An overhaul of UW graduation requirements hit a snag in its two-year voyage when more than 100 faculty objected to changes which passed the Faculty Senate in May.
While the proposal would streamline degree requirements, making it easier to graduate in four years, most of the faculty protests centered on one element—a five-credit ethnic studies requirement.
As it came out of two faculty committees, the overhaul included a 10-credit requirement in “The United States Experience,” but the Senate Executive Committee and then the full senate removed that proposal, adding the ethnic studies requirement instead.
Only 1 percent of the faculty (26 professors) had to object in writing to force reconsideration of the entire package. Now the Senate Executive Committee and the full senate will rethink the proposal when they meet in October.
An ethnic studies requirement, expanded to include issues of “pluralism in American society,” passed the senate in 1991, only to be voted down by a rare vote of the entire faculty.
Those who feel the entire system needs retooling are afraid the ethnic studies controversy may gum up the gears. “A comprehensive change to the graduation requirements is long overdue and desperately needed to ease the gridlock our undergraduates report facing time and again on their way to graduation,” Faculty Senate Chair Miceal Vaughan wrote in a letter to the faculty.
In the new plan students would take 40 credits of “general education” courses from the following subject areas: The Natural World; Individuals and Society; and The Visual, Literary and Performing Arts. Students would take a minimum of 10 credits in each area; courses in the major could also count as “general education” credits.
The plan also authorized departments to offer academic minors.