While the university’s new ten-year strategic plan debuted to limited comment and a minor turnout of mostly faculty and administrators two weeks ago, last night, in its first public presentation, the scene was quite different.
Faculty, staff and several undergraduate students filled more than 200 seats in a Skinner Hall lecture room, with some forced to gather in doorways and along walls. Throughout the two-hour session, lines of people crowded by microphones waiting to give their praise and damnation.
“The strategic plan, luckily, is generating a lot of excitement at the university,” commented Provost Nariman Farvardin while giving a brief overview of the strategic planning committee’s work so far.
“When you develop a plan for a university with 50,000 citizens,” he went on, “and you try to engage everything, I want you to recognize that you’re going to get input that covers the entire spectrum of possibilities.”
The provost stood before a murmuring, fidgety crowd, as the majority of the comments made during the session tended to lean toward the more critical end of the spectrum.
Even though several people made an effort to say something positive about the working document, most accused the planning committee of failing to consider a gamut of issues, including environmental sustainability, resource allocation between departments, tactics to decrease area crime and the ability of the university’s non-native and low-income employees to give feedback on the plan on a website written in English.
But the most common complaint, by far, was that the plan contained major flaws in its proposed revisions to undergraduate academics, as faculty members targeted their criticisms particularly at the strategic plan’s proposed changes to the CORE curriculum.
While agreeing that CORE must be revisited every decade to remain current, Richard Price, chair of the history department, derided its newest incarnation as one that largely abandons the importance of liberal arts and humanities and cannot be successful if it is rushed through for completion for fall 2009.
“The philosophy of the plan is presentist,” Price said. “It reads more like a managerial document rather than a strategic plan.”
And while he praised the plan’s ambition to address local and global issues, he said without fundamental academics, the university will turn into what he dubbed “a mid-Atlantic Georgia Tech.”
“The fact that their scent was so strong, was so dominant, in the absence of any mention of traditions of liberal arts, the traditions of the humanities, for example, in the vision of the university, really leads me to ask you to rethink what it is you’re doing,” he said.
In the planning committee’s defense, Elizabeth Beise, the chair of its CORE subcommittee, said that the plan’s more generalized language is not meant to suggest backbone courses like history will play a lesser role. Rather, the plan aims to open general education to a more diverse spectrum of course offering, she said.
“We specifically tried not to call out any particular discipline when we tried to put together … the discipline pathways that are outlined in the [new] program, so history is not mentioned, humanities is not mentioned,” she said. “That was by design and that was probably a mistake. It was not at all our intention that the primary disciplines in the humanities and also history were not going to be central pieces to the new program.”
But that answer didn’t alleviate everyone’s concerns, and faculty continued stacking up behind the mic to state their case regarding the new general education.
“I, too, felt that this read more like a document for a very high-level training institutions rather than a really rich educational institution,” said Maynard Mack, an English professor.
Mack suggested, as well, that the planning committee failed to consider how similar curriculum proposals made when CORE was last revised were tried with little success.
“These were all well-intentioned, they were in the previous report, and they all died,” he said. “And to simply throw them up as if somehow they’ll work now scares me, because it suggests that there is no awareness of where some of these battles have been in the past.”
The concerns surrounding general education did not appear to surprise Farvardin, as he noted that his most important realization after becoming provost was the sensitivities of the university community about CORE.
“A lot of people approach CORE in a very religious manner,” he said. “And there’s going to be a diversity of different thoughts … We will try to be as thoughtful about this process as possible.”
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