we are hearing
high public goals, while the people making the proposal have low private
expectations for these courses. There's also a great problem for the TAs
themselves. These students are studying in order to learn their chosen
field. The Pathways courses will generally pull them away from their fields
and their mentors, and while dividing their time and attention, greatly
burden them with responsibilities which are at once extraneous to their
studies and excessive in themselves. The Delaware Association of Scholars
is concerned about the Pathways courses effect on the University as a whole
as well. Delaware enjoys a reputation for undergraduate instruction by
faculty, rather than by TAs. Our reliance on faculty instructions is a
major reason why many students come to the University. It is also a major
reason for the University's national ranking--why it has kept climbing.
The Pathways courses, however, threaten the success. While the courses
would be a conspicuous part of Delaware's undergraduate program, students
in them would react primarily with TAs, rather than with faculty. Ironically,
in the name of upgrading undergraduate education, the University would,
in fact, would be shifting a large and important part of freshmen teaching
from faculty to nonfaculty. It is hard to see how either the quality of
our undergraduate instruction or our reputation can escape unharmed. I
hope that the Pathways proposal does not go to the Senate until the problem
of adequately staffing the 200 Pathways Discussion sections is clearly
resolved. Thank you.
-
LINDA GOTTFREDSON:
-
Thank you Judy, and the Committee, for the opportunity
to speak. I'm Linda Gottfredson. I'm a Senator for the School of Education.
Our Director, Professor Robert Hampel, had a prior commitment today, so
he asked me to read the following statement. The statement focuses on the
General Education proposal's experiential learning component, which would
require service learning, professional internships, research or other such
activities outside the University. This aspect of the proposal is not the
school's only concern, but it's the one that some school faculty and staff
believe would create the biggest problem for us. So here is Dr. Hampel's
statement.
-
-
The School of Education is currently hardpressed
to find enough schools for our undergraduates. Our freshmen and sophomore
field experiences, typically 10 to 20 hours observing or tutoring, require
approximately 800 placements per year. For our juniors, who spend seven
dozen mornings and afternoons designing and teaching lessons, administering
tests, and assisting teachers, we need another 300 sites. For our seniors,
who all student teach for two nine-week periods, another several hundred
classrooms are necessary. Furthermore, we seek excellent classrooms taught
by experienced teachers, so we can't use classroom with rookie teachers
or teachers who are not outstanding. In addition, other colleges in this
area--Lincoln, Widener, Wilmington and West Chester--compete vigorously
for field placements, and their enrollments are rising as rapidly as ours.
Finally, the new accountability regulations in Delaware have prompted several
districts to limit the number of grade levels open to our students. Taking
together all of those factors mean that a sudden surge of undergraduates
seeking a place in Delaware public schools would create significant hardships
for the School of Education and for the public schools.
-
-
Now, Dr. Hampel's statement has just described
how one element of the General Education proposal might damage the School
of Education's and UD's responsibility or ability to meet our responsibilities
in educating preservice teachers. I would add that there are risks for
the rest of the University as well. Mandating field experiences for all
students, UD students, would be a massive undertaking, even if it were
phased in gradually. Our staff can tell you in exquisite detail how difficult
and time consuming it is to develop, run and monitor hundreds of field
experiences, specifically placements that are pedagogically sound and feasible
simultaneously for students and faculty and the host sites. Good placements
are labor intensive. They are cultivated over time. They take much advanced
planning, including for such mundane things as transporting students to
the sites. Good field experiences also require close supervision and monitoring.
We have staff in the field giving advice and troubleshooting. Who will
do that for hundreds if not thousands of students, UD students, each year.
Unfortunately, none of the School of Education's key faculty or staff in
this area could attend the hearing today to elaborate these concerns, and
perhaps only one will be available for the second hearing. It was a real
problem for us that the Open Hearings were scheduled suddenly during the
most hectic time of the semester. We appreciate the desire to move forward
expeditiously, but we hope that the Coordinating Committee will schedule
additional time for open hearings after the holidays, something which Judy
Van Name said at Monday's Senate Faculty Meeting it could do. Thank you.
-
HARRY SHIPMAN:
-
I've got a few copies of a handout. I don't have
enough for everybody here. Basically, the only additional piece of information
on the handout is going to be a couple of Web Sites, and if anybody wants
it, I'll be glad to give it to you. I was planning only to speak about
the enrollment limit, but I can't resist adding to what Professor Gottfredson
said, since I taught a section of Elementary Science Methods this fall,
and I just came from our closing meeting, in which discussed the difficulties
of problem placements. When you teach students all about how students ought
to learn in groups, and they go to a school in which their cooperating
teacher thinks this is a bunch of hooey. What I take this to mean, if I
can operationally translate what you said into a couple of sentences, is
that for those of us outside the School of Education, to look to the Delaware
public schools as a place to get a lot of students placed in field experiences,
is dreaming. We struggle in the School of Education to find the right kind
of places that we've got. So we're going to have to look elsewhere. And
the other thing that I've learned from being involved in this section is
the amount of work that's involved in supervising it, is not trivial. It's
a good bit. The main thing that I wanted to talk about, and I will stay
within my five-minute limit, and you can cut me off if you need to, is
the enrollment limit. I've taught General Education courses ever since
I've been here at the University. I think I've had some success in that.
