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November 18, 2005 > News > Minors proposal moves from committee to faculty

Minors proposal moves from committee to faculty

By David Brown | Thresher Editorial Staff

In a unanimous vote Nov. 10, the University Standing Committee on the Undergraduate Curriculum approved minors. If the faculty Senate approves the proposal, students may be able to add minors to their degrees as soon as next year.

Under the proposal, which was initiated by Dean of Undergraduates Robin Forman, faculty members would be able to propose interdisciplinary minors, which would generally consist of six courses. Disciplines in which students can already obtain a major would not be permitted as minors.

Early discussions about the minors proposal focused on whether offering minors would decrease the number of students who have too many majors, but Forman said he supports adding minors because of how it would affect faculty.

“The goal is to give faculty a chance to think more creatively about the curriculum, to provide the opportunity for faculty to create new types of academic experiences and to [encourage them to] think about how the classes they’re offering relate to those elsewhere in the university,” Forman said.

Although the proposal has not yet been finalized, Undergraduate Curriculum Committee Chair Bill Wilson said it is almost complete and he will soon turn it over to the Faculty Senate.

Speaker of the Faculty Marj Corcoran, a physics and astronomy professor, said the Faculty Senate is not likely to discuss minors at its next meeting Dec. 7, its last of the calendar year. The Faculty Senate’s spring semester meetings have not yet been scheduled.

Wilson, an electrical and computer engineering professor, said he also supports the decision to only allow interdisciplinary minors.

“If some departments started to offer minors in their discipline, other departments would feel defensive and say, ‘Oh, we better have a minor too or we’ll lose out,’” Wilson said. “So everybody would be doing more work for no real gain other than students getting another little merit badge on their transcript.”

Undergraduate committee representative John Kehoe said he voted for the proposal but also supports adding minors in disciplines that are currently majors.

“There are areas in which students are going to take a lot of courses and would like some recognition,” Kehoe, a Wiess College sophomore, said. “Minors allow them to [get recognition] without taking a couple extra courses to get a major.”

Wilson said a minor would ideally consist of several existing courses, as well as a few new courses designed for the minor.

“You will probably have some where all the courses you need already exist, but I think a lot of the better minors will probably need one or two more courses,” Wilson said.

Forman said he imagines a minor being proposed by a group of faculty members from different departments. The proposal states, “Minors are generally created by a group of faculty who come together under a common interest and propose the minor and its requirements.”

According to the proposal, a minor would have to be approved by departments and schools that would offer a course in the program, as well as the undergraduate curriculum committee and the provost. The minors proposal also contains a “sunset” clause that would require individual minors be re-approved every five years to remain part of the curriculum.

Under the proposal, each minor would have one faculty member responsible for advising students and overseeing the minor’s course offerings. As with majors, courses used for a minor could not be taken Pass/Fail, and a student would have to maintain at least a 2.0 grade point average in the minor in order to complete it.

The proposal to recognize minors might be approved and instituted before the 2006-‘07 school year begins, but Forman said he does not expect many individual minors to be added to the curriculum by that time. So far, a joint proposal by the economics department and the Jones Graduate School of Management for a business minor is the only one to have been formally proposed.

“Nobody should expect an onslaught of a dozen of minors in the spring,” Forman said. “These will take time to think through and organize. The business minor may very well be the only one submitted before next year.”

Forman said faculty members are considering other subjects that might lead to proposals for minors, including legal studies, medical humanities and one in engineering that would focus on a capstone research project.

Kehoe, also the SA academics chair, said the SA is conducting a paper survey — being administered by new student representatives — to gauge student opinion on minors as well as other academic issues. Kehoe said he hopes 200-300 students fill out the survey. The SA is not using any scientific survey techniques, but Kehoe said he expects those surveyed students to be an adequate sample of the student body. Data on minors from the survey will be presented to the Faculty Senate, Kehoe said.

Forman said the effort to add minors to the curriculum is the first in what he hopes will be many improvements to the Rice curriculum over the next few years.

“One of reasons for the creation of [the dean of undergraduates position] was there was nobody whose job it was to keep a constant eye on the curriculum,” Forman said. “I’m hopeful that this is the first step in a full-scale review of the curriculum that will take place over the next few years.”

End of article

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