Tales of the Bureaucracy

I: Names & Titles

A minor but nonetheless extant controversy: How should course instructors be listed in the course catalog? At the moment they're listed under their courses as Professor X or Assistant Professor Y, but the Faculty Council felt last spring that perhaps the listings should be more egalitarian. So the council decided to dispense with titles and use Mr. X or Ms. Y instead, in order to do away with distinctions of rank.

There was, however, a problem: every woman instructor had to say whether she wanted to be listed as Ms., Mrs. or Miss, and that, a source close to the council said this week, was forcing women instructors "to make a political statement" in the course catalog.

Anthony Oettinger, professor of Linguistics, proposed to the council that the catalog revert to the old listings, with titles--but the council decided this week to take a more radical step and simply list the unadorned names of professors. Students may not even notice the change, but if they do they should take comfort in the knowledge that in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, nothing happens by accident.

II: Profuse Honors

The Faculty Council earlier this spring placed on the docket for the May Faculty meeting a series of proposed changes in undergraduate honors requirements that would generally tighten up standards that some faculty members feel have grown too lax lately.

This week, however, John R. Marquand, assistant dean of the College, gave the council a memorandum that showed under the proposed guidelines there were no less than 13 different ways to graduate; that some of the ways could overlap; and that a cum laude in general studies could conceivably be more desirable than a departmental cum.

The council beat a retreat, taking off--the docket all but the summa section of the proposed honors changes.