For most of my career I've taught hundreds of students. I had one year
where I even had to limit the enrollment in my class to fit into the big
rooms in Smith Hall, which hold about 400 people. And when all I was doing
was lecturing, I perceived, and the research and the education supported
me on this, that there was really a relatively weak correlation between
teaching effectiveness and class size. Put it differently, if all you're
going to do is lecture, it doesn't matter that much whether you're lecturing
to 40 students or 400 students. But in about the last five or six years,
I've started to use active learning methods, and one of the things I really
like about the Committee's proposal is the use of the words group methods
and active learning. I think those are the two important phrases in the
whole thing. When you do that, things change. Barbara Duch and I did some
research on my Physical Science class last spring. We taught a section
of 240 students, and we taught a section of 120 students. As close as we
could, we kept them identical. When Barbara was in charge of the class,
I took notes. When I was in charge of the class, she took notes and I kept
them really, really close and parallel. And we gathered a whole lot of
data about the different experiences of the different students, and what
the data shows is that the group learning component of this class in the
section of 120 was considerably more effective. So, I think the enrollment
cap of 80 to 100 students in the proposal is entirely appropriate. We could
argue. I don't really think there is data out there that shows whether
it should be 80 or 100 or 120, but I think those are methods of details,
but I think you want to be talking about 100 or so, rather than 300 or
so.
-
JUDY VAN NAME:
-
And now we'll open it for questions, and if you
please remember to state your name and your identity for the record.
-
JOHN MCLAUGHLIN:
-
Where is the money going to come from to hire
all these TA's. Its clear that TA population as of now that exists is completely
used by the existing courses. So, the logical conclusion is, we got to
get a whole lot more new people, who's going to pay for it?
-
JUDY VAN NAME:
-
I forgot to mention that it might be helpful
if you use the microphones and you could see, I think we heard you, John.
Did we pick that up? But I just thought I'd add that now, and also there
are some portable microphones, would you hold those up? Oh, right here,
I'm sorry they're right here in front of my nose. O.K. The Committee has
been discussing about resources and I'd like to ask Bobby Gempesaw to respond
to that.
-
BOBBY GEMPESAW:
-
I'm Bobby Gempesaw, Acting Vice-Provost for Academic
Programs. I guess being one of the only other administrator present. We
have to have some answer for John's question. We would have the same number
of students entering the University of Delaware. We would not be teaching
more students, so the same size, and the administration is committed to
doing that. So if we are mounting other courses that our students will
take, obviously some of the courses that we've been teaching may experience
drops in enrollment. If we're going to do all of these Pathways approaches.
The other thing that we would like to emphasize is that there are ways
of implementing the freshman experience and one way would be what DiLorenzo
has proposed. If you read closely to what the Freshman Interest Groups
concept is all about, the realignment of the TA's, if you will accept the
term, is not seriously present if we compare it to the concept of the teaching
of the faculty. So what I think we envision, is when we do this pilot implementation
we would study the appropriate procedure or process of how we could mount
Pathways courses or freshman interest concepts, or there might be other
options out there that we haven't studied. And then we would put an assessment
plan - an evaluation plan, and then come back to the faculty and say this
is what we learned after all this period of pilot implementation and let's
decide what is best for our students.
-
ALAN FOX:
-
I'm Alan Fox from Philosophy. I don't really
have a question I just wanted to respond to some concerns that came up.
I was on the General Education Committee, and I was part that wrote some
of the Pathways things. So, I don't know what form the Coordinating Committee
will finally forward these proposals, but some of the concerns that come
up, obviously people are feeling somewhat threatened by some of these things.
But I think some of that is based on, at least misunderstandings of what
the Committee had in mind. So I wanted to address some of those concerns.
First of all, the interdisciplinary component, the skills component of
the course, and the concern that the TA's wouldn't be capable of teaching
all these different kinds of things, and the fact that interdisciplinary
necessarily means that it has to be watered down and all those kinds of
things. I think that does reflect what, just based on reading, it seems
to kind of be a sort of trend throughout the country, to see interdisciplinary
work as somehow watered down in someway. I don't think it has to be that
way and of course we're hoping that the very best teachers would teach
these kinds of things. But we don't necessarily expect students to have
all this interdisciplinary ability when they come in as freshman. The idea
is to expose them to it, and I think expose them is really the critical
term here because we seem to be thinking that the TA's will be responsible
for teaching these people how to read, how to write, how to do math, how
to speak in public, and how to do all these things. I think the goal of
the TA's is, at least how we envision it, or the goal of the course is,
in general is not to provide students with all of these skills but rather
to show them how all the skills can come to bear on a single problem. So
that its not so much that you learn to read and write and do math in this
course, but you learn that when you're doing a philosophy problem it helps
to be able to analyze certain kinds of data quantitatively and that you'll
have to take into consideration social factors and historical factors and
so on and so forth. So I think if that sounds dilettantish I guess I'm
not sure, I guess that's just kind of a, seems to me kind of a simple equation
of interdisciplinary and dilettantish. Obviously, you are sacrificing a
little bit in depth, but you're also giving students, I think, a way of
approaching the rest of their training, the rest of their career in a way
that will enable them, I think, to make much better use of what they're
exposed to. So again, I don't see why that can't be a disciplined learning
experience. I think that depends on the teachers involved. And I don’t
think, I do want to emphasize that the Committee, we did not have low expectations
when we went into this, we had very high expectations and we expect that
obviously this is going to require a certain amount of brokering and a
certain amount of hard and effective work on the part of some really skilled
teachers. But not everybody is going to be teaching a Pathways course,
obviously enough. As far as the coherence, the coherence is going to be
provided by the faculty members and not by the TA's so much. Obviously
TA's don’t have to teach everything. Their job is like a conference leader
in a discussion except different kinds of days there might be different
kinds of activities. And also, just one other concern I had was about,
it seems to me that people were suggesting the service component of this
is immediately going to mean that everybody is going to go out and try
to get a job in the public school systems. It seems to me that the service
component was meant to be understood way more broadly than that, doesn’t
have to mean external placement. It can be things like independent studies
and stuff like that. Most programs already have service learning components
of this kind, already in place. So there's no need to even think about
where these additional people come from. Those things are already going
to count for those people already doing it. Other people can satisfy that
in all kinds of other ways. Anyway I'm not selling any of this to anybody,
but I do think that there seems to be some concerns about the Pathways
courses that don’t seem to reflect what I thought was in the report, and
don’t seem to reflect what the people who worked on this stuff had in mind
when they produced it. Thanks.
