Time
requested to reach CUE faculty consensus
By
Brandon Ortiz
Staff Reporter
Requests for
more time to hammer out a consensus over controversial elements
of the proposed Common Undergraduate Experience will likely be made
in todays Faculty Assembly, professors said.
Plans call for
the CUE, a major overhaul of the core curriculum that has been in
the works for over a year, to be approved by faculty by April, but
many professors said the core is being rushed.
This process
is going too far, too fast, said religion professor Claudia
Camp, who was the principle author of an e-mail signed by 15 professors
in the religion, philosophy and English departments Jan. 18 that
criticized the CUE as marginalizing the humanities.
I hope
we stop and say we need another year to chew on this, Camp
said.
Faculty will
discuss the CUE at 3:30 p.m. today in Moudy Building North, room
141, in a closed meeting. Faculty Senate will review comments and
suggestions made in the assembly Thursday and will try to put
together a consensus document, said Carolyn Spence Cagle,
chairwoman of Faculty Senate.
William H. Koehler,
provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs, said he would
not be against pushing back approval if it would improve the CUE.
That is
something I will take up, Koehler said. I am supportive
of everyone having ample time (to study the CUE). (But) I would
like to see this resolved by the end of the school year.
Even though
Koehler said he would ideally like to see the CUE approved by April,
it wouldnt harm the university to wait a year.
Many people
would argue the curriculum is good so why change it, Koehler
said. (A delay is) not a setback. I would rather wait to have
a better proposal.
Many faculty
have complained tight deadlines have not allowed the CUE to have
enough campus wide input.
In an e-mail
Jan. 24 responding to concerns that the CUE marginalized the humanities
and was created with little faculty input, Phil Hartman said the
UCR Drafting Committee, which he was a member of, did not have time
to solicit much input.
The charge
from the Provost to the (drafting) committee was to develop a curriculum
by the end of the fall semester, Hartman wrote. This
time-line did not allow for systematic and widespread communication
once we began the task at hand. However, the committee, (committee
chairman Richard) Enos in particular, interacted extensively with
faculty from a number of departments and colleges ... in an honest
attempt to represent their desires and concerns to the committee.
M.J. Neeley
School of Business Dean Robert Lusch, also a member of the committee,
said the deadline was tough, but necessary.
We had
a real ambitious schedule, Lusch said. But faculty will
meet forever and forever without a deadline. It was a tight deadline,
but we had to have one.
Brandon
Ortiz
b.p.ortiz@student.tcu.edu
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