Gen Ed to Get Facelift

The Faculty is expected to approve today the first change in General Education rules in six years, enabling students to use departmental courses to satisfy their basic Gen Ed requirement.

While the Committee on Undergraduate Education has dominated most curriculum reform discussion for the past year and a half, this first reform to effect most undergraduates did not creep through the bureaucratic jungle of the CUE but instead emerged swiftly and quietly from the Committee on General Education.

The new legislation replaces four pages of Rules Relating with approximately half a page. It provides that the basic General Education requirement can be met "either with one full or two half-courses offered as fulfilling the basic requirement by the Committee on General Education; or with two full or four half-courses offered by Departments or Committees of Instruction" in each of the three areas.

Currently, the Humanities and Social Science basic requirements must be satisfied by Gen Ed courses. The Nat Sci requirement may be met either with one year of Nat Sci courses or two years of departmental courses within the natural sciences. The complicated rules by which courses do and do not count for the so-called "Nat Sci by-pass" will be dropped from the official rules.

Edward T. Wilcox, chairman of the Gen Ed committee, said he will ask the Faculty to allow the committee discretion in setting such rules.

One consequence of the new rules will be the elimination of the basic requirement in a student's own field of concentration. Wilcox said yesterday the regulations are meant to imply that courses used for concentration may also be counted for the Gen Ed requirement.

Wilcox said the new regulations, if approved, will take effect immediately and will apply to all current undergraduates. The upper level Gen Ed requirement-two courses outside one's area of concentration-and the half-term expository writing requirement will remain unchanged.

The CUE has already endorsed a more massive Gen Ed reform which would drop all Gen Ed requirements in favor of recommendations and an expanded advising system. When the CUE proposal was discussed at the last Faculty meeting, Wilcox and other CGE members spoke out against it.

But now the CUE has endorsed the Wilcox proposal and CUE member James S. Ackerman. professor of Fine Arts, will second it. Ackerman said yesterday that the two proposals were not conflicting and that the CUE proposal was a first step which did not preclude further reform.

General Education was originally conceived after World. War II as a "core curriculum" of basic courses to

transmit the fundamentals of Western civilization to succeeding generations. A 1965 reform greatly expanded the number of Gen Ed courses and since then the Gen Ed committee has become a place where interdisciplinary or experimental courses could find financing and sponsorship. This new reform will likely accelerate this trend.

But Faculty-watchers are worried that if students no longer have to take Gen Ed courses, General Education will lose some of its aura of "core curriculum" and it may become harder to pursuade senior Faculty members to teach these courses, which are primarily for undergraduates.

Wilcox said at the last Faculty meeting that it's always been hard to convince distinguished professors to teach introductory courses. "But if you convince them the courses are 'basic', it makes things much easier."