-
JUDY VAN NAME:
-
Other comments? Let's see I saw this hand first.
Yes?
-
JERRY BEASLEY:
-
I'm Jerry Beasley, I'm chair of the English department.
I was also a member of the General Education Committee and I simply want
to affirm some of what Alan Fox was saying. Namely that the committee did
not work with low expectations, I think that’s a very unfair characterization
of the Committee to say that. And I don’t say that defensively because
I don’t think it was an unfair characterization I think it is an inaccurate
one. If anything, our expectations may have been higher than some of you
here think they should have been. In any rate, the ideal we imagine for
the freshman year experience is just what Alan tried to describe--an opening
up of experience to students. An exposure to introduce interdisciplinary
approaches to the range of disciplines to the range of a discipline to
get them excited. To have students experience opportunities for learning
that might lead them in the direction of certain kinds of majors for example.
The second thing I want to do, again underscore something that Alan said.
I think there's been a confusion about the term service learning and discovery
learning here. If I've understood the discussion correctly, what's really
at issue is discovery learning. And as Alan I think was trying to say a
great many of our students are already engaged in discovery learning, it
is not simply a matter of placing students in the public schools or in
other local service organizations or in other kinds of public forums. We
have students doing study abroad programs, we have literally hundreds perhaps
thousands of students on campus who are already placed in internships and
I believe that the Committee's figures will show that something over fifty
percent of our Undergraduates are already involved in discovery learning
of one sort or another. So this is a much lesser problem than the Gottfredson's
characterization of it would suggest. And I wanted to say just one more
thing. We were all aware in the Committee of the feasibility issue--the
difficulty that we would all have coming to terms with the implementation
problem with respect to the Pathways courses and TA's. We were finally
instructed because we spent so much of our time wrestling with that problem
just to leave it alone and let someone else work it out. Which is what
we decided gratefully to do. But in the interim, many other people have
become concerned about those issues and I would like as others have done
to second Dean DiLorenzo's proposal that serious consideration be given
to an alternative model of a freshman integrated group, or the FIG. It
seems to me also that this offers opportunity to accomplish a great many
of the objectives that our committee had in mind. Perhaps not in the ideal
way that we imagined but in a very effective way that would offer opportunity
for interdisciplinary study, for collaboration among faculty, for allowing
students to be exposed to multiple fields of study in the freshman year
while also perhaps avoiding a lot of the staffing or other resource problems.
So I do hope, as I've said to the Coordinating Committee before, you will
take that proposal very seriously in the spirit in which it has been offered,
it has been offered and it has been supported. Thanks.
-
JUDY VAN NAME:
-
Lets see, there was another hand here and then
here. Yes, please.
-
BRIAN ACKERMAN:
-
I'm Brian Ackerman from Psychology. I'm going
to beat a dead horse a little bit here because I appreciate the FIG's construct,
I'm not sure I know what it is yet, but it seems like we're devolving,
or evolving into that sort of medium. When I attended the earlier, I attended
the earlier session that Carol chaired on the Pathways approach, a month
or so I guess, and the resource question was raised there and Carol suggested
that the solution was that you know, you take some from this give some
to that, and its all going to even out or it was going to be wash and that
was part of what Bobby Gempesaw just suggested that was going to be wash
because we have a certain fixed number of students with a certain fixed
number of resources, divided this way divided that way and so forth. Well,
I guess I would like to suggest that more attention be paid to the people
who actually distribute these resources. I direct the graduate program
in psychology, Bonnie Scott does it in English and there's a Committee
of us that have gotten together to talk about these sorts of issues. One
of the pieces of information that must be heard is that it's just not going
to be tit-for-tat. In psychology we have an intro psych course of about
2500 students or so a year. Is that about accurate, Tom? And one would
think that the twenty TA's that we devote to that 2500 students a year,
well some say, a fixed percentage say half could be devoted to Pathways,
say those 2500, go down to 1000. We take our twenty TA's, give ten to Pathways
keep ten. Seems reasonable, but we don’t devote twenty TA's to one course,
we devote two. Two. What that means is, in respective of the education
consequences of devoting two to a course that size, what that means is
that I have no TA's to give you. None. Nada. Not a one. There will not
be one. If you take half of my intro psych enrollment away, you're getting
nothing from me. Now there's an alternative. Suppose you give me more resources.
