Faculty introduce new cultural diversity, math reqirements
By Elizabeth Bland
Old Gold and Black Reporter

> February 16, 2001

Faculty revised and made changes to the academic bulletin at a meeting in Feb. 12 in Pugh Auditorium.

After Paul Escott, the dean of the college, called the meeting to order, Simone Caron, an associate professor of history, introduced the first major topic of discussion. She asked the faculty to vote on a decision to allow a student to pursue a triple major, and discussed a few administrative changes to the bulletin.

Next, Paul Ribiso, the chairman of the department of health and exercise science, moderated a discussion and voting procedure on a new cultural diversity and quantitative reasoning requirement that will be added next year for incoming freshmen.

According to a handout, “The committee on Academic Planning recommends the adoption of a requirement that each student complete a course that educates him/her regarding contemporary cultural diversity.” This included courses that study cultural differences with an emphasis on ethnicity, class, gender, religion, sexuality and/or nationality.

These courses were described as doing more than to just “introduce students to a single aspect of a foreign, minority or subordinate culture; rather, they should include study of multiple cultural components.”

“We’re hoping that as it becomes a familiar part of the curriculum it will inspire us to have a new focus that we haven’t had before,” said Claudia Kairoff, an associate dean of the college and chair of the curriculum review committee that helped develop the new requirement.

The new requirement does not necessarily mean that a student would have to take an additional course.

Most of the courses with the potential to fulfill the new cultural diversity requirement would be courses that many students would take regardless.

“There are a lot of different ways you can fulfill the requirement,” Kairoff said. “I strongly advocated such a requirement.”

The quantitative reasoning requirement, as described by a handout, “should aim to teach the student, at a level beyond that normally attained in the high school experience, how to: Interpret mathematical models such as formulas, graphs, tables and schematics, and draw inferences from them; represent mathematical information symbolically, visually, numerically and verbally; use arithmetical, algebraic and statistical methods to solve problems; estimate and check answers to mathematical problems in order to determine reasonableness, identify alternatives, and select optimal results and recognize that mathematical and statistical methods have limits.”

Following a discussion by faculty members on the merits of such requirements, Ribiso called for approval on all of the various courses that were designated as fulfilling these requirements.

After all approval was given, the meeting was adjourned.