By Matt Clyburn

A public hearing was held Wednesday in Founders Hall by the Faculty Senate General Education Ad Hoc Committee to field comments and suggestions from students and teachers on a possible redesign of the program.

Robert Wolff, associate professor of history and assistant to the dean for the School of Arts and Sciences, opened the hearing by announcing a “clean slate” in the committee’s approach to redesigning the program.

“One of our goals today is to have enough questions and comments to write another survey…and go back to faculty and students for more feedback,” Wolff said.

A recent survey distributed to 230 faculty members about CCSU’s general education program found that of the 230 members surveyed, 61.3 percent either agree or strongly agree that the program should be redesigned. Wolff told The Recorder that the hearings and surveys are one step in a long process. Any changes to the program would have to be approved in several committees and the Faculty Senate as a whole with the ultimate approval coming from President Jack Miller.

“As part of the process, we’re holding open meetings, we anticipate more survey work and we look forward to as much input and participation as we can possibly obtain,” Wolff said. “With that in mind, we really would just like to hear what the campus community…thinks about general education and what they would like to see.”

“We are limited in our deliberations by a few things, one of which is that the state of Connecticut mandates that one-third of the credits in any academic degree be dedicated to this thing called general education,” said Wolff. “We have been asked to try to develop a plan that is resource neutral, meaning that it does not imagine that we expand the size of the faculty. We assume that at some level all of the work that we do in creating a gen ed program will have to be validated for our accreditors through some form of student assessment yet to be determined.”

Ray Perreault, professor of manufacturing and construction managements, suggested that a current events course be added as well as “one three-credit course where five weeks would be dedicated to each of the professional schools.”

Perreault added that such a course could help to relieve the requirements of one or more general education courses already in place. Perreault also pointed out that when the program was first restructured in 1991 students were required to take 62 general education credit hours rather than the 44 to 46 required now.

“I think that writing across the curriculum is so important that I would vote for some sort of writing requirement outside of the English department. Students might take a writing-intensive course in a discipline outside of English,” said Dr. Kristine Larsen, physics and earth science department professor and former director of the CCSU honors program. “The other skill that our students need is information literacy, they have to be able to judge who are reliable sources, who are not reliable sources and that can also be built into numerous courses around campus.”

Guy Crundwell, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, said that “Ultimately, [students’] gen eds make no serious impact on their academic life…it’s just icing for the cake.”

“I find it odd that for gen eds we create these checklists telling them which icings are good for you, which icings aren’t. You know, students may have certain flavors that they want to try themselves,” Crundwell said. “I’ve always had the most liberal and open sense of general education – that it’s general, it’s their choice because it’s their dime and it will round them the way they want to be rounded and not constrict them if they want to change majors.”

Faculty members discussed a proposed idea where individual schools would determine general education requirements rather than the university. Supporters argued that it would help similar majors maintain similar courses of study and prevent those students from taking classes unrelated to their majors, while detractors argued that giving individual schools such power would prevent students from getting a well-rounded education.

“Is general education designed to give students some basic fundamental skills or is general education designed to give faculty members something to do?” asked Dr. Jacob Kovel, chairperson of the manufacturing and construction management department. “There are certain skills that every student should have when they graduate. Beyond that, what is the philosophy of general education supposed to be?”

Dave Blitz, professor of philosophy, who participated in the general education design of the 1990’s, said that “Resources are not infinitely expendable and indeed we can expect in the next few years that they are going to be contracting.”

“It was a tragedy [in 1991] that we had more and more of these good ideas and objectives without taking into account priorities, resources and constraints, and I would like to see that done this time around with general education reform,” Blitz said.

Jason Jones, president of the CCSU chapter of the American Association of University Professors, believes that the proposed higher education system restructuring at the state level could negatively influence plans for general education changes if those concepts are not taken into account.

“One of the things we have heard is that they want to have the [proposed] Board of Regents identify the general education standards for the CSU schools,” said Jones. “I think that the [higher education proposal] could possibly trump our hopes for reorganizing general education. It’s possible that there would be no meaningful campus control over curriculum.”

The current system was put in place in 1998 and requires a minimum of 44 to 46 credits in general education studies, not including the foreign language department, and has four study areas and four skill areas.