You double the amount of TA resources I get. Well I'm having trouble recruiting.
I can't even fill my lines right now and I know that's true in several
other disciplines because we've been in communication. I can't recruit
anymore, at least I can't recruit high quality students and it seems to
me from what I heard it should be high quality students we need to run
these Pathways courses. I can't recruit. More importantly, if I'm going
to recruit, I'm going to take the money you give me, and I'm going to double
the stipends of my graduate students. So, it's not a question of me getting
more bodies. It's a question of me being able to fill the lines you already
have. You're just not going to get any bodies from me. It's just not going
to be possible. Now, I don't know for sure that this issue is general across
disciplines. The one or two or three or four other graduate coordinators
that we've met with seem to have the same sorts of issues, but insofar
as we haven't yet addressed the FIGS Program, and insofar as this Pathways
Program is on the table, I think that a little more detailed? Work needs
to be done to talk to the people that actually allocate these graduate
students. I'm just not sure the resources are at all possible, even in
a dream world. Thank you.
-
HARRY SHIPMAN:
-
I just want to take a couple minutes to follow
Professors Fox and Beasley in responding to the comment that interdisciplinary
necessarily means watered down. I teach interdisciplinary courses. The
way you teach it and not water it down is you stop trying to survey everything.
You focus on a few areas. And I've taught for a couple of years—team taught
a course that Jeff Jordan and I both considered to be a Pathways course
in Science and Religion. That's how we've done it. I don't think the papers
are watered down, and Jeff is here, and he can respond to that if he wants.
But I don't see it as being watered down. Another example comes from my
Cosmic Evolution course, PHYSICS 145. If people are concerned about it
being watered down, take a look at the relativity problem on my course
web site, which 80 percent of my students were able to solve. When this
same problem was given to physics graduate students in the Ph.D. qualifiers,
only one-third of them were able to solve it. So my 145 students--now the
comparison's a little unfair--my students got it as a homework problem.
They got a support system. The physics grad students got it in the qualifiers
when they were sitting, sweating in a room. They had no support system.
But still, my students were able to do pretty well on it. So you can teach
rigorous, interdisciplinary courses.
-
TOM DiLORENZO:
-
Yes, sir. Probably the best way for me to describe
what a FIG is just to tell you very briefly about one that I participated
in. I think it was about a year ago. I can't remember exactly when it was.
Students were co-enrolled in three classes--in my introductory psychology,
in a lower-level communication class, and in what could be translated as
ENGLISH 110, an ENGLISH 110 section. There was no change in the number
of students in any of the classes. It was simply the case that 20 students
were co-enrolled in those three classes. So much of the implementation
issues or much of the resource we've talked about go away immediately.
The faculty members would get together on whatever regularity basis that
you would choose to do. Our freshmen interest group I think was called
something like Psychology in the Media. And I taught my course. Each of
them taught their own courses, and there could have been common content.
We could have set up the syllabus so that we talked about similar types
of themes at certain times. The important concept is that these students
during this experience followed each other around. So it was a study group
that was created among the group, also connected to the residence hall.
So the living, learning component was there as well. Research indicated
that you enhance retention rates, you enhance graduation rates. A significant
number of students are involved in more appropriate academic experiences
that freshmen would be organized in, and it's relatively low cost. They
put together much of the interdisciplinary aspects as well. So it ends
up being relatively low cost but relatively high academic rigor, and an
excitement is generated among both the faculty and the students. Interestingly
enough, we collected data from this and ended up presenting them at a national
English conference. I would have never gone to a national English conference,
not because I'm sure they aren't wonderful things, it's just that I don't
do that. But there was a certain amount of excitement that came with working
with my colleagues in the other disciplines, and that was fun. Now, I'm
not proposing that the current Pathways courses that are being designed,
that we would do away with those. It's exciting to me to see the excitement
that has grown from that group as well. And so, perhaps we could look at
some way to set this up that is really quite flexible, that allows colleges
or departments to create experiences, and in the two that we are talking
about the FIGS and the current Pathways courses interdisciplinary thematic.
It really achieves, I think, what we want to achieve. There can be a number
of ways that we can create these freshmen interdisciplinary experiences,
and that's where the excitement can really come from among the faculty.
Thank you.
-
THEODORE BRAUN:
-
I'm Theodore Braun from Foreign Languages. I'm
glad that Dean DiLorenzo suggested these as sort of parallel tracts. That
one of the things that we do in my department has been for 20 or 25 years
now to try to open up parallel tracts for our students, but we are very
flexible major program, for example, in all our languages. I would like
to suggest a third tract, which is really very simple. I really hope the
Committee will consider not as either/or but both and. Students would make
the choice of either/or or maybe the department would do so. But I would
like to add a third one, which every department in the University can participate
in and create themselves, which is a study abroad program in the summer
or particularly the winter session. A lot of departments don't have, maybe
have been resisting study abroad opportunities for their students. But
these can be designed to meet all the goals that are mentioned in any of
these experiences that we've had described to us now, and I'd like to propose
that as a kind of third pile on your table. Thanks.
