Faculty and administrators disagree on the feasibility of including diversity topics into the technical curriculum and say courses may not meet the standards suggested in the recently passed diversity requirements.

At least one technical college has said it will not investigate diversifying its courses, and others either will leave research to individual departments or taskforces.

All colleges will not be required to offer "diversified" courses scheduled for implementation in 1991.

The diversity requirement passed by the University Faculty Senate two weeks ago aims to speed curriculum integration, said Jerry Covert, associate dean of undergraduate education. But many faculty members said they believe achieving this goal is impossible in the technical curriculum.

Incoming students will be required to pass a specific number of credits dealing with racial, ethnic, gender, religious, sexual orientation and/or global issues.

Individual professors can diversify their own curriculum and apply to a Faculty Senate committee to qualify as a course students can take to meet these requirements. But individual colleges are not required to develop the courses.

The College of Engineering does not plan to investigate diversifying its courses and the College of Science is leaving development of the classes to individual departments, said Carl Wolgemuth, associate dean of undergraduate education in the College of Engineering, and Norman Freed, associate dean of undergraduate studies in the College of Science.

In contrast, the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences has formed a taskforce to investigate curriculum integration in both technical and non-technical courses, said John Cahir, associate dean of undergraduate programs for the college.

While diversity courses is necessary, the objective, impersonal nature of technical-course content makes inclusion of diversity material implausible, Wolgemuth and Freed agreed.

But science is not a strictly objective process, said Donna Hughes, a women studies lecturer and doctoral candidate in genetics.

"If society as a whole has biases . . . then those biases are reflected in the research which is done and the theories which are developed," Hughes said.

Because science has worked during the last 200 years to remove personalities from its teaching, diversity -- a people-oriented topic -- could not be included in the technical curriculum, Freed said.

"Ninety-nine percent of courses (the College of Science) is going to be involved in could not include diversity," he said.

Though a few engineering courses, such as design courses in which students work in teams, could include diversity issues, integration of most engineering courses would be difficult if not impossible, said Robert Melton, aerospace engineering professor.

The first step in diversifying technical fields is to change the content of engineering courses by including the history, ethics and implication of technical discoveries, Hughes said.

But, the amount of material which must be covered in science courses leaves little time to include history, Freed said.

Introductory courses for non-technical majors, like Biological Science 4, concentrate as much on personalities as scientific content, and could incorporate diversity issues, he said.

Other University professors said Hughes methods enhance rather than detract from learning.

"To present science as something which is 'just there' is to do enormous disservice to students," said Roy Olofson, professor of chemistry.

History makes up about 10-15 percent of his chemistry course for technical majors, acting as a break in a sometimes overwhelming flow of data and motivating students to learn data which may have been left out, Olofson said.

The human investigation of science may include diversity issues and is of particular importance in upper-level courses, he said.

"You can't teach science without teaching people how it's done and how to do it," Olofson said.

Olofson tells a story in his organic chemistry class about a female University chemist who made an important discovery after being "pushed" into an obscure field considered by mainstream scientists to be unimportant.

People must change their perception of engineering to integrate the curriculum, said Richard Devon, associate professor of general engineering.

Both the general curriculum and specific classes need to address the fact that the processes of engineering are objective and society's use of engineering is subjective, said Devon, who integrates his curriculum.