Committee finalizes first-year seminar requirements

The members of the Special Committee on General Education were greeted with the last rays of sunlight instead of the night sky when they left their short and productive meeting yesterday.

The committee finalized details regarding the first-year seminar, a course designed to introduce students to both the intellectual and cultural aspects of life at the University. Details including specifications about credit hours, how long implementation should take, class size and when the seminar should be taken were discussed.

The first-year seminar subcommittee, headed by Bonnie MacEwan, associate librarian, distributed an outline to the committee with specific details about the structure of the seminar. The committee went through the proposal fairly quickly without raised voices or many counter points.

The seminar will be worth one- to three-credit hours, according to the proposal, depending on the college in which it's taken. The committee also agreed the seminar should be implemented over a period of two years, so colleges can get an idea of how the seminar will work.

"See how it works, learn how to do it, phase it in gradually," said Steven Arnold, associate professor of statistics. "See how it'll actually work out before the disaster actually happens."

Although the final proposal will state that the seminar should be phased in throughout a two-year period, subcommittee member Paul Clark, associate professor of labor studies and industrial relations, said a two-year implementation may appear sloppy.

"It seems neater and cleaner to implement it all at one time," he said.

Other issues facing the committee are class size and available classroom space. The proposed class size for a first-year seminar is 20 students. This size, while ideal for a seminar, poses the problem of there not being enough space to house all of the seminar sections. A possible solution to the problem would be to encourage incoming freshmen to take the seminar during the summer of their freshman year. That way, in the Fall Semester, finding classroom space may not be too much of a problem.

"It frees up a lot of classrooms," MacEwan said.

Some committee members said not all admitted freshman will want to spend their summer taking a first-year seminar. But Michael Dooris, director of academic assessment, said if only 1000 students take the seminar over the summer, there may be more classroom space for Fall Semester.