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MIKE KEEFE:
-
I'm Mike Keefe from Mechanical Engineering and
I have a much more mundane question, except for Bob's comment about upper-level
students kind of being bumped for freshmen. The Committee discussed transfer
students--people who come in the University after a few years--whether
this kind of experience makes sense to them at that level. I just was wondering,
although it's not a lot of students, since this would be a University requirement,
it would have to be addressed somehow. So, I was just wondering if somebody
. .
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BOB BROWN:
-
Yes, we did. We discussed transfer students.
We discussed Parallel Program. We discussed students who are attempting
to do a degree at night through Continuing Education. As far as the transfer
students are concerned, it seemed to us what would be wise would be to
have the Assistant or Associate Deans, who do graduation checkout in the
students' colleges, make a judgment call on those people, just as they
do with respect to other requirements, and establishing equivalencies between
courses they may have elsewhere and here as to whether or not they think
that student should have to have a Pathways course, if a Pathways were
a requirement, and leave it in those people's hands the way things like
that are handled now, where people are allowed to make substitutions or
are excused from requirements for good reasons. The people who make those
judgments we think should be able to make those judgements with regard
to these kinds of requirements as well.
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MIKE KEEFE:
-
So seniors could be in this Pathways sequence?
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BOB BROWN:
-
I think it would be extraordinarily unlikely,
extraordinarily because presumably they would have, unless they went to
a most unsatisfactory kind of place elsewhere, they wouldn't, they would
seem to probably to have had many of these experiences already in one form
or another, so, and my supposition is that it would be unusual to require
transfer students unless they were people who hadn't done very much work
at another place before transferring in. And similarly with the Parallel
Program they might or might not have difficulty mounting these kinds of
experiences and that call could be made when they transfer to the main
campus. It seems to me that the mechanisms that we have in place for deciding
whether these special categories that people need to meet existing requirements
or can substitute others for them would work just fine for this as it does
for other instances.
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KEN ACKERMAN:
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When this started, which was some years ago,
was it? Oh, Ken Ackerman. I'm in Anthropology. I think I was very close
to the beginning of it. I kept thinking that I probably shouldn't be doing
this because I'm too close to retirement, and it will have nothing to do
with me. I probably will be retired before it ever gets done, so I'm closer
to right than I even intended to be. I think that when we address questions
of education, we ought to ask why we're doing what we're doing. It really
ought to be central to why we do what we do, and I saw the original rationale
set out. And, for those of you who don't know this, it started with a committee
appointed by the Dean of the College of Arts and Science and then went
several steps to where we are now, and I saw the set of justifications
for examining our curriculum, and I could not find in that set of justifications
a single defensible proposition which is not the same as saying that there
is not anything wrong with the education that we offer. The problem was
that we had not stated what was wrong, and in failing to state what was
wrong, we were unlikely to be addressing means of dealing with it. I think
that's still the case. I still think we haven't addressed what's wrong,
and I'm not sure that anything we propose to do will address it. Now it
may be that I'm wrong in my conclusions about what's wrong. But I'll tell
you what I think is wrong. What I think is wrong is that we have not succeeded,
and I'm not sure we know how to succeed in interesting young graduate students
in learning. That's what we're about. As an institution, we are about learning,
and we are about offering to people the opportunity to learn. We can't
force them to, but we could possibly get them excited if we did the right
things, and I think many of the things that have been proposed have been
proposed with that at the very least as a subtext. It is hoped that the
outcome of these courses will be that we will get some students, some proportion
of students, some part of the students who come to the University, who
are not now excited about learning excited. I wrote a letter of recommendation
for one of our students, who is about, I'm quite certain, to go off to
a first-rate graduate school, and it was a very easy letter to write. I
wrote it this morning. Actually, it dragged on into this afternoon, which
is why I was late. What was I able to say about her? That when she walked
in our door, she was excited about learning. She was easy to teach. She
was a delight to have in classrooms, not just in our classrooms. I suspect
she was a delight to have in every classroom she went into. I taught a
class this semester with 150 students. I did my damnedest--required attendance.
You cannot miss this class. I'll count your absences, and they will count
against your grade. I had 20 people asleep on a pretty regular basis, and
if I'd counted more closely, it would have been more than 20. I don't think
I'm a bad teacher, but I had people asleep. And I have a good, I think
a reasonable, I may be wrong--I may be a bad teacher--but I have a reasonable
understanding. I don't think they were excited. I don't think I could have
excited them. Well, maybe I could have, but I failed. How do we turn our
classrooms into places where students are excited. That's our problem.
