PROMISES TO KEEP: THE COLLEGE PARK PLAN FOR UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION FINAL REPORT, SEPTEMBER 14, 1987 Prepared by the College Park Campus Senate AD HOC COMMITTEE ON UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION The University of Maryland COMMITTEE PREFACE The members of the Campus Senate Ad Hoc Committee on Undergraduate Education are pleased to present their report to the campus community. We believe that the issues we have reviewed are important for the future of the campus. We urge all members to consider our report and to participate actively in the debate on improving undergraduate education. Chair: John Pease (Department of Sociology) Linda Berg (Department of Botany) Denny Gulick (Department of Mathematics) Gregory Lyons (Electrical Engineering student) Maynard Mack, Jr. (Department of English) Don Piper (Department of Government and Politics) Judith Sciannella (History alumna) Kathryn Theus (National Center for Post- secondary Governance and Finance) James Wallace (Department of Mechanical Engineering) Andrew Wolvin (Department of Communication Arts and Theatre) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS One of the really nice things about working on this committee was the help, support, encouragement, and good cheer we received from the campus community. Without exception, everyone we turned to for help was generous--a nice thing to find in colleagues. If what you read here seems reasonable or brilliant, it may well be: we probably got it from you. Thanks. We are especially grateful to the Campus Senate Executive Committees of 1985-1986 and 1986-1987, the staff of the Campus Senate Shirley van Valkenburg and Mary Lou O'Bryhim, and Provost/Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs William E. Kirwan and his staff for their considerable help during the past two years. Most of all we want to thank two of the Campus Senate's finest: Professors Janet Hunt and Ralph Bennett. Write them a note of thanks and be lavish in your praise. TABLE OF CONTENTS COMMITTEE PREFACE............................................i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.............................................ii TABLE OF CONTENTS..........................................iii SUMMARY OF THE REPORT........................................v INTRODUCTION.................................................1 The Committee's Charge..................................1 The Process.............................................5 A Time for Change.......................................7 The College Park Goal..................................14 The Current State of Undergraduate Education...........15 THE PROPOSED GENERAL EDUCATION PROGRAM......................19 Fundamental Studies....................................19 English and Mathematics...........................20 The College Park Seminar..........................22 Speech............................................26 Distributive Studies...................................28 Advanced Studies.......................................34 The Capstone......................................35 Pedagogy...............................................37 Administration.........................................39 THE UNDERGRADUATE MAJOR.....................................43 Restricted Electives, Restricted Majors................44 ADMISSION REQUIREMENTS......................................48 Foreign Language.......................................48 THE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT....................................51 Academic Advising .....................................51 New Student Orientation................................53 Recognition of Academic Excellence.....................53 Honors Programs........................................54 Women and Minorities...................................55 THE TEACHING MILIEU.........................................57 Center for Instructional Excellence....................57 Classroom Facilities...................................57 Rewarding Teaching Excellence..........................58 IMPLEMENTATION..............................................62 BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................64 APPENDIX 1: The Charge to the Committee.....................72 A. Copy of the Letter Charging the Committee.72 B. Excerpts from Professor Bennett's Remarks at the First Meeting of the Committee........73 APPENDIX 2: Excerpts from Professor Mack's Remarks at the Reorganization Hearings......................75 APPENDIX 3: Re-affirmations of the Charge...................77 A. Excerpts from Professor Bennett's Remarks at the Open-forum ...........................77 B. Excerpts from Professor Hunt's Remarks at the Open-forum...............................77 APPENDIX 4: List of Individuals and Student Organizations Especially Invited to Speak at the Open-forums.78 A. Individual Faculty, Students, Administrators, and Staff....................78 B. Student Organizations.....................86 APPENDIX 5: Speakers at the Open-forums.....................94 A. Those who Provided Written Material.......94 B. Those who Spoke...........................96 APPENDIX 6: Committee Meeting with the Educational Policy Committee of the Board of Regents.............101 APPENDIX 7: Academic Advising..............................103 APPENDIX 8: Current UMCP Policy Regarding Academic Appointments, Promotion, Tenure, and Appeals Procedures..................................105 A. Revision of Policy of UMCP Regarding Academic Appointments, Promotion, Tenure and Appeals Procedures..........................105 B. Format for Promotion and Tenure Recommendations.............................113 SUMMARY OF THE REPORT The University of Maryland, College Park, is a good university and is improving. All concerned should be impressed with the talent, dedication, and industry of the faculty, staff, and administration. We can all be proud of the accomplishments of the students and encouraged by the fact that each year for the past several years the talents and abilities of the freshman class have exceeded those of earlier years. The quality of graduate students has improved markedly in the last ten years. The faculty continues a steady climb in national reputation, with increasing numbers of departments gaining the professional respect they deserve. The campus community can take pride in the quality of the graduate programs and the outstanding research accomplishments of the faculty. We on the committee believe, however, that undergraduate education must and can be equally distinguished. "UMCP" is a comprehensive university and must provide both continued excellence in research and graduate study and a rigorous, demanding program of undergraduate education. These are not incompatible but, in the final analysis, mutually dependent. As the flagship campus of the University, the College Park campus must provide a first-rate liberal arts education to tens of thousands of students while setting for the whole state high standards in undergraduate education, graduate study, service, and research. In many ways the vitality and condition of undergraduate education at College Park is about the same as it is at other large, public research-oriented universities--and for very similar reasons, save one: compared to peer institutions, the campus is underfunded. As at many other flagship campuses, the quality of undergraduate education lags behind the quality of research and graduate study. And at College Park, as elsewhere, the quality of the undergraduate experience varies considerably. Much of the strength of the current program of undergraduate study lies in the "major," and thus in the educational experiences of juniors and seniors. Courses taught in and for the "major" are often stronger pedagogically and academically than those which are taught for the general education program, the present "University Studies Program." Most "major" areas of study on the campus are established politically and