Revisions to the Strong Foundations Process

Dr. Leland has sent this letter to the USG Provosts indicating revisions to the Strong Foundations process. It outlines significant changes in that process.

Comments

[Brian W. Schwartz]

There are significant changes, but will they be meaningful and will they make a difference? One member of our general education committee suggested that it could be the same thing only with more people.

I don't see in the letter a solid plan to broadly canvass USG faculty and to build consensus from the bottom up. Also, I don't see mention of a willingness to start over and put everything back on the table for discussion.

My understanding is that the original timeline called for the basic framework of the core to be selected by January. At the rate we are going (2 months collecting feedback on proposals A and B), I don't see that there will be enough time to come up with something very different from A and B, develop it, get feedback on it, and make a decision by January. Therefore, I fear that the final framework that is selected will be something very much like A or B.

[William Blake]

I agree with the reservations expressed in the entry above. In addition,
I would like to know why there still is not a third option for faculty to consider of a core curriculum closer to the one we now have requiring students to take courses in the four traditional fields of humanities, the arts, the social sciences, and the natural sciences? This initial "limiting the grounds of the argument" is the fallacy that has greatly concerned many faculty,and provoked a good deal of the resentful and negative comments.

--An English Professor

[anonymous]

Well, it seems now that a bizarre exercise in Friedmanesque magical thinking will morph into tedious, interminable debates that will put the semester conversion of the late '90s to shame. Yet there's nothing faculty welcome more than the opportunity to bloviate about the only thing over which they supposedly have any control: the curriculum. And in this case, it is not even university-level curriculum at all. It's high school in a college setting, and so it must be dressed up in all manner of grand ideas and the latest in education jargon (preferably newly invented).

What has happened to this university system? Faculty salaries have stagnated for eight years. We devote half of our resources to doing the job that the public school system doesn't do. Enrollment growth is paramount, because that's all that matters in the funding formula. We're judged by retention figures -- with no regard for standards or consideration of student preparedness. More and more students enroll in more and more classes taught by part-time and "full-time temporary" faculty.

The entire system is broken, having been lead by fools since the departure of Chancellor Portch and the arrival of Governor Purdue and seemingly permanent Republican rule. Had USG faculty any dignity, we would all be on strike.