I think that's the University's problem. It's not this University. We didn't
create this problem. I read in the paper the other day. I think. I hope
haven't distorted the date. I think this is roughly correct. Sixty-five
percent of American eight-year olds have television in their rooms. Try
beating that. Try beating that. How good are you at what you do because
the production values in my classroom don't match the production values
of even the worst commercials, much less those other programs. So, what
do we want to accomplish? We want to excite students about learning. I
wish I had proposals. I wish I knew how. I'm out. I missed this phase,
about us too. I can remember a meeting of the faculty, when we had general
faculty meetings, to discuss a change of curriculum. It was the first change
of curriculum that occurred after I came here. I can't remember in what
class it was held, though I think it was in one of the Smith classrooms,
and that room was damned near full of faculty, of faculty. This meeting
is held on a day when there are no classes, and we held it in a room small
enough so that it would look as though a lot of us were interested. I think
a lot of us are not. I think there's very little excitement about these
proposals, and I think there's very little excitement about them because
they're not very exciting. Not because a lot of good will and thought has
gone into them, but because they don't really address the problem. The
other half of the problem I think is skill. We want people to be excited
about learning, and we want to improve their skills, basic skills. I think
we probably do an excellent job of providing people educations in those
things that they finally decide to major in. But skills are lacking. We're
satisfied a relatively low level of competence in language. We're satisfied
with a relatively low level in mathematics. We're satisfied with a relatively
low level in English, in writing. We're satisfied with those things because
we almost have to be satisfied with them, because if we try to take them
to a higher standard, the University of Delaware would lose a good deal
of its enrollment. Other schools, after all, may not be willing to do this,
but I think it is what we should be addressing. We should be addressing
passion. We should be addressing skills, and if we could succeed in addressing
both of those things, I think we'd be proud of the students that were going
out of this University, rather than wondering how they were going to survive
out there in the world. They probably will survive. I wish I knew a way
to overcome the television set in the bedroom of eight-year olds. I don't,
but I haven't been able to discover, and I think the lack of enthusiasm,
and I have to count the lack of enthusiasm in terms of number of people
present, in terms of what Ray Wolters said about people who were questioning
the program in one way or another, either with their bodies present or
their bodies absent. I think we haven't succeeded in generating the kind
of enthusiasm from the faculty that we have to have if we want to make
this work, and I think one of the reasons we failed to do that is because
the programs themselves, well meaning, simply don't seem to address the
root causes, not our problem, but I think the problems of higher education
generally may be the problems of education generally. I think it would
be smarter simply to talk about the particulars--how's this going to work,
how's that going to work--and that's what we've been doing. But from the
beginning, I have found myself asking the question, what's broke and does
this address what's broke. Definitely, something's broke and there are
shards all over the place, and I don't think this will address what's broken.
I like, in preference to the Pathways course, and not because I didn't
think the Pathways courses were a good idea, but because they would have
demanded considerable enthusiasm on the part of a great many more of the
faculty than seem to be enthusiastic about them. Twenty-five, after all,
is not a large number. I had some doubts as to its likelihood of success.
I do much prefer between that proposal and the Pathways proposal, the proposal
offered by Dean DiLorenzo. I think there is at least within that the possibility,
given that students will actually be working together. At least that's
the ideal model for it. That we can generate in some students a passion
for learning that is not now there. If we can't generate it, we will have
performed another useful exercise in examining the curriculum, looking
at the parts of it that probably aren't broken and never looking at the
parts that are.
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CAROL HOFFECKER:
-
First of all, I think that this has been a wonderful
discussion. I think that a lot of very important have come to pass in this
discussion, and I'm only going to limit myself to addressing what Ken just
said because I think, ultimately, it's the most important thing of all.
I think he really did hit the nail on the head as to what our Committee
was all about trying to do and why we chose the idea of having thematic
courses. We recognize the same things that Ken has just commented on--that
too many of our freshmen come to the University without much interest in
learning anything. Yes, they want to get a good job when it's all over,
but they don't have any particular desire to learn. They're facing a very
complex world, and they don't know it, and they couldn't care less. And
we put them into a lot of introductory courses that are in various disciplines
that are taught by people who are skilled in their discipline, but who
are very constrained as to the way they approach teaching because they
have to cover this, that and the other thing by the end of the course.
The opportunity that the Pathways concept gives us is just the opportunity
to overcome that problem. It is the opportunity to specifically design
courses from the bottom up that are targeted to things that will be of
interest to students, first of all, and that will incorporate these various
skills into them because you don't have to be so concerned with covering
this, that and the other thing and getting to such and such a chapter by
the end of the semester. You can design the whole thing to be an entryway
into the University. It can work very well as part of the FIG or it can
stand alone. It's true that you're not going to teach this kind of a course
in a way that you would teach Money and Banking. You're not going to assume
that the purpose of the course is that at the end of the course, a student
is ready to walk into a bank and get a job and decide how to do things
in a relationship to the rediscount rate. What you would hope, if you were
going to teach say a course on money, would be a) that students are interested
in money. Let's cut to the chase here. The students don't know anything
about it. None of us do, except the people in the Economics Department.
You hear, that so-and-so's currency is going down and so-and-so's is going
up and Alan Greenspan is saying this and Wallstreet's reacting like that,
and you think ay ay ay ay ay. How does all this . . How many of us really
feel like, "Oh, yea. I understand what's going on." If we could just say
to students, "Hey, listen to the radio every day. Listen to this stuff."
You hear this on the radio. What's it's all about. What are they talking
about? How is the United States involved? How are you involved? And take
it from there. What do you do? You begin a Pathways for that student, that
group of students to say, "Gee, I need to know more about this. This is
interesting. Maybe I want to major in economics. Maybe I do want to go
into banking, or, hey, I'm going into fashion merchandising, but it's a
good thing that I know something about this. Or my career will probably
be in engineering, and may be sent off by my company to China or India
or Brazil, and it will be important for me to have some concept of how
the Peso is doing or whatever currency it may be relative to my own in
order to understand the conditions in which I'm operating. Even though
my purpose is to try to sell them some new widget and gadget, it's a Pathways."
It isn't the whole story. It isn't a replacement for the concept of general
education. It isn't any of those things. It's a way in to open the window,
so that the students will say, "This place is important. This place has
stuff to teach me that I really need to know. Why this is a wonderful opportunity.