defended vigorously and enthusiastically. Here at College Park, general education has long been an "orphan child," and the current situation reveals cumulative problems that have been years, even decades, in the making. However, the committee has discovered a growing sentiment on campus that now is the time for a concerted effort to improve the quality of undergraduate education at College Park. Now is the time, we heard over and over, to give special attention to the undergraduates and, especially, to the general education program. Now is the time for general education to be re-established, nourished, and promoted with energy and skill. The best universities in the country have long known that it is too late to begin serious education at the junior-senior level or in graduate programs. Truly outstanding universities provide an academically rigorous and intellectually varied educational program from the day a student arrives: they promise quality education from start to finish, and they keep their promise. The need for this is the central theme of our report. We ask that it become a commitment of the campus. We are not recommending that anything we now do well be cut back. We recognize that some of our proposals will require that more resources be directed to the General Education Program. Some of these resources may be generated by internal reallocations; the bulk of the resources must come from the outside. We do not advocate reduction in resources devoted to graduate study, research, or the majors that would adversely affect the quality of these programs. But we are recommending that we do more--that we find imaginative strategies and programs and resourceful methods of funding that will enable us to promise the citizens of our state, "send your college student to us and we will instill both breadth and depth from start to finish." No university can solidify its reputation unless it can attract and deserve to attract many of the brightest undergraduates around. In an effort to begin building more rigor and imagination into our undergraduate program, the committee is recommending that there be an increase in the amount of time, energy, prestige, and resources committed to undergraduate education, and that most of this increase go to the General Education Program to improve the educational experience of all students whether they choose broad liberal arts majors or more narrow professional training. Our recommendations offer a plan for an integrated program. In the interests of brevity we have chosen not to repeat all the arguments for the different parts of our program that borrow heavily from the existing University Studies Program. The goals and justifications for these parts of general education are clearly set forth in the Campus Senate legislation passed in April, 1979 and are summarized regularly in the Schedule of Classes. We believe they are understood and accepted widely on campus. Our proposed initiatives are explained somewhat more fully. At every point our goal has been to integrate--integrate students better into the intellectual life of this campus; integrate them into the global village our world is becoming; integrate the knowledge being acquired within disciplines; integrate the kinds of knowledge being acquired by studying different disciplines; integrate the major--however specialized- -more fully into the general education process of undergraduate study. Specialization may help land that first job; only profound intellectual integration and awareness will prepare our students for their long lives in a challenging, changing world. We seek to achieve these objectives by recommending changes in a) curriculum, b) pedagogy, c) administration, d) admission requirements, (e) the learning environment, and f) the teaching milieu. (a) Curriculum. (Recommendations 1 through 10) While reaffirming the current requirements, we are recommending beginning a trial program of "College Park Seminars" for first year students, and exploring the suitability of a campus-wide speech requirement. One science course and one arts and humanities course would be added to the requirements in Distributive Studies. The choice of courses which may be used to satisfy the Distributive Studies requirements would be limited more strictly than at present. The Advanced Studies program would be modified to build more explicitly upon the Distributive Studies component, and "major" programs of study would assume more responsibility for extending and developing the goals of the General Education Program by developing a senior level "capstone" course to help students synthesize their undergraduate experience. Recommendation 1: The present English and mathematics requirements of Fundamental Studies should be continued. Recommendation 2: The campus should establish a two year trial program of "College Park Seminars" as part of the General Education Program. Recommendation 3: The campus should explore establishing a speech communication course as part of the Fundamental Studies program by instituting a two year experiment. Recommendation 4: Each Distributive Studies course should acquaint students with central ways of seeing, conceptualizing, and knowing a significant portion of the world. Each course should give an historical and epistemological perspective of the discipline area and identify its relationship to other disciplines. Recommendation 5: The Distributive Studies program should require that each student complete nine credits in arts and humanities: one literature course; one arts course; and one additional arts and humanities course (literature, arts, philosophy, or classics). Recommendation 6: The Distributive Studies program should require that each student complete nine credits in social science: one social or political history course, and two courses in behavioral and social science. Recommendation 7: The Distributive Studies program should require that each student complete ten credits in mathematics, science, and technology: one life science course and one physical science course, one of which must provide a laboratory experience; and one additional course in computer science, life science, mathematics, physical science, statistics, or technology. Recommendation 8: Each student should be required to take one course that focuses primarily on either (a) the history, status, treatment, or accomplishments of women or minority groups and subcultures, or (b) cultural areas outside North America and Western Europe. (This course may but need not be drawn from either Distributive Studies or Advanced Studies; it may be satisfied with any major, supporting, or elective course from the approved list.) Recommendation 9: Each student should take six credits of Advanced Studies courses: one "Analysis of Social and Ethical Problems" course and one of the following options: (a) a second "Analysis of Social and Ethical Problems" course from a different department also outside the major, or (b) an approved senior- level "capstone" course in the student's major department. Recommendation 10: Each Department should develop a "capstone" course for its major field of study. (b) Pedagogy. (Recommendations 11 through 13) Adjustment of curriculum is only a part of what is necessary to improve the general education available on our campus. Who teaches General Education Program courses and how they teach them are matters of equal importance. We recommend that more of the Distributive Studies and Advanced Studies courses be taught by regular faculty and use modes of teaching that impel students actively to process course materials. We also recommend that where large classes are necessary there be increased use of well- supervised teaching assistants to ensure that all students in General Education Program courses have the responsibility for actively involving themselves in the learning process. Students need to take greater responsibility for their education, and Distributive Studies courses particularly are the appropriate places to teach students how to do