The lecture hall is filled with 100 students, and many have their heads bowed. Some are scribbling furiously; others are dozing.

At the front of the room, the professor paces back and forth, speaking into a microphone pinned to his shirt, explaining the characteristics of Zen Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism.

"You can't understand Zen from a book," he tells the class.

You have to go below logic, reasoning and thinking, he says.

Notes are taken, crosswords are filled out and eyes close as the afternoon goes on.

While the class may seem like many others at Penn State, it is a course that has been debated and discussed extensively because of the topics that it covers: diversity issues.

Religious Studies 001 (Introduction to World Religions) is one of the classes students can take to fulfill the Intercultural and International Competence Requirement (GI) at Penn State. Often referred to as the diversity requirement, the GI requirement is perhaps the element of Penn State's curriculum that has drawn the most contention over the past decade.

"There's a swirl of agitation, of debate," said John Moore, University Faculty Senate chair. "People feel passionately about the GI requirement."

Nobody wants to do away with the requirement, but people have different ideas of how it should be used, he said.

The debate Moore is referring to is how the university should address diversity issues in its curriculum:

-- What is the goal?

-- What topics should be included?

-- Should students be required to take a course? And if so, how many credits should it be, and where would it fit in the curriculum?

Faculty Senate, the legislative body responsible for the curriculum, responded to these questions in the form of the three-credit GI requirement and through an incorporation of the issues into other General Education courses offered.

The goal: to allow students to compare their background to those of other cultures and perspectives at the broadest level, Moore said.

Implemented only five years ago, this approach already is undergoing a review by a committee in the Faculty Senate.

Student groups have weighed in as well.

Gye'Nyame Curriculum Committee, a group formed at the end of 2000 that brought students and faculty together to work on increasing diversity in the curriculum, and the Undergraduate Student Government Academic Assembly, the branch of USG responsible for academic issues, both have pushed for curriculum changes that differ from the current requirements.

Other universities, faced with the same question, also have developed answers, almost all of which are a similar three- to six-credit requirement, though the topics covered and the names for the requirement vary.

The debate ebbs and swells, but it has remained a constant issue facing Penn State.

"This is nothing new," Moore said. "This has been a part of the game for a long time."

Making GI active

The requirement began as the three-credit diversity focus requirement in 1990, but it was renamed to the GI requirement in 1997. The changes were mostly semantic, though some faculty point to the addition of active learning as a major shift in the requirement.

"Competence is not a passive word," said Shelley Stoffels, chair of the curricular affairs committee of Faculty Senate. "You can't do that [gain Intercultural and International Competence] passively. ... I can't imagine doing that passively."

One of the musts for newly certified GI courses is the inclusion of active learning, said Stoffels, who knows the ins and outs of a GI course review process that sees course proposals snake through various Senate committees before getting a stamp of approval.

The active learning element is part of what sets GI classes apart from their DF predecessors.

"There are very few courses that could meet the GI requirement without change," Stoffels said.

The main question, she said, is this: "Could a student get through this course being passive? And if the answer is 'yes,' then that's not OK."

The Religious Studies 001 course, the GI class with the most students enrolled in the last five years, paints a different picture.

Previously a DF mainstay, the course has been certified as fulfilling the GI requirement.

Curtis Smith, a lecturer in religious studies, teaches two sections of Religious Studies 001 this semester, with each section packing more than 100 students into a lecture hall in Chambers Building. Other sections of the course up that figure to more than 150 students.

Smith said he has been teaching religion courses for 20 years, and he has not changed his approach during that time.

"The main goal is to understand each religion as it understands itself," he said about the introductory course's approach. "It exposes the student to a multitude of worldviews."

While the content may cover different cultures, its practice does not seem to entail the active learning envisioned by the Senate.

Kara Borski (freshman-liberal arts), a student in Religious Studies 001, said the course follows a typical class lecture and reading assignment format.

"It's passive, just retaining the information," she said.

Of the other GI courses most frequently taken, Anthropology 045 (Cultural Anthropology) has the smallest classes at 30, while others such as Women's Studies 001 (Introduction to Women's Studies) and American Studies 105 (American Popular Culture and Folklife) have classes sizes between 50 and 100 -- which presents the challenge of making a large, lecture-based course active.

Moore said a balance between an idealistic approach with small classes and a more realistic view of larger courses must be reached.

"What can we do with the resources available to us -- that's what it comes down to," he said. "It's easy for me and Senate to be idealistic, but I'm not the guy that has to make the books balance."