I am surrounded by a banquet of learning and knowledge." Now, can we do
this? Can we pull it off? Ken is absolutely right. If the faculty aren't
interested in doing it, it doesn't matter what's in the report. It doesn't
matter the Senate endorses it or not. It doesn't matter at all if the Provost
were to walk in the door and say, "Here's money for six zillion TAs." That
it wouldn't make a bit of difference. If there's aren't enough faculty
members who are excited about developing courses that have these kinds
of aspects to them, it will be a flop. Thank you.
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JUDY VAN NAME:
-
David and then
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DAVID COLTON:
-
After hearing Carol speak I was moved to say
something in response. I want to remind people that there are students
who come here who do know what they want to do, are dedicated, like the
person Ken talked about he wrote a letter from. I want to mention two of
them. One happens to be my wife who came here Phi Beta Kappa, took courses
from Carol, knew what she wanted. I showed her the Pathways course. She
says she didn't want to take that, she wants to take a course in American
history. That's what she was interested in. She wants to take a course
in other things. In Women's Studies. That's what she took a course in.
And we need to be able to attract people like that. Not force them to go
into things. That's why the idea of requirements is so crucial. It can
not be required for everybody. Or otherwise we wind up as student people
like my wife in this case. I want to get personal with that. I think the
personal is correct to talk about this time. The second example I want
to give you is my daughter who came here and majored for two years in sociology
and Women's Studies and went on and graduated magna cum laude from New
York University. She is currently a lawyer or studying to be a lawyer hoping
she passes her exam right now at Georgetown law school. I showed her this
also just to get some feedback. I realized a sample of two--this may not
be a big sample--but it's the only sample that I had direct access to and
I knew would be honest. My daughter, Natashia, looked at this and said
no. I don't want to take those courses on death and dying, oceans and so
forth. I want to take a course like she took. I know what I want to do.
I want the opportunity to make my choice. That's where FIG will allow that
option. I have no objection to people who are enthusiastic to design a
course like described in the Pathways program. They should do it. If people
are enthusiastic enough to do it, more power to them and God bless. They
have their work cut out for them. But to require that for 3,500 students
coming here would be to sacrifice the students who are best. The students
who are dear to my heart like my wife and daughter. We have to allow that
flexibility. So what I would urge this committee and I was moved by hearing
these last two talks is to allow people to experiment in Pathways. Named
professors aren't against that. The dean's not against that. Probably no
one here is against that possibility. You could do it now. Design a course.
People, your chair will love you if you say you want to design a course.
But allow people who know what they want to do, who are our best students,
that we do attract good students, to get on with it. We have exciting courses
here. We have people coming here who want to learn. We should encourage
that. Let them learn and let us be able to do it. But don't require them
to go into these sequences first described that they have to take these
Pathways courses. That would be a shame. I would be very sad. My wife would
be very sad. And my daughter would be very sad. Thank you.
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PHIL GOLSTEIN:
-
I'm Phil Goldstein from the University Parallel
Program. I'm not supposed to talk hard into this, am I? I'm not going to
comment on these polemics for and against the Pathways, I just wanted to
say that it surprised me that people think the Parallel Program can't run
a Pathways course. My two colleagues are already thinking of one. They
have ideas for one because nobody told them it was difficult for them.
And I teach three courses that I could put together into a Pathways course.
I think it might be a little easier for us to run Pathways than to run
say the FIG. Because with the FIG you need an additional one- credit course
beyond the courses you are already teaching and that starts to squeeze
us a little. So I just wanted to add that.
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BETH HASLETT:
-
I've really appreciated the discussion as I have
all the way along because I am speaking to you from the standpoint of someone
who's on the Coordinating Committee, who's also been on the Gen Ed Committee,
and who has been dealing with these issues. I was very again struck by
what Ken had to say about passion. And I don't think he would have any
question in mind about passion had he been able to sit in on some of the
Gen Ed discussions, because one of the things I will be privileged to carry
away from this, regardless of what the University does or does not do about
this, is the wonderfully exciting, thoughtful, challenging, passionate
things that people are doing in the classroom. And I have been privileged
to observe and talk to people about that and to incorporate it in my own
learning as well. And I'm also sensitive to Ken's remark, not so much because
I think it's television's problem, but if you think about our educational
system we have invested twelve years in teaching people not to learn. To
be passive consumers of knowledge not to be active learners, and if we
expect them to be active learners then we have to challenge and create
them with opportunities we designed to do it here. Because I think unless
your children have some exceptional experiences, and I'm not saying there
are not any of those out there, saying by and large the bulk of students
coming in have been taught not to ask questions. And taught not to be active
learners, and taught simply to master whatever it is they are required
to know. And that is not something what any of us has as an ideal for education.
