THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 23, 1997 TAG: 9702230166
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: 106 lines
Old Dominion University will probably require future students to take extra helpings of science and writing. But to make room on their plates, the school may cut requirements for history.
ODU's Faculty Senate has overwhelmingly passed a proposal to revise the university's core requirements, usually taken during the first two years of school.
The final decision rests with the administration. The university's provost, Jo Ann Gora, said she couldn't comment on the Faculty Senate plan because she hadn't reviewed it. But she said she was happy that the group endorsed tougher science and writing demands.
Gora said the school had hoped to institute new requirements with this fall's freshman class but may not start them until 1998.
The plan reflects the movement among colleges to re-examine core requirements, to cope with the information explosion and with criticism that schools are not properly training students for life after graduation.
The Faculty Senate's proposal would increase the number of required writing courses for all undergraduates from the current one to two and the number of science or technology classes from two to three.
That mirrors a recommendation last year by a faculty committee, overseen by Gora, also looking at overhauling the core - or ``general education'' - requirements. That recommendation was sent to the Faculty Senate. The goal of the tougher science and writing requirements is to better prepare students for the work world.
To keep total requirements level, Gora's faculty committee had recommended cutting the number of required history courses from two to one. But the Faculty Senate offered a compromise: Require two history courses for ``traditional'' majors, in liberal-arts areas such as psychology and English, but only one for ``professional'' students, in fields such as nursing, engineering and business.
The state has prodded colleges to keep overall graduation requirements to 120 credit hours - or roughly 40 courses. During recent meetings to hash out ODU's requirements, Faculty Senate members voiced frustration at having to heed the state's limit while trying to offer students the best possible education.
``Given the constraints we worked under, it was the best we could do,'' said Charles E. Ruhl, an English professor who led the Faculty Senate subcommittee that drafted the plan.
But history professors still aren't happy with the compromise. ``I think those in the professional schools will be less prepared,'' said D. Alan Harris, an associate professor of history who voted against the plan. ``History is a very broad subject; to teach it in depth, you have to have at least a year.''
John W. Kuehl, another associate history professor who dissented, said, ``Do they want an articulate liberally educated person or do they want someone more narrowly focused in technical training? . . .
``It doesn't seem to me we want citizens going out in the world who don't know the difference between Hammurabi and J. Edgar Hoover,'' Kuehl said, referring to the Babylonian king and the FBI director.
History professors also worry that they could lose a significant number of students with a reduced requirement for professional students - who, Ruhl estimates, make up 40 percent to 50 percent of all undergraduates. The number of students a department draws helps determine the number of courses it can offer - and the number of professors it can hire.
But Ruhl said he believed many history classes are now too large, and a reduction in students could pose benefits for teachers.
The list of courses that would fulfill the new requirements has not yet been drawn, said Lucien X. Lombardo, a professor of sociology and criminal justice who helped broker the compromise in the Faculty Senate.
All ODU undergraduates would have to meet the general education requirements. But depending on their majors, students could face tougher standards in certain areas. For instance, Ruhl said, the College of Arts and Letters already requires its majors to take two writing courses, and engineering students now have to take more than three science classes.
In its plan, the Faculty Senate did not recommend changes in most of the current requirements - such as one class each in philosophy and English and two semesters of a foreign language. The senate, however, proposed reducing the social science requirements from two classes for all students to one class for ``professional'' students. That has not created the same concern as the history reduction, because the effects would be spread across several departments.
The general education requirements generally take up roughly one-third of the total 120 credit hours required for most students to graduate. The rest comes from courses required for majors and from electives. Professional students tend to have a larger bulk of requirements for their major - sometimes exceeding 80 hours - which leaves less room for general education classes.
Margaret A. Miller, an associate director of the State Council of Higher Education, said the state is bearing down on schools to keep within 120 required hours for graduation because of concerns that it's taking students too long to graduate.
Officials, she said, also want to control the ``add-a-course syndrome. We thought it was important for faculty to look at the curriculum as a whole, to see whether they could take out of it as well as add into it.''
Miller said requiring just one history class wouldn't necessarily hurt students. The goal of these core classes, she said, should be ``to give students a framework for lifelong learning. One history course, well-conceived, could be such a framework.'' MEMO: A Faculty Senate committee is drafting a policy to offer course
credit for non-academic experience. Anyone with suggestions or examples
should call Charles Ruhl at 683-4020 or e-mail him at:
cer100u(AT)hamlet.bal.odu.edu. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic\VP
Current and Proposed core requirements at ODU.
For complete copy, see microfilm
KEYWORDS: OLD DOMINION UNIVERSITY CURRICULUM REQUIREMENTS