GI review

Before some of these newly certified GI courses ever become available to students, though, the foundation on which they are based might shift.

Throughout this fall, a subcommittee in Faculty Senate has been reviewing the GI requirement as a whole.

The committee has already charted a different possible course for the requirement, said Julia Simon, chair of the committee.

"It became clear competence was out the window," said Simon, who teaches a GI course on 16th-century Paris, adding that a three-credit course can't provide competence.

The alternative, according to the committee: a division of the Intercultural and International requirement into separate three-credit requirements.

And while some might say that would make an already-long list of requirements even longer, Simon is quick to point out that the split would not simply be three more credits.

"It really needs to be thought of in a different way," she said.

GI courses differ from other General Education courses in that they can fulfill other requirements, including other General Education or major requirements. That means students already would have to take these six credits, but under the new proposal, they would have to choose six credits that also would meet the International and Intercultural requirements.

The catch, Simon said, is selling the idea to the skeptics.

Initial reactions to the proposal were negative, she said.

"In order to make it work, I think we really do have to go on an educational campaign," she said. "I think people need time for this to sink in."

The change would not undo all the work done by Senate to certify GI courses, though, Simon said. Courses simply could be classified as International or Intercultural or both.

A student view

Pressure for change in the requirement also comes from several student groups on campus. The Gye'Nyame Curriculum Committee and the USG Academic Assembly represent two of the most visible.

In the past two years, both organizations have pushed for change, and those in control of the curriculum have met both with some acceptance and some resistance.

Gye'Nyame formed so students could express what they felt was wrong with the curriculum.

"That's always been the major emphasis of Gye'Nyame -- to create mechanisms to enhance diversity in the curriculum," Gye'Nyame Co-Chair Steve Desir said.

Desir said the group's major goal is to implement a required course university-wide. The course would be similar to first-year seminars. It would be offered through each department with a focus on diversity issues in a particular field or profession. The course would emphasize projects, discussion and other active approaches, Desir said.

"It would serve each student so much better," he said.

Desir said he had doubts about the success of the current GI requirement in reaching students and meeting the requirements.

"As it stands right now, I'm not sure it's fulfilling its own standards," he said. "What I'm hearing from students is not all the courses that are listed are fulfilling that."

And while Gye'Nyame has established the lines of communication with faculty and administrators -- representatives from both are present at most of the group's weekly meetings -- there is still resistance to the concept of a standing course.

"To them, it's supposedly a logistical nightmare," Desir said.

Such a requirement would require a vast amount of faculty, facilities and money.

For the university-wide English 15 requirement, University Park offers 97 sections of the course with 24 students in each. A proposal for courses with fewer than 20 students would require at least 100 sections at University Park to enable every student to take the class before graduating.

Some other student groups oppose the idea of a university-wide required course.

"You come to college to actually think for yourselves," said Sean Clark, president of Young Americans for Freedom. "You don't go there to be indoctrinated. That's basically what they're trying to do."

Clark said he was not opposed to the current requirement because it offers a broader look at cultural issues.

"The GI requirement as it is now isn't that bad because you have a large selection of classes," he said. "That's fine when it makes you think about taking a general education course you normally wouldn't think about."

Academic Assembly has run into a similar logistical roadblock with a proposal it submitted to Faculty Senate at the end of the spring semester last year.

The proposal supported shifting the GI requirement from a three-credit course to an independent or small group study that would be completed in conjunction with another course. It also would encourage the option of completing a study abroad or service program, such as the Peace Corps, to fulfill the requirement -- an option that currently exists but that has been largely ignored, said D. Josh Troxell, assembly president.

Troxell said the current GI requirement doesn't always force students to be active and doesn't always touch on subjects that are of relevance at Penn State.

"It's not forcing you out of your comfort zone; it's not forcing you to look through someone else's eyes," he said, adding that that was the goal of the requirement.

Having independent or small group studies that would be advised by individual faculty members also would require huge resources, something that makes the Assembly proposal unfeasible, according to some faculty members.

At University Park alone, such a requirement would mean about 5,000 independent studies each semester, while there are only about 2,800 faculty members total.

Troxell said Assembly intentionally set its sights high for the requirement, with the hope that a compromise could be reached.

Despite the lack of progress on Gye'Nyame's and Academic Assembly's proposals, Troxell still exudes a sense of optimism.

"This is the first time students have stepped forward and said, 'This is how we want our curriculum to be,' " he said.