this. Professors should set uniformly high academic standards for all students and should design learning experiences for students that are intellectually demanding. The campus administration must provide additional resources to make possible appropriate class sizes in General Education Program courses. Recommendation 11: The campus should set high academic standards for courses taken to fulfill requirements for the General Education Program, discontinuing the pass-fail grading option for these courses. Recommendation 12: Every effort should be made to staff Distributive and Advanced Studies courses with regular faculty members and to provide laboratory or discussion sessions in large classes. Recommendation 13: General Education Program courses should feature modes of teaching which require that students take responsibility for their learning and should have enrollments sufficiently small to make this possible. (c) Administration. (Recommendations 14 through 17) As part of the effort to increase quality and accountability in the General Education Program, we recommend that a senior administrator of recognized stature with an enabling budget be made responsible for this Program. The Campus Senate should establish a permanent committee devoted solely to general education and should request and publicly evaluate periodic reports from this senior administrator on the state of undergraduate education on campus. Every academic unit should evaluate its curriculum and pedagogy to learn how it might do a more efficient and effective job, eliminate unnecessary courses, and better serve undergraduate education. Departments should help monitor the General Education courses. Recommendation 14: A senior campus administrator with an enabling budget should be responsible for all elements of the General Education Program. This administrator should serve ex officio on the Campus Senate Committee on General Education, should be responsible for implementing the Committee's actions, and should report biennially to the Campus Senate on the state of undergraduate education on campus. Recommendation 15: The Campus Senate should have a standing committee solely concerned with the General Education Program. Recommendation 16: Department Chairs should review annually all General Education Program courses in their departments to ascertain if each course is meeting the intellectual and pedagogical goals of the General Education Program and should report the findings to the senior administrator responsible for the General Education Program. Recommendation 17: Each department should develop a rationale for its major as a coherent body of knowledge, including an explanation of the need for each required course, and should reexamine the adequacy of its contribution to general education on campus. (d) Admission Requirements (Recommendation 18) The campus has several admission requirements at present. We believe it is appropriate to add one to these, one that will add the voice of the campus to the growing chorus calling on secondary schools to increase the amount of foreign language study they provide. Virtually all experts agree that foreign language is best begun even before high school, in the elementary schools. While we cannot make that happen, we can encourage movement in that direction by having the flagship campus of the University take a clear stand on the importance of early foreign language instruction. Recommendation 18: The campus should phase in a foreign language admission requirement of three years of one foreign language in high school. (e) Learning Environment. (Recommendations 19 through 23) A major thrust of these recommendations is that the campus must do much more to create an intellectually stimulating and supportive learning environment for undergraduate students. Professors should set high standards and develop rigorous learning experiences. A central point of these recommendations is that undergraduates need better, more, and earlier academic advising. As part of this emphasis, the current campus-wide orientation program should be expanded, given a more academic focus, and be followed by college or department orientation programs. Advising should be defined as part of the professorial role. Both the campus-wide and academic unit orientation programs should involve the faculty intensively. In addition, the campus must continue recent efforts to recognize the academic achievements of undergraduates. Any academic unit that does not now have an honors program should establish one, and the Senate should ensure that standards in all honors programs are high. Recommendation 19: All academic units should affirm that advising is an integral part of teaching and should offer a systematic program of advising that guides students from matriculation through graduation. Recommendation 20: The campus should expand and re-focus the orientation program, instituting a new program required of all new students that will have a strong academic emphasis. Recommendation 21: The campus should expand and improve activities to recognize the academic excellence of students. Recommendation 22: Departments which do not have honors programs should consider establishing them. Recommendation 23: The Campus Senate should issue guidelines and enforce standards for all honors programs. (f) The Teaching Milieu. (Recommendations 24 through 26) A professor's work is highly demanding, and never finished. Even under the best of conditions the craft of university teaching is labor-intensive and problematic. Other reports have championed the needs of professors as scholars. Our recommendations focus on the professor as teacher, calling for the creation of an initiative-taking center for the improvement of teaching and instructional development, and for improving the classrooms. But most of all, the central point of our recommendations in this area is that there should be a change in the reward structure: quality undergraduate teaching must receive heavy weight in pay, promotion, and tenure decisions. Recommendation 24: The campus should establish a center for the improvement of teaching and instructional development. Recommendation 25: The campus should increase efforts to improve classrooms. Recommendation 26: Heads of all academic units should ensure that faculty members maintain appropriate standards of teaching performance, should increase the public recognition of excellence in undergraduate teaching, and should give heavy weight to teaching in the process of hiring and determining retention, tenure, promotion, and compensation. (g) Implementation. (Recommendation 27) Implementation of these recommendations will be complex, and will take time. There needs to be a committee charged with producing a schedule for implementation (following the suggestions in this report) and with overseeing its progress throughout the several years that will be required. Recommendation 27: The Campus Senate and the Office of Academic Affairs should establish a committee to implement all approved recommendations of this report which are not strictly curricular matters assigned to the Campus Senate General Education Committee or to another Campus Senate Committee. INTRODUCTION THE COMMITTEE'S CHARGE Two years ago the Campus Senate held hearings on the administrative reorganization plan to transform the campus (from five divisions into 14 colleges). One of the results of these hearings was a focused concern about the impact of the administrative change on the integrity of undergraduate education --especially the general education component. The faculty was concerned that the reorganization should not compromise the undergraduate curriculum by transforming the campus from a university to a collection of insular professional schools. There was concern that the reorganization might diminish the place of liberal education while emphasizing professional training (see Appendix 1). According to "The Report of the Campus Senate ad hoc Committee on Academic Reorganization:" There was widespread expression