Faculty Meeting Today To Decide On Gen Ed

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences may conclude its debate on General Education--now entering its sixth month--at a special meeting this afternoon.

The Faculty has answered all but two of the six guideline questions posed three weeks ago by the Committee on Educational Policy. After these two votes the Faculty will discuss Chapters IV and V of the Doty Report and send the whole matter back to the CEP, which will incorporate the Faculty's suggestions in a new Gen Ed program.

Ultimately, the revised program will go before the Faculty again for final approval. Debate this time, however, is expected to be relatively brief, since all points of controversy will have already been discussed.

Dean Ford said yesterday that he hoped to get a vote today on the CEP's fifth question, which asks whether an "exchange rate" should be established between Gen Ed and departmental courses, so that several of the latter could be used as the equivalent of one Gen Ed course. If the Faculty votes yes on an exchange rate, it will have to decide whether the rate should be 2:1 or 1.5:1.

And then it will be faced with the CEP's sixth question--should a student be allowed to take all departmental courses to fill his requirement, or should there be a rule that one course must be approved by the Committee on General Education?

Re-argue One Point

At its last meeting, on March 16, the Faculty voted to let the Gen Ed Committee decide what departmental courses could be directly substituted for Gen Ed courses to satisfy the Gen Ed requirement. Dean Ford said that "there may be some desire" to re-argue this point if an exchange rate is allowed.

In another vote earlier this month, the Faculty rejected a plan that would have let a student take any course outside his area of concentration as a means of satisfying his Gen Ed requirement. It agreed, however, that students should not be required to take two courses in each area of General Education, and retained a Gen Ed requirement in a student's field of concentration.

Incentives

If the discussion today gets as far as Chapter V of the Doty Report, the most controversial proposal is likely to be that Faculty members should be given incentives for teaching in Gen Ed rather than departmental courses, Dean Ford predicted.

Ford declined to estimate how long the CEP might take to produce a revised Gen Ed program, but he said that he hoped a reorganized Gen Ed Committee could begin working out its policies by next Fall.