A proposal by the Ad Hoc Committee for General Education Review will expand the range of courses that satisfy CCSU’s history requirements.

This change would allow courses such as music and art history classes to fulfill students’ history requirements.

Mark Jones, chair of the history department, said this change will allow students to examine the past in different ways.

“It gives students different windows to the past that they wouldn’t have,” Jones said.

Jones said Leanne Zalewski, who teaches an art history course, “thinks and writes like a historian,” and such courses deserve to satisfy the history requirement.

“It’s a course that does what we think a history course should do,” he said. “Professor Zalewski, her art history classes do that, and I’m sure there are other people on campus as well who can do that.”

Jones has established a set of written guidelines that are imperative to meet for a class to be recognized as a proper history course.

“Students who complete a general education history course will see the world (past and present) as a large, interconnected, and complicated web of people, events, and forces changing (or not changing) over time,” Jones wrote to Ned Moore, the chair of the Curriculum Committee.

Jones said this change can be especially helpful for transfer students who want to stay on track to graduate on time.

“Transfer students who come in with an art history course … that could be counted as a history course if they already have enough in Study Area I,” he said.

If students choose to count a course towards history, they will have to give up that credit for Study Area I.

It is still unknown what courses will be included in this change.

“There may be people from other departments who I’m not even aware of who may want their courses to count for the history requirement,” Jones said.

While Central is just proposing this change, its sister schools already allow art and music history courses to fulfill the history gen-ed requirement.

“I just think revising any part of general education, historically, has been very difficult at Central,” Jones said. “Ned Moore courageously took it on … With no one really pushing to revise general education none of these changes have been touched until recently.”

This change will be in effect for the Fall 2024 semester.

While Jones is unsure if students’ previous credits will be grandfathered into the new requirements, he “certainly wouldn’t be opposed to it,” he said.