of concern over the fragmentation seen to be produced by the proposal [for administrative reorganization] with an accompanying contention that commitment to undergraduate education is weakening as the professional schools become independent. Many of our respondents felt that the proposal did not represent a structure with a hierarchy showing the pre-eminence of the traditional academic disciplines. The idea that a professional school or college appeared to be valued in the same way as a group of traditional academic disciplines is a problem for many, and an issue felt to be dealt with more explicitly by many other institutions (p.6). This report went on to make the following recommendation: Recommendation 8: That the reorganization plan should explicitly address the development of a coherent liberal arts core curriculum for undergraduates. The Colleges of Arts and Humanities, Behavioral and Social Sciences, Life Sciences, and [Computer] Mathematical and Physical Sciences should have special responsibilities for the development of a coherent core curriculum, and these Colleges should receive appropriate recognition by the Vice Chancellor [for Academic Affairs]/Provost (pp. 8-9). It was this expressed faculty desire to safeguard the tradition of liberal education in the process of reorganization (see Appendix 2) and mounting questions about the Distributive Studies and Advanced Studies requirements of the University Studies Program that compelled the Campus Senate to ask for a review of undergraduate education. In February, 1986 the Campus Senate created the ad hoc committee on undergraduate education (see Appendix 1). The committee was asked to: 1. draft a brief general definition of what an undergraduate education ought to be; 2. assess how well the current general education requirements serve the aims of a liberal education; 3. consider the implications of the administrative reorganization for undergraduate education; and 4. make any other recommendations about undergraduate education the committee considered appropriate. The chairs and executive committees of the Campus Senate have since reaffirmed this original charge (see appendix 3). In his remarks to the committee at the open forums in November, 1986, Professor Bennett declared "I am here to. . .advocate precisely the agenda you have established." Professor Hunt concurred. The charge to the. . .committee was to advise the [Campus] Senate with respect to undergraduate education . . .to make recommendations regarding any aspects of undergraduate education the committee deemed appropriate. The Committee was urged to think boldly and theoretically about the definition of undergraduate education and the best possible ways to truly educate. It is important to stress that the charge to this committee goes beyond curricular review. While a sound curriculum is essential, quality education is also a matter of proper pedagogy, advising, and the learning environment. Last May, following considerable campus discussion of the "Draft Report" by the committee, the Campus Senate Executive Committee reaffirmed its support of the original charge. We want to reiterate the original charge to the Committee to think boldly and make whatever recommendations you deem necessary for improving undergraduate education. You may delimit the task in any way you see fit to focus on the curricular, pedagogical, advising and/or learning environment matters you consider most essential in a statement about quality education at College Park (letter, May 20, 1987). * * * We began our work at the height of a national reexamination of undergraduate education and as the final draft of the Middle States self-study was being prepared. The recommendations that follow reflect campus opinion, the national studies, and the recommendations of the recent Middle States report. The committee has tried to put together a coherent, effective, yet pragmatic set of proposals to improve undergraduate education on this campus. We have tried to write these proposals with sufficient specificity to give meaning and direction to the impending reform and to allow the campus to monitor and measure how fast and how well these reforms are accomplished. We also have tried to introduce enough flexibility into the recommendations so that those who are given the responsibility of instituting the changes will have adequate administrative room in which to work. Our plan is comprehensive and integrated, changing things from before classes begin in the freshman year to a student's last semester in his or her major. Because they are widely known and accepted, we have avoided repeating in detail the goals and justifications for the parts of our proposed General Education Program that borrow directly from the University Studies Program. Where we have suggested major changes, we have tried to be somewhat more full in our discussion. To a large extent we have simply tried to give more coherence to the present University Studies requirements, to ensure that they achieve more of what their creators had in mind. We are trying to ensure that students actually get the kind of broadening education the campus is already committed to providing. What emerge here as formal requirements can often be seen effectively as the highest form of advising: we are advising faculty and students alike to make sure that their general education courses are truly that. And we are responding to numbers of faculty who have asked us to help them do a better job of teaching. Providing a solid education to undergraduates is a central responsibility of the University, perhaps the main responsibility in the eyes of the public. We believe that the campus must enhance the learning environment in which students will grow in mind and spirit and in their ability to participate effectively in the modern world. The campus needs to become more socially supportive, intellectually exciting, and academically rigorous. A leading mission of a great university is to develop students' curiosity and love of learning and equip them with the essential skills and approaches to knowing that will help them towards a lifetime of learning, social contribution, and personal fulfillment. We proceed on the assumption that the campus community-- faculty, staff, and students--shares an enthusiasm for our collective mission, an appreciation and expectation of high standards, a commitment to fairness, a relentless dedication to hard work, and a desire to make the College Park educational experience a model of the best a public institution of higher learning can offer. THE PROCESS The committee has been working continuously for the past nineteen months. For over a year we met on a weekly basis and intensely discussed and debated how to define a meaningful and workable proposal to improve substantially undergraduate education at College Park. We read a great amount of printed material, including all of the recent and much talked-about national reports as well as the Middle States self-study. Individually and/or collectively members of the committee talked with over 450 members of the campus community. One of the most useful things the committee did was to hold a week-long series of open-forums in the fall semester of 1986 to seek the advice of the campus community. The committee sent over 500 letters of invitation including ones to every registered student group on campus and many other student organizations as well. We also sent invitations to over 300 individuals, including all campus senators, many other faculty, the Chancellor, the vice-chancellors, the deans, the academic unit heads, the assistants deans with responsibility for undergraduate education, the heads of academic support services, and many others (see Appendix 4). These open-forums were repeatedly announced in Outlook and advertised in The Diamondback and over WMUC radio. During these sessions we heard from over l50 administrators, alumni/ae, faculty, parents, staff, and students (see Appendix 5). Further, the chair of the committee met last