Faculty members meet today to debate core
By Brandon Ortiz
Staff Reporter

Debate over the controversial Common Undergraduate Experience will move from the Internet into an open forum when faculty meet today to discuss the proposed core curriculum.

The CUE, a major overhaul of the core curriculum that has been in progress for more than a year, will be discussed at 3 p.m. today in Moudy Building North Room 141 in a Faculty Assembly. The document has been met by a firestorm of criticism from professors in the humanities through e-mails to faculty, which has triggered rebuttals and similar response from other departments.

Debate over the CUE is centered around a number of issues. Some faculty feel the CUE’s reduction in writing course requirements, from six hours to three, is disturbing. Others say the humanities is under-represented.

Unlike the University Curriculum Requirements, a discipline-oriented core currently in place, the CUE is outcomes based. Some faculty said the outcomes in certain rubrics are either vague, unachievable or unmeasurable.

Members from the English department questioned the elimination of some writing requirements in the CUE in an e-mail to all faculty. English professor Sharon Harris, who distributed the letter from English department faculty, said students need classes that concentrate specifically on writing.

“It is like anything else, we have requirements in science and math because we feel they need a concentrated effort in those areas,” Harris said. “I think six hours (as required in the UCR) is really a minimum.”

Some members of the UCR Drafting Committee, which built upon the work of four previous committees to create the CUE, said no one intended to de-emphasize writing.

“The intention was to have a heavy requirement of writing across the core,” said Richard Allen, an associate radio-TV-film professor and member of the committee.

Other professors also criticized the core.

Religion professor Claudia Camp, the principle author of an e-mail from 15 professors criticizing the CUE, said CUE marginalizes the humanities. The CUE does not have explicit requirements for literature, religion or critical inquiry.

In an e-mailed rebuttal to Camp’s letter Thursday, Phil Hartman, a biology professor and member of the drafting committee, said more opportunities exist for the humanities in the core. He said the UCR only requires a minimum of three hours in the humanities with the religion requirement. He said literature courses are often avoided by students and most critical inquiry classes are not in the humanities.

He wrote in the letter that students could take up to 12 hours of the humanities in the CUE, but acknowledged “a student would completely circumnavigate” them.

M.J. Neeley School of Business Dean Robert Lusch, a member of the UCR Drafting Committee, said the CUE gives faculty in the humanities the opportunity to create courses which would fulfill the outcomes outlined in the document.

“What we attempted to do was create a document where there would be many pathways to achieve outcomes,” Lusch said.

But Camp said the outcomes outlined in the CUE squeeze the humanities out.

“Things are not written in humanities point of view,” Camp said. “We are mentioned in a very narrow box. It is extraordinarily limiting. It is constructed with criteria we would not write.”

Religion professor Jack Hill said the outcomes under the Ethical Thought and Actions rubric were more suitable for a professional ethics class, such as business ethics or bio-ethics. While those classes are important, Hill said, they do not lay the foundation for critical self examination needed in an ethics course.

“It wouldn’t satisfy the critical inquiry element of ethics,” he said.

Language outlining outcomes for fine arts has also been criticized.

In an e-mail to all faculty, 22 professors from the College of Fine Arts voiced concerns over language in fine arts requirements and the “lamentable marginalization of the liberal arts.” “Some of the goals were ambiguous,” said Babette Bohn, an associate professor of art and art history who distributed the e-mail. “That is probably the least of our issues.”

Brandon Ortiz
b.p.ortiz@student.tcu.edu

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