Committees tackle theses, staffing

Author: Jessie Singleton

The Educational Affairs Committee (EAC) held its first joint meeting of the year with the Student Educational Affairs Committee (SEAC) on Nov. 20 to move forward on the agenda for the academic year. Reports from the closed-door meeting indicate that the joint-committee focused on how to begin evaluating the current academic situation, such as senior work and staff hiring, and recommending adjustments to meet the needs of the College's Strategic Plan.

According to Acting Dean of the Faculty Sunder Ramaswamy, departmental staffing requests largely dominated the EAC's fall term agenda, leaving little space for student input or involvement. The impetus for this significant task comes from the College's Strategic Plan, which calls for the addition of new faculty positions over the next eight years while maintaining the current size of the student body. The Strategic Plan supports hiring enough faculty to provide a large selection of courses for students while allowing each faculty member to teach smaller, more focused courses and maintain a healthy work-life balance.

Every year after the EAC concludes its fall logistical obligations, the EAC calls on the SGA-appointed student counterpart to participate in forthcoming deliberations about all-things academic on behalf of the students. After addressing grade inflation last year, the focus this year is on academic elements of the Strategic Plan.

In preparation for the meeting, Frances Kammeraad '08, the chair of the SEAC, researched the ways that overlap schools such as Amherst and Williams handle issues ranging from distribution requirements to senior work. The SEAC took direction from the guidelines for academic improvement found in the Strategic Plan when deciding what information from other institutions to research and compare with the College's current operating model. These include reevaluating the 12-year-old distribution requirements, restructuring major requirements as the emphasis shifts within each field of study, balancing the proliferation of double and triple majors and student creativity with the cost of staffing all the courses. The College is also exploring the possibility of a "lab science requirement" that would, as Dean Ramaswamy stated, "increase the analytical literacy of Middlebury Students for the 21st century" and is considering different options for meaningful engagement of senior work.

The debate surrounding senior work, for example, stems from the discrepancies between departmental requirements and options for seniors to pursue advanced independent study. History and math majors are required to complete senior work but political science majors are not eligible to write a thesis unless they have a 3.33 GPA in their major. Althea Webber '08, a member of the SEAC, believes that this threshold is too high.

"Because of the high GPA requirement combined with the difficulty of the department, the number of seniors writing theses in Political Science is lower than in other departments." As a history major required to write theses both junior and senior years, Webber believes that "all students should be able to pursue some form of specialized independent study by the time they reach the fourth year of their major." This debate is representative of the type of research these committees will explore and is indicative of the need for such an exploration.

Following their preliminary discussion last Monday, both committees reached the conclusion that because these issues do not exist in a vacuum, the correlation between the two requires the committees to move forward using a more holistic approach in determining strategic improvements. Kammeraad said that "rather than looking at each issue individually, the EAC and the SEAC would both like to look at everything more comprehensively. Both committees feel that many issues are interrelated and that if all are addressed within the same year in a comprehensive way, large improvements can be made."

With the semester coming to an end soon, time is not on their side. The EAC would like to complete its study and bring recommendations to the faculty at large sometime after Winter Term. However, Ramaswamy admits that the date might be pushed back as far as March. In order to bring all of the necessary information together in a manageable and cohesive fashion, the EAC must to go through two subcommittees, one to evaluate teaching resources and the other to recommend curricular changes. The subcommittees will use the weekly EAC meeting as an opportunity to share their findings and coordinate their progress.

The SEAC will soon solicit a formal opinion from the student body through a campus-wide survey.