fall with the Middle States Association site team and in February the full committee met and discussed its work with the Educational Policy Committee of the Board of Regents (see Appendix 6). In March, 1987 we prepared a Draft Report which was widely circulated on campus and made available to all campus senators. This Draft Report became the basis of extensive campus discussions of the committee's initial proposals. Consideration of the draft was the basis of a special informational meeting of the Campus Senate as well as meetings between representatives of the committee and (a) various faculty groups such as the campus senators and other interested faculty in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, the College of Education, the College of Physical Education, Recreation and Health, and many departments; (b) various student groups such as the Chancellor's Student Advisory Committee, the Freshman Honor Society (Phi Eta Sigma), and the national leadership honor society (Omicron Delta Kappa); and (c) various groups in the administration such as the Chancellor's office, the Office of Academic Affairs, and the Council of Deans. The committee made a intensive effort to involve the entire campus community continually in the review process. Indeed, this report is significantly influenced by other people's best thinking about quality undergraduate education. A TIME FOR CHANGE This report calls for substantial renewal and revision of undergraduate education at College Park. Why should we do this? Because it will improve the quality of undergraduate education here and enable the campus to move forward in its efforts to achieve academic excellence. The faculty wants it, the students deserve it, the parents expect it, the Chancellor has called for it, the Provost supports it, and the State Board of Higher Education requires it. The time is right. The committee believes that the changes recommended in this report will not only provide students with a better education but in so doing will also reduce attrition and substantially aid the campus in recruiting more of the state's ablest high school graduates to College Park. Far too many of Maryland's best high school graduates now go out of state for their college education. "Currently, [the campus] attracts far fewer merit scholars than its peers, and the SAT scores of entering freshmen fall short of those in peer institutions" (the Hoblitzell report, p. 16). And far too many parents believe that College Park is a first-rate University for graduate study and research or to take a course at themselves--but then they send their children elsewhere. Many parents have the perception that the campus is too large, too impersonal, and too indifferent to quality undergraduate education. And too often they are right. Moreover, the committee believes that strengthening the General Education Program and improving the quality of education during the freshman and sophomore years will benefit the "major" programs of study. An improved program of undergraduate study will also have a positive effect on advancing the programs of research and graduate study. The students deserve the best undergraduate education and the faculty want to provide it. The faculty made this clear during the reorganization hearings (see Appendix 2), in the Campus Senate approval of recommendation 8 of "the Wolvin report," in its response to the survey conducted by the Middle States Coordinating Committee, and in the testimony received by this committee. Indeed, it was the faculty that took the lead and convinced the Campus Senate to create this committee and to charge it with finding ways of improving the quality and rigor of undergraduate education. This faculty initiative is consistent with the campus mission statement and the direction set by Chancellor Slaughter. Four years ago when the Chancellor announced his goals for this campus, he made undergraduate education the centerpiece. At the open-forums of the committee the Chancellor and the Provost renewed their commitment to these goals. Chancellor Slaughter said (November 3, 1986): "When I was inaugurated as Chancellor of College Park in May, 1983, I stressed that one of my principal concerns for the Campus was the quality of the undergraduate experience. I continue to be concerned that we provide opportunities for our students. . .to equip them for a lifetime of learning and growth. "Since that time I have, in conjunction with other Campus leaders, developed a set of goals for the Campus. With the exception of the goal aimed at improving the effectiveness of administration on Campus, each of these goals. . .depends essentially on the quality of our undergraduate experience. "Our campus reorganization requires us to be especially attentive to the need for a cohesive, connected curriculum that cuts across disciplinary boundaries and has as its core a solid, focused intellectual experience such as those proposed in the College Park Seminar and the capstone experience. "All of our students need better advising and better mentoring. . . .We must provide greater opportunities for our students to get to know faculty members as role models, to have faculty members they can call upon for guidance and help, to get excited about learning and intellectual growth. "We are a Campus that is justifiably proud of its growing reputation as a research university. We now have, I believe, the self-confidence and the strength to make a major investment in teaching [and] student- related activities. We need to redress the balance between research and teaching both within our curriculum, which must be broad and inclusive, and within our reward system for our faculty." In his remarks on the same occasion, Provost Kirwan said: "I share [the Chancellor's] views on this matter. . . .You asked, "What is the commitment of the campus administration to this effort?" First, I would like to stress my strong personal support for this effort; I think it is extremely important if we are to realize our potential as a great university. Further, the Office of Academic Affairs is very enthusiastic and very supportive of the effort. . . .As an indication of broad-based campus support, I point out that when the campus made a decision on what areas it would examine in the Middle States effort, we chose the undergraduate curriculum as one of five areas for special emphasis. That is an indication of the importance we, as a campus, place on this matter. "I think that improving undergraduate education is the most important campus initiative underway at this time." The State Board for Higher Education's Maryland Statewide Plan for Postsecondary Education (1986) is unequivocal in making four strong points about undergraduate education: First, "of the three major functions. . .teaching, research, and public service, the instruction of students has been and will continue to be the most important" (p. 1). "The most important function is the transmission of knowledge to individuals through formal courses and programs of study" (p. 42). Second, no part of undergraduate education is more important than the general education component of the baccalaureate program: "This increased emphasis [on general education] is designed to help insure that, regardless of their majors, students will have an understanding of the essential theories and knowledge in important disciplines and will exhibit acceptable levels of achievement among higher order intellectual skills" (p.10). "A strong arts and science background provides students with the general intellectual skills necessary to adapt to a world that is increasingly complex and changing in ways that cannot be predicted very far in advance. Despite increasing student interest in career programs, a strong liberal arts background also is more likely to provide each student with greater long-term advantages in a successful adjusting to changing labor market conditions than a program emphasizing primarily specialized undergraduate training" (p.17). Third, "quality" is the priority