STUDENT self-governance often appears to be nothing more than the University’s marketing pitch, a promise more than a practice. Though students take pride in this oft-invoked but rarely realized tradition, our shining examples of student self-governance — Honor, class councils — also tend to create our most contentious issues. Yet this year, Student Council has launched one of the most hopeful programs in support of student self-governance the student body has seen in recent years: Student-Initiated Courses.
It’s a program that makes sense. Why not allow students, this supposedly self-governing lot of young minds with a multitude of ideas and perspectives, to take it upon themselves to engineer their own class, complete with credits and all? While not entirely student-run (the program requires a professor to sponsor the class), student-initiated courses are a giant leap forward and away from the University’s administration-heavy status quo.
Student Council first announced this initiative last spring, posting on their blog, “For the first time, Student Council will offer a process by which students will be able to propose a course with a professor and receive funding for it to appear on the COD as a for-credit course.” The organization recently circulated an e-mail stating that the program would, as originally hoped, continue into this coming spring semester. Now is the perfect time for students to begin taking the academic reins in an effort to navigate a path to true self-governance. Marisa Roman, Student Council Academic Affairs Committee chair, said, “[The program] gives students the freedom to apply themselves in a way only faculty or administrative members have been able to do in the past. By giving students this ability to express themselves through academia, they are supporting their rights to self-govern themselves as teachers and as learners.”
Student-initiated courses also accomplish a number of other ends. They support the creation of strong ties between students and their professors, requiring that both parties work together in the creation and carrying out of a student-generated idea. Not only do students now have an additional reason to get to know their favorite professors, but professors have the opportunity to help their students take ownership of an idea or a study in an entirely new way.
Secondly, student-initiated courses have the potential to address the most relevant and meaningful issues on Grounds and throughout the larger community. Students have the ability to tap into the cultural movements and attitudes among their peers. By creating a student-initiated course, they can now address these attitudes first-hand on a peer-to-peer level.
This fall’s first student-initiated course, Global Development in Practice, addresses an issue that has become more and more palpable in recent years, especially among the country’s young adult population. With a stated goal of creating “collaborative projects” addressing issues in global development, the course allows both its student creators as well as those enrolled to work together on student-led initiatives in an extremely meaningful and relevant subject area.
Student-initiated courses also have the potential to give students the opportunity to create classes and opportunities lacking in other areas on Grounds. Recent demands for increased attention to courses relating to globalization and development were addressed directly by the creation of this fall’s student-initiated course. Other student demands, such as those for more courses addressing poverty both in the community and worldwide, or for more courses addressing global climate change, for example, can be realized by Student Council’s student-initiated classes.
This program possesses great potential for improvement in coming years. According to Roman, Student Council currently has enough funding for the creation of two or three courses in the Spring. “The ultimate goal is to have the Student-Initiated Courses program branched out of the College strictly and into all of the undergraduate schools,” Roman said. In the future, it would be an even greater accomplishment to list these classes under specific departments rather than lump them all together as Interdisciplinary courses, as they are now, or to make them legitimate enough in the eyes of the administration to be worth more than a maximum of two credits. Perhaps certain extremely successful courses could become a yearly tradition, adopted and adapted by incoming students each year to remain current and relevant to the student body.
It is important now to realize the potential of this program. All too often, student self-governance is a phrase that lacks meaning on Grounds. It is supposedly valued, but it is rarely defined, and it seems to be realized only when students collectively react to a specific and particularly frustrating policy put in place by the University’s administrators.
The expression of our potential and our power as students and the recognition of our various interests and passions can be accomplished in part by embracing these student-initiated courses. So sign up for a class, or better yet, create one yourself. These courses are more than an advertising pitch; they are an attempt to capture the true spirit of student self-governance.
Amelia Meyer’s column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at a.meyer@cavalierdaily.com.
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