 "Photo: Karina Jacques/The Daily Texan")
Unanimous faculty opposition led the College of Liberal Arts to drop proposed changes to foreign language curriculum last week. As a result, Faculty Council will more thoroughly review curriculum changes proposed in the future, said some members at Monday’s meeting.
Faculty Council Chairwoman Janet Staiger said the council’s executive committee and members from two other curriculum committees will review the approval process for changes and ask college deans to submit their own guidelines for how changes should be made in the colleges.
The proposed foreign language curriculum would have reduced required foreign language credit hours from 16 to 12.
“From our point of view, the procedure was not clear in several areas,” Staiger said.
The Faculty Council is a body of elected representatives that deal with faculty grievances and process some University policy changes. The Board of Regents gives the council the power to set the curriculum for the University.
A more thorough review process may resolve a dispute about the transparency of the changes to the language requirements brought up by lecturers in the College of Liberal Arts in last week’s meeting. She said it is necessary to review the approval process now, before another major policy change is raised.
“Because we are looking at four or five years of a rather dismal budget scene, one of the places people go to start saving money is a new curriculum,” Staiger said. “So there may be more attempts to alter the curriculum in the future. We want to make sure the process is appropriate when something comes from the college.”
Members of the Faculty Council executive committee and the Committee on Undergraduate Degree Program Review, or CUDPR, are meeting to determine a clearer procedure. The review committee studies minor course catalog changes before they are voted on by the Faculty Council.
“CUDPR is meant to ensure that everyone is well informed about any catalog changes with ramifications for multiple colleges,” Staiger said. “In the case of the foreign language requirement, somewhere along the line it became a question of whether this was a big enough policy change to go through the Educational Policy Committee.”
The Educational Policy Committee, a third committee which is made up of nine Faculty Council members and four students, reviews major changes to University curricula. English professor Alan Friedman, chairman of the committee, said it should be involved with all significant course catalog changes. It was not clear to those at the meeting whether the committee should have been involved in last week’s proposed changes. However, Friedman said the Educational Policy Committee would bring about more faculty involvement in any proposed changes.
“A lot of minor changes sail through with very little conflict, and that’s the way it should be,” Friedman said. “CUDPR seems to be made up of mostly administrators, and it’s fair enough that they the have a role in this. But the faculty should have the ultimate responsibility when it comes to determining the curriculum.”
The Faculty Council will also review how proposals are moved through the colleges up to the faculty level.
“Each college has a different approval mechanism,” Staiger said. “So, the Faculty Council is going to ask the deans of each of the colleges to provide us in written form what the procedures are regarding these kinds of changes.”
During Monday’s meeting, the council unanimously added six courses to a list that fulfills core requirements. Three radio-television-film courses, including Development of the Motion Picture, will count for visual and performing arts credit.
One of the goals of incorporating these courses into the core curriculum was to make them available for non-major students, said education professor Lawrence Abraham.
“We are trying to expand the number of courses so there are more options for students to fulfill their core requirements,” Abraham said.
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