goal. The Board insists that the instructional program, especially the general education component, be of "the highest possible quality" (p.17): "Because all students, regardless of their major fields of study, are exposed to an array of courses in the arts and sciences through the completion of general education requirements, it is essential that these programs be of the highest possible quality" (p.17). Fourth, "UMCP should endeavor to become one of the finest public comprehensive universities in the nation" (p.52). The time is right. As Provost Kirwan made plain in his remarks in November, 1986, now is the time to make substantial improvement in the quality of undergraduate education at College Park. "The timing of this effort is. . .perfect," he said, "because it comes on the heels of a very substantial effort here at the University to review undergraduate education as part of our ten year Middle States [Accreditation] report. It also comes at a time when universities across the country are studying the same issues. Other schools are engaged in a similar process." The work of the Middle States self-study committee on undergraduate education has been enormously helpful. The Middle States group laid the groundwork. They collected useful data, engaged the campus in a wide-ranging discussion about undergraduate education, created a critical mass of faculty informed about what is needed to improve undergraduate education here at College Park, and produced a first-rate report. Of all the material we read about undergraduate education, this Middle States self-study prepared for the Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools as part of the decennial review of the campus was the most useful. Barely two weeks after the first meeting of the committee we read an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education reporting that more than one-half (now 2/3) of all the nation's colleges and universities had recently reformed their undergraduate curriculum or were in the process of doing so. We were timid about being engulfed in a fad--we saw little value in merely aping what other colleges and universities do--yet we appreciated the advantage of designing a program of study that would keep the campus competitive and contemporary. Our work was much informed by the experiences at other colleges and universities and by the many recent national studies. There are still other events which indicate that this is a propitious time for change. The Board of Regents is especially interested in and very supportive of campus efforts to improve the quality of undergraduate education. The "Educational Policy Committee" of the Board has proclaimed 1987 the "Year of Teaching" to emphasize its commitment. Evidence of the campus interest in quality undergraduate education is the fact that last year the campus joined with 11 other state universities (University of California at Berkeley, University of California at Los Angeles, University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Texas at Austin, University of Washington, and University of Wisconsin at Madison) to form "The Alliance for Undergraduate Education" which is committed to improving this cornerstone of their missions. In addition, the report of the Governor's Commission on Excellence in Education, the "Hoblitzell report," dealt in large measure with undergraduate education. This report underscores the need to improve the quality and rigor of undergraduate study at College Park and recommends a relative increase in resources toward this end: a 20% reduction in the number of undergraduates at College Park with no decrease in state funding to the campus. This increase in resources is to be devoted to improving the quality and rigor of undergraduate education on campus. Now, indeed, is the time for change. THE COLLEGE PARK GOAL "Education is conversation about the meaning of life, as each sees some part of it, on behalf of everyone." (Robert Redfield, 1955) When students leave the university they should do so only physically and not merely with a transcript and a list of courses successfully passed. They should leave with the ability to teach themselves and with substantial academic knowledge refined by experience in applying their knowledge on the basis of considered ethical choices. The committee spent much time wresting with the question "what are the goals of undergraduate education?" We read a considerable volume of writing on this subject. These materials and the opinions we received from the campus variously emphasized preparation for citizenship, skill development, personal fulfillment, technical competence, epistemological awareness, information, social service, moral-ethical development, and analytical thinking. There is merit in each of these. We believe that a College Park education should enhance the student in all of these ways. The following "College Park Goal" reflects a synthesis of the important objectives of the major schools of thought regarding undergraduate education. It is purposefully ambitious. It is an ideal statement of what undergraduate education should strive for. A campus which has high expectations of its students can ask no less of itself. The College Park Goal An education at the University of Maryland, College Park, strives to cultivate intellect by teaching students to extend principles and ideas to new situations and to new groups of people. It aims to provide students with a sense of identity and purpose, a concern for others, a sense of responsibility for the quality of life around them, a continuing eagerness for knowledge and understanding, and a foundation for a lifetime of personal enrichment. It enlivens students to enlarge the common understanding, to develop humane values, to celebrate tolerance and fairness, to contribute to the social conscience, to monitor and assess private and collective assumptions, and to recognize the glory, tragedy, and humor of the human condition. Specifically, undergraduate education at College Park seeks to enable students to develop and expand their use of basic academic and intellectual tools. Students are educated to be able to read with perception and pleasure, write and speak with clarity and verve, handle numbers and computation proficiently, reason mathematically, generate clear questions and find probable answers, identify and evaluate evidence, develop reasoned arguments, reach substantiated conclusions, and accept ambiguity. Students also study in depth and acquire a substantial competence in a coherent academic discipline. A College Park education helps students to become aware of the variety of ways of knowing, the complexity of being human, and to understand their place in history and in the contemporary world. Students learn to analyze and appreciate artistic creations, to identify and evaluate moral questions, to synthesize and integrate knowledge, and to become intellectually flexible, inventive, and creative. THE CURRENT STATE OF UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION American colleges and universities are currently in the midst of a highly critical reexamination of undergraduate education. During the last three years several major reports and innumerable minor ones have been published examining the quality of undergraduate education at most colleges and universities. In our view, the three best of the national reports are Involvement in Learning: Realizing the Potential of Higher Education, Integrity in the College Curriculum: A Report to the Academic Community, and College: The Undergraduate Experience in America. These reports are nearly unanimous in describing what is amiss. Among their many indictments are disarray in the undergraduate curriculum, low valuation of undergraduate teaching, loss of integrity of the baccalaureate degree, excessive specialization, majoring in narrow specialties, excessive professionalization and vocationalism, the failure of distribution requirements to yield a general education, and more. In their recommendations for