March 5, 2008

Colleagues:

Given the recent (March 3, 2008) motion in the Faculty Senate for the Coordinating and Undergraduate Committees to discuss the breadth requirements and provide recommendations to the Senate, I wanted to share the following information which may serve to jump start our discussion. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve e-mailed a number of faculty who have played active roles in the Faculty Senate and had conversations with some administrators, regarding breadths requirements. In the following section, I provide a summary of some of the ideas/issues/questions posed.

1. We could not find any evidence that a unilateral decision was made by the Faculty Senate indicating that breadth requirements are the domain of the College of Arts and Sciences. Actually, there appears to be no Faculty Senate stipulation whatsoever about uniform or university-wide or institutional breadths requirements. This does not mean that these discussions have not taken place, but we could not find any documentation on this matter.

2. It appears that the only breadth requirement discussions that have taken place in the Faculty Senate in recent years have been in the context of the breadth requirements offered by the College of A&S. For example, the Faculty Senate approved (for a three year period) that the College of Arts & Sciences modify its breadth requirements (and their corresponding groups). The Senate will review this in about two years to determine how it wants to proceed; see http://www.art-sci.udel.edu/legacy/senate/ed-affairs/0607_ed_affairs_index.html for a more comprehensive discussion on this topic.

3. For at least two years, the Coordinating and the Undergraduate Committees have been operating under the principle that the breadth requirements of the different colleges should be based on the College of Arts and Sciences’ breadth requirements, although, as outlined below, there have been some discrepancies between the committees.

4. A quick perusal of UD’s Undergraduate and Graduate catalog shows that most programs have their breadth requirements under the College of Arts and Sciences (pp. 95-100). For example, Engineering (p. 186), Health Sciences (p. 201), CHEP (p. 221, 223, 225, 227), and Marine & Earth Studies (p. 230) all list their breadth requirements in the College of Arts & Sciences (e.g., humanities, social sciences, other sciences, math, etc.). Thus, there is somewhat compelling evidence that we (e.g., most colleges) have identified the breadth requirements in terms of the College of Arts and Sciences and this has been the standard operating practice, although this is not a university policy. However, there are exceptions to this. For example, the College of Health Sciences has several engineering, marine studies, and entomology courses listed in their breadth requirements. Also, Some departments in CHEP do not have breadth requirements.

5. One of the Assistant Deans informed me that over 90% of the breadth requirements offered at UD are within the College of Arts and Sciences. However, I have not verified this empirically.

6. The College of Arts and Sciences’ administration does not fully endorse the idea that the breadth requirements should be exclusively in their College. For example, it was argued that with the move of economics to the College of Business and Economics and the move of the department of Geology to the College of Marine & Earth Studies, students should be able to take courses in both areas and have them count as breadth requirements.

7. A major issue has been that both in the case of Engineering and presumably in Agriculture and Natural Resources (and more recently in Health Sciences), the Undergraduate Committee has approved requests to have breadth requirements that include, for example, an Engineering course in Ethics. However, the Coordinating Committee has not approved this request, indicating that the breadth requirements should be in A&S. Thus, this raises a question about uniformity of decisions.

8. There are several questions (among others) in my view that the Undergraduate and the Coordinating Committee should discuss and present some recommendations to the Faculty Senate:

1. What constitutes or should constitute breadth requirements?
2. How do we define breadth requirements as an institution?
3. Should there be university-wide or institutional breadth requirements or should they be college-based or department-based?
4. Should there be a process for determining what courses constitute breadth requirements? If so, where is this process originated (e.g., departments?) and where does it end (e.g., Faculty Senate?)?

9. I concur with an e-mail that Chuck sent to the Coordinating Committee a while back: “we need to develop a proposed policy framework and guidelines for everyone to consider and hopefully agree on a policy that is consistent across the University. The history, philosophy, educational value, and purpose of breadth requirements should be considered in developing such a recommendation. If there is an agreement among the faculty based on discussion, perhaps necessitating hearings, that could be passed as a resolution by the Senate, then I believe [that] we as a university will be on better footing regarding this issue and it is less likely to be a problem every time a college or program proposes something new regarding breadth requirements.”

I hope that this information is useful.

Havidán