After Liberal Arts faculty members showed overwhelming disapproval for reducing the number of required foreign language hours at an open forum Monday, the proposed changes will no longer be voted on at the upcoming Faculty Council meeting Oct. 26.
Dean Randy Diehl notified the instructional staff in an e-mail Tuesday morning that the foreign language classes will continue to be taught in the same way.
If the proposed changes had been implemented, students would have been required to take 12 hours of a foreign language instead of 16. The administration originally proposed a model in which students would take two six-hour classes to complete their language credits.
The department chairs negotiated for a plan that would require one six-hour course followed by two three-hour courses.
Monday’s forum lasted more than three hours and no one, including the six language department heads who helped write the counterproposal, spoke in favor of the changes.
“In view of the overwhelming negative reaction to the proposal, I have decided to withdraw it from further consideration,” Diehl said in the e-mail.
Daniela Bini, chairwoman of the French and Italian Department, said it is good that the dean is willing to listen to objections from faculty members.
“I wish we didn’t have to get to this point, because we spent a lot of time making the counterproposal,” Bini said. “But I am glad that he realized these are major changes that cannot be made overnight.”
Bini said she was never ecstatic about the 6-3-3 proposal.
“I personally would like to up the number of hours required in a foreign language,” Bini said. “But under the current budgetary constraints, that obviously isn’t an option.”
Peter Hess, chairman of the department of Germanic Studies, said he is still trying to make sense of the implications that keeping the same requirements will have on the college.
“I think it creates an opportunity for all of us to channel the discussion we’ve had over the past three months in a positive direction,” Hess said. “But there is an underlying unresolved issue.”
The college will still have to reallocate between $10 million and $13 million to fund its targeted faculty merit pay program and obtain funding for the new Liberal Arts building.
Diehl said in a statement that the individual departments in the college will have to find places to their budget to make up for the money that would have been saved by changing the curriculum.
Reductions to the “soft” money budget — the pool of money that pays teaching assistants and lecturers — will not be affected. An undetermined amount of lecturer positions will still be cut.
Bini said that tenured faculty may have to teach more language sections, class sizes will increase and the department will not be able to offer as many sections.
“Unless we can miraculously find more money, we will still have to deal with these budget limitations,” Bini said. “And I don’t think that will happen. My goal is to maintain the integrity of the department.”
Hess said his department has not had an opportunity to find alternate sources of funding.
“We haven’t really discussed anything because from very early on, we thought we would have to work with the 6-6 model,” Hess said. “Now the door is wide open, but what that means exactly we don’t know.”
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