revitalization of undergraduate education, these reports are surprisingly similar (e.g., all underscore the need to increase the rewards for good undergraduate teaching). The main difference is one of emphasis. Some reports stress curricular reform as the way "to take back" the university. Others, particularly Involvement in Learning, focus less on the content of undergraduate education than on the modes in which it can be made effective. The key, they say, is student involvement. Students must be actively engaged in processing the materials being explored in the classroom through writing, small discussion groups, case studies, in-class presentations, student-faculty contact, direct student involvement in scholarly work of the faculty, improved advising. Considered together these national reports alone constitute a convincing argument for reassessing the quality of undergraduate education at College Park. Yet the substance of these national reports has long been part of campus discussions. Based upon the advice and testimony received by the committee as well as numerous campus reports, the 1985 survey of faculty and students conducted for the Middle States study group, and the Middle States self-study report, the campus community seems to have made essentially the same assessment of undergraduate education at College Park that is contained in the national reports. Some specific campus criticisms frequently repeated are: 1. Many professors are unaware (and some are indifferent) that the courses they teach are part of a general education program. 2. Partly as a result of (1), students do not understand the purpose of the general education program or see how individual courses fit into it. Students typically view general education courses as hurdles in the way of taking courses in the major. 3. Too many undergraduate courses are taught in classes too large for active learning and foster, instead, passive training. 4. Undergraduate teaching is seriously undervalued by the present reward structure. 5. The content of many of the Distributive and Advanced Studies courses is too narrow and specialized. 6. No one is effectively in charge of, and therefore championing, undergraduate education and general education in particular. 7. The academic expectations in many undergraduate courses are too low. 8. The Distributive and Advanced Studies programs are structured so loosely that the combination of courses which most students take does not provide them with a coherent undergraduate education. 9. There may simply be too many courses in the Distributive Studies program (388 different courses, many with very different multiple sections), which makes monitoring and advising difficult. There are definitely many marginal courses that need to be eliminated. 10. First and second year courses are too often taught by the least experienced and skilled professors or by graduate students. 11. The current orientation program for beginning students provides inadequate attention to the academic needs and responsibilities of students and is not mandatory. 12. Students regularly receive inadequate academic advising. THE PROPOSED GENERAL EDUCATION PROGRAM The proposed General Education Program retains many of the features of the current University Studies Program. Specifically, we advocate continuing the framework of three basic components--Fundamental Studies, Distributive Studies, and Advanced Studies. We also advocate continuing the current policy that any General Education Program course may satisfy college, major, and/or supporting area requirements at the discretion of the college or department. In the following pages we address each of these components recommending various changes and initiatives. FUNDAMENTAL STUDIES The rationale behind Fundamental Studies is that work on certain basic skills ensures that every student will have the tools necessary for success in higher education. Presently Fundamental Studies includes an English and a mathematics requirement. The committee recommends continuance, evaluation, and improvement of courses in this part of the General Education Program. We recommend instituting a pilot program of College Park Seminars that would eventually provide all first-year students with a small class dealing with a few primary texts or central concepts taught by a full-time faculty member; and we recommend studying the possibility of establishing a required speech course. - English and Mathematics Students are presently required to earn nine credits in Fundamental Studies by satisfying two basic requirements which, except for ENGL 391 or 393, must be completed by the time the student has completed 30 credit hours): 1. English Composition (2 courses, 6 credits) Students must complete English 101 and English 391 or 393 a. English 101 (3 credits) 1. Students with TWST score below 330 take ENGL 101A 2. Students with AP score of 4 or 5, or SAT verbal of 600 or above are exempt 3. Students who achieve a score of 5l or above on the CLEP Subject Examination College Composition (with essay questions) are exempt b. English 391--Junior Level Expository Writing or 393 --Technical Writing (3 credits) 1. Must be taken after student has completed 56 credit hours 2. Students with an A grade in ENGL 101 (but not 101A or 101X) are exempt 2. Mathematics (1 course, 3 credits) Students must complete Mathematics 110 (or the modular equivalent MATH 102-3-4) or 115. a. Students with the following minimum examination scores or higher are exempt: 1. SAT of 600 or above 2. College Board Achievement Tests in Mathematics, Level I or II: 600 3. Advanced Placement Examinations, Calculus AB or BC: 3 4. Any CLEP Subject Examination in Mathematics: 60 b. Successful completion of any of the following higher level entry courses than MATH 110: MATH 111, 140, 141, 151, 220, 221, 240, 241, 246, 250, 251; STAT 100, 250 Recommendation 1: The present English and mathematics requirements of Fundamental Studies should be continued. All students should write clearly and effectively. The committee recommends continuing the present English requirement of English 101 and English 391 or 393. However, the committee is concerned that students are required to write in so few of their non-English courses and that so few faculty correct even the grossest of writing mistakes. We believe that writing assignments should be a feature of most courses and that faculty across the curriculum should take care to evaluate the quality of both the content and the written expression of content. Writing is fundamental. Two required English courses cannot do it all. All students should have a basic understanding of mathematics. The current requirement of achieving a high score on either an aptitude or placement test and/or successful completion of either Math 110 or 115 or a higher-level mathematics course should be continued. However, there are two features of the mathematics component of the Fundamental Studies program that need attention. First, because the different mathematics courses which are used to satisfy the general education requirement have diverse missions, great care must be exercised in advising and placing students. Ill-considered placement of a student in a course often results in poor performance. The Mathematics Department should make certain that advisors throughout the campus are aware of the goals of and requirements for each of these courses and advisors should take seriously such information, as well as results of mathematics placement tests. Second, all students should be advised and encouraged to satisfy the mathematics requirement early in their studies. University policy states that students must have attempted Fundamental Studies courses in English 101 and Mathematics 110 or 115 by the 30 credit level and have completed them by the 60 credit level. This is a sound policy. For too long, too many students (particularly transfer students) have postponed taking mathematics until late in their academic studies. The committee applauds recent campus efforts to require students