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 College Senate Meeting: October 2, 2000
Agenda Item: 7b
Description: Discussion on the six upper-level credits yet to be define

Submission Guidelines for the General Education Program

  1. The CCC Committee will be a sub-committee of the Academic Affairs Committee. It will consist of the director of the CCC Program and one representative each from the Arts, the Humanities, the Social Sciences, and the Natural Sciences as well as one representative from the Interdisciplinary Studies Council and one student. These representatives will be appointed by the Academic Affairs Committee and will serve staggered two-year terms. (This provision will require a change in the by-laws.)
  2. Before being submitted to the CCC Committee, courses must be approved by the submitting department or program and certified by the department chair and the appropriate dean.
  3. The committee will examine the submitted material to be sure that the course meets all the criteria for the appropriate CCC section. If a course is found not to meet the criteria, the Committee must indicate which criteria are not met and give the department the opportunity to revise the course submission.
  4. If the CCC Committee should turn down a course after revisions have been made and the department disagrees with that decision, it can be appealed to the Academic Affairs Committee.
  5. Courses will be approved as departmental offerings, and all faculty who teach the courses will be expected to meet the appropriate criteria. The CCC Committee will review all CCC syllabi every semester to ensure that criteria are being met.
  6. To satisfy the Board of Trustees, the CCC Committee will ask every department to explain how it is meeting the requirement for including Oral Communication in their majors.
  7. All faculty, including adjunct faculty, will be given a copy of the CCC Guidelines. New faculty members will be given the Guidelines during new faculty orientation.

Proposal for the Upper-Level Six Hours

The college's new general education program has many strong points: it emphasizes fundamental skills at all levels, it introduces students to college-level work in a large variety of disciplines, and it requires critical thinking in all of its courses. Still, faculty have expressed a desire, through votes in the College Senate, to provide a capstone or upper-level experience for the program. Many of the college'' major programs have some sort of capstone already, but those upper-level departmental capstones are not the same as a general education experience. The general education committee therefore proposes the following for the six upper-level hours that are part of the program.

One major goal of a general education program is to produce educated citizens, people who are familiar with the major intellectual trends that have contributed to the making of the modern world. It would consequently be beneficial to our students if they would be given a chance to read some of the important primary documents in a variety of fields. Of necessity, the lower-level general education courses will focus on the teaching of information and concepts, but students will not have many opportunities to engage with the primary documents of each discipline. Furthermore, the student who takes, for example, two social science courses will still not come into contact with other disciplines in the social sciences. The committee proposes, then, the creation of four three-credit courses (GE 301, 302, 303, 304) that will examine primary documents in, respectively, the art, the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. Each course will be developed by a group of faculty members, will have a historical component, and will focus on a particular theme or topic that is important in the contemporary world.

The selection of works would be left up to individual instructors but it would have to be interdisciplinary and international in nature, and it would be subject to review by the CCC Committee. It will not be necessary to read whole works, but readings should be substantial, more, that is, than brief excerpts. Classes should, ideally, be conducted as discussions; and students should be assessed most heavily on their ability to think critically about the works they have read.

We must remember as we consider these courses that we are talking about general education and that general education in this course means not specialization but a direct encounter with the documents, and ultimately with the minds, that have shaped our world.

(The committee also recommends that students who take part in a study-abroad program be exempted from taking one of these courses.)

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