The number of students in the College graduating with two majors is on the rise -- prompting University professors to ask why students are seeking additional degrees. They also are discussing how departments should alter their curricula and increase collaboration with other academic disciplines.
Double majors made up 7 percent of students in the College in 1997. By last spring, 9.2 percent of College students were double majors, according to the University's Office of Institutional Assessment.
At the Faculty Senate's annual retreat in September, English Dept. Chairman Michael Levenson advised University faculty to shape and deepen their undergraduate programs. He also advised them to improve their programs both internally and externally by integrating with other academic departments.
"The proposal is to remove the possibility of two majors and to encourage instead a major and a program" attached to that major, Levenson said.
Levenson criticized departments for isolating themselves.
"The self-enclosure of our departments is a notorious weakness," he said. "Any fair reading of our history shows that we have failed to develop a network of relations among departments, failed to constitute sustained interdisciplinary collaboration, failed indeed to constitute the humanities as a collective vocation."
Politics Dept. Chairman Robert Fatton said he is open to departments cooperating, but he does not see how his own department could implement the idea at the present time.
"There has been talk of mixing politics and economics, so students would get experience in public policy or political economy," Fatton said. "I don't know if we could do that, given the pressure of requirements on each faculty, and our faculty shortages. We really would need a lot more resources to be able to do so."
Fatton said resources are lacking in his department, especially during the current budget crisis.
"Last year, before the hiring freeze, we were expecting five new regular faculty members, and even with five new ones, we would be short 12," he said. Fatton offered several other possibilities to compensate for the faculty deficit.
"I want to find common patterns that transcend particular issues," he said. "There could be a class on Islam and politics. We could look at issues of democracy and civic involvement with sociology. We could look at politics with specific localities with anthropology, and we could look at politics with the environment."
Another department under financial pressure is economics, which had to adjust to a swell of majors from 200 in the 1996-97 school year to 405 in the 2000-01 school year.
The University-wide hiring freeze has hampered the department from effectively handling increases in students, Dept. Chairman David E. Mills said.
"We were told to open up six faculty sources, but by the end of last year, that had been reduced to one," Mills said. "The ability of my department to aggressively pursue these things is limited. The highest priority now is the meat and potatoes for the economics majors."
In spite of the hiring freeze, Mills said he would like to see the establishment of a Commerce minor.
"Some students have a lot of intellectual curiosity and academic ability to focus so early on a profession," Mills said. "It's too bad that some of those students have to forfeit that."
One of the few interdepartmental courses available now is "21st Century Choices: War, Justice, Human Rights," taught by Religious Studies Prof. James Childress and Politics Prof. Michael Smith this semester.
Students should expect to see more interdisciplinary classes next year, College Dean Edward L. Ayers said. Provost Gene Block, Ayers and other College professors currently are re-evaluating the College's core curriculum for the first time in 20 years.
"Students want to leave less with just a series of things they've been exposed to and a more planned and purposeful outcome of their undergraduate experience," Ayers said. "We do better to look for coherence rather than addition."
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