One of the ways that I have discovered to make students interested in learning
is to make them owners of their own knowledge, and I have been able to
do that by learning from some of my colleagues and having students participate
actively in this. So I have been very effective, not me personally, but
students have been effective at teaching other students, at making relative,
at making connections. And once you start doing that in the classroom,
wonderful things happen. I had a small group of students enter my gender
communication, an organization class who could have cared less about any
of those issues. I now have a group of students who are powerfully interested
in that because they have connected those issues to situations they are
going to face after graduation. In this case, they were all seniors so
it’s a pretty close experience. But I will confess that in my case, passion
for learning ran up to practicality. Because the kind of experience I would
like to have students have is simply not possible in a public university
of this size. At Bucknell, yes, at some ivy league schools, yes. But what
I've tried to do was to learn from the discussion ways in which that can
be incorporated into my own teaching, but I think the real questions that
have been raised here about resources are ones that continue to trouble
me. I understand that from the administration's point of view and some
of the studies that have been run, they think its going to be an equal
exchange. But, I would be very surprised if that would be the case. I'm
concerned that we have not had any discussion of what this might take in
terms of dollar values. If we are arguing even exchange, ok, where's the
exchange going to come from? And, the cost is not just in the Pathways
program. The cost is also in the FIG program. If you take a look seriously
in the details of the proposals because then you're going to have serious
elevated responsibilities for residence people. And I think that's an intriguing
idea because I think we are all interested in the concept living - learning
and making that more of a connected experience. But again, I think there's
a resource question and reminder again that its going to be an issue regardless
of what we decide to do and I would like to have at some point some serious
attention, some discussion, some data that has been run to see whether
or not we can have an exchange system. Thank you.
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JUDY VAN NAME:
-
Thank you, Beth Haslett. I was trying to get
her to say her name at the beginning. It's ok. Other comments? Marcia?
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MARCIA HALIO:
-
I'm Marcia Halio from the English Department,
and for a moment I want to step out of my role on the Coordinating Committee
and go back to the Ad Hoc Gen Ed Committee where I worked with Carol and
Beth and others in the room for two years. Was it Carol? O.k. Some of the
issues that have been raised here today have reminded me of some of our
discussions and also some of the reasons I think that I was probably asked
to be on that Committee. For the past fifteen years, I worked almost exclusively
with freshman. So I'm very well aware of the freshman mind. And the freshman
interests. I think that some of the issues, for example that Ray Wolters
raised, are very interesting and very important. His discussion of, I'm
sorry that Ray isn't here right now, his discussion of the course in money
and banking and the way that it is taught now in the College of Business
and Economics, contrasts sharply, in my mind, with, for example, with how
such a course would be taught to freshmen--a course about money. O.k. What
do we know about freshmen? Well, as Carol said, yes, they are interested
in money. They spend lots of it certainly on Main Street. But we also know
from looking at some of the research for instance the Perry cognitive scale,
which I learned about from Judy Green years ago. That, freshman are not
able to see themselves as part of the world, That their view is very, very
insular, very, very tiny. We might go back again to Ray's image, in a way,
of the glass box. O.k. I'm not sure their box is glass, but it’s some sort
of a box that many of these students are in. And so how do we design courses
that will help them get out of that box? How do we design courses that
will help them see the world and view themselves as part of the world?
For example, if we're teaching freshmen a course on money, one way we might
do that is to have them learn something about how money affects people
in different parts of the world. What's it like to be poor in America?
O.k. Many of our students come, not all, but many come from very comfortable,
middle class homes. Many come from middle Atlantic states. Many of them
have not had experiences that let them see, that it's no wonder that there
are some conflicts in the world because people do not all have the same
resources, the same opportunities as they do. I try to do that with them
in my freshman English course in various ways, some of which involve discussions
on listServes, and in role playing in some of these discussions. But I
think that the intent always of Pathways or FIGs, as I could imagine it,
is to take a look at where freshmen are, and help them get to where they
need to go or where they want to go. And I think that we have a lot of
wisdom about the freshman mind, on this campus. We maybe need to express
that more eloquently or forcefully to our faculty, some of whom may not
work with freshmen much anymore. Certainly they don't work with freshmen
one on one much anymore. But I can certainly say that I agree we need to
get our students excited about learning, motivated about learning. But
to do that, we have to know who they are, and we have to know how to help
them expand their visions.
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BOB GEMPESAW:
-
I'll be quick, Bobby Gempesaw here again. Because
the resource issue has always been brought up, I'd like to say maybe one
or two things about this topic. First, in the lunch meeting between the
Executive Committee of the Faculty Senate and the President and the Provost
of the University, this same issue was raised, and both the President and
the Provost have said eloquently that they will not allow this initiative
to fail because of lack of resources. I know we faculty do not like to
hear general answers that way. But let me say another thing we understand.
We the faculty, I consider myself the faculty first, and an administrator
second, understand that if there is a new initiative that we would like
to embark upon and it is justifiable, it’s something we would like to do
as Ken has said. If we have the passion of doing it, the administration
will support us. For us, to say we want the resources question answered
now, its saying, do you know how to embark the Pathways program? Do you
know how to embark the FIGS? I said let's practice the implementation phase
by not requiring it. Let's learn from our experience. And if we slowly
do it, we learn from it, we will learn what kind of resources we need.
We do not say it will be an even exchange. That is not the intent of the
administration. And another thing I'd like to say is I really appreciate
the discussion here, there was so much passion here. I wish I had a class
this way. Thank you.
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JUDY VAN NAME:
-
Other comments, questions? We're a little over
our time but I appreciate everyone coming. I'd like to thank everyone and
for the special input that we've received from many people. And I'd like
to just double check regarding David has left, and Ray has left. But Cindy
will be here and I'll need to find out how to pronounce her last name.
Okolo, thank you. Okolo. Will Jan, will you be here Monday? Ok, Linda said
she would not. You will be, I apologize. Is Harry still here? We look forward
to another session on Monday, same time, same place. Thank you very much.
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