Lower Level Gen Ed May Be Expanded

The new Committee on General Education voted Tuesday to change three of the basic rules of the Gen Ed program.

At its first meeting, the committee agreed to:

* permit a student to take any number of lower-level Gen Ed courses for credit;

* permit more lower-level courses to be offered;

* encourage the offering of half-courses at the lower-level.

The Faculty will vote on the revised set of Gen Ed rules this spring.

At present, a student can take only one lower-level course in any area -- Social Sciences. Natural Sciences or Humanities. Opponents of this rule pointed out that a greater variety of courses is expected under the new program and that some of them might not be available outside Gen. Ed.

Only five courses can now be offered in any of the three areas. The committee removed the limit in anticipation of a number of new course offerings, some of them half-courses. All lower-level Gen Ed offerings are now full courses.

Under the "Redbook system" on which the present program is based, only one lower-level course was supposed to be offered in each area, and all students would be required to take it. But the single-course idea was never put into effect, and as the Gen Ed system has moved away from the concept of providing a "common core" of knowledge all students would share, the number of courses in each area has been increased.

Three Subcommittees

The committee's 20 members were also split up into three subcommittees, one on each area. Gerald Holton, professor of Physics and vice-chairman of the committee, will chair the Natural Sciences subcommittee; Carl Kaysen, Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy, the Social Sciences committee; and James S. Ackerman, chairman of the Department of Fine Arts, the Humanities committee.

The subcommittees will meet monthly during the Spring term to discuss possible courses in their respective areas. The three chairmen, with Edward T. Wilcox, secretary of the Gen Ed Committee, and Dean Ford, chairman of the committee, will constitute an executive committee to co-ordinate the program.

At its Tuesday meeting the Committee also discussed, but did not vote on, a change in the Gen Ed nomenclature. Gen Ed courses are presently divided into lower level courses (those which fulfill one of a student's three Gen Ed requirements) and upper-level courses (those which don't). The new system adopted by the Faculty this Fall would create a new category: Gen Ed courses with departmental prerequisites that would fulfill the Gen Ed requirement.

Wilcox suggested calling present lower-level courses "Basic" courses; the present upper-levels "Elective"; and new courses under the pre-requisite system "Advanced.