to complete Fundamental Studies in mathematics before their junior year. Indeed, earlier is better. In the interests of equity and high standards, we urge the administrators of the required English and mathematics courses to be diligent in determining that all courses--on or off campus-- accepted as satisfying the Fundamental Studies requirements be carefully examined to ensure that they are of sufficient sophistication and rigor to meet the goals of the Fundamental Studies Program. - The College Park Seminar Recommendation 2: The campus should establish a two year trial program of "College Park Seminars" as part of the General Education Program. The Middle States self-study says, "we currently spend much time and money trying to ensure that our students can write and compute, but do little to improve their abilities to read deeply and think for themselves." The "Task Force on Lower Division Education in California" argues persuasively that small classes in the first year improve the campus climate in a number of ways, attracting more good students and improving retention, thereby raising the intellectual level of the whole campus. The committee shares these beliefs and sees a compelling need to introduce students to the intellectual expectations of this campus and to deepen the intellectual experience of every beginning student in his or her first year here. Students more thoroughly introduced to university intellectual life will benefit more from all their courses and will take their education here more seriously. Close contact with full-time faculty in their first year will help students find their intellectual, social, moral, and personal bearings on this large campus. Large lecture classes alone do not constitute an adequate setting for learning. The seminar is needed as a balance point. One seminar will provide the opportunity for each student to work closely with a regular faculty member and to confront difficult questions through directed inquiry. The goal of The College Park Seminar is to guide students in dealing with texts or concepts that require analysis and digestion. The approach will not be "coverage," but depth; not information, but information coupled with understanding. Students will be taught how to approach the difficult and seemingly unanswerable questions that have challenged and continue to challenge thinking people and have produced some of the wisest texts and most important intellectual discoveries of our heritage. The goal is clear; the need recognized by many on this campus and in most of the recent studies of higher education. But because of the varied nature of a modern university, the means to this goal are complex and hard to pin down. After extensive study and discussion, the committee decided to break with the recommendations of the Middle States self-study report that the College Park Seminars all have a very similar shape and even overlapping substance. The attraction of one or a series of "great books" interdisciplinary seminars for all first year students is strong; the benefits in providing a common core of intellectual experience for the whole freshman class are many. Options less uniform that would still maintain some common intellectual core, some text studies by all students, were studied and discussed at length. Some on the committee still hope that if this recommendation is approved, the person responsible for the seminar program will examine the possibility of having a single text, changed and announced each year by the Chancellor, read in all or most of the seminars (and, we would hope, by the whole campus community). The unifying effects of such a common intellectual commitment could be galvanic. Although uniformity of intellectual experience is desirable, the primary concern is that of getting beginning students in small classes with seasoned teachers to work on major texts or key concepts through extensive discussion and paper writing. It is manifestly clear to the committee that the whole seminar program will be much more feasible if the substance of the seminars is opened up almost without limit as long as the approach follows guidelines to ensure that all seminars introduce students to a few of the most substantial texts or central concepts and oblige students to work with these texts or concepts intensively through discussion and writing. The seminars should be small (20 students), should be taught by full-time faculty or appropriate emeriti faculty (a rich and neglected resource), should require multiple writing exercises outside of class, and should deal centrally with a few primary texts of a discipline or disciplines, or with a few of the seminal concepts in disciplines (like some of the sciences) where the original texts themselves may not be appropriate or available to beginning students. Each proposer of a seminar should be free to choose the texts or concepts that would both challenge the students and give them some understanding of the nature of the disciplines being explored. Clear criteria will need to be established for approving proposals, including evidence that the seminar has been designed to confront epistemological issues, to explore complex questions deeply, and to articulate the knowledge being explored in the seminar with a larger intellectual context. The requirement that each seminar should focus on a few central texts or concepts should be ironclad. Because this venture needs the full resolve of the campus community, the committee suggests that the campus test the idea for three semesters and then return to the Campus Senate with a detailed evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of the seminars for a final decision as to whether and/or when to provide one seminar for each member of the freshman class. We suggest that during the trial the number of seminars be gradually increased--perhaps 20 the first semester, 40 the second, and 60 the third. This pilot program will require only minimal additional resources. If a full seminar program is implemented, additional new resources will be required at that time. The success of such a program requires that the campus administration from the Provost/Vice-chancellor for Academic Affairs to Deans and Chairs affirm its value by indicating that teaching in the program will be valued and that departments will be rewarded for the number of seminars they offer. The College Park Seminar program should not be considered in isolation, since it is intended to be a part of the whole package of changes being recommended which will, we think, improve the intellectual climate on this campus. The College Park Seminar is directly tied to the Distributive Studies component of the General Education Program since each seminar will satisfy one requirement in the appropriate category of Distributive Studies. The connection with the proposed "capstone" course is subtler but intellectually very strong: the same concern with students' abilities to think deeply and creatively rather than merely to absorb information passively lies behind the call for both these innovations. - Speech Recommendation 3: The campus should explore establishing a speech communication course as part of the Fundamental Studies program by instituting a two year experiment. Current reviews of undergraduate education (e. g., the reports sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the National Institute of Education, and the Association of American Colleges, etc.) recognize the importance of students being able to speak clearly and effectively. The committee agrees. The committee received conflicting advice as to the wisdom and feasibility of requiring a speech course as part of Fundamental Studies. There is universal agreement that all students should leave the campus able to express themselves effectively in oral presentations. But there is also a lot of sentiment that speech is something which can be learned well in high school and that students often develop speaking skills in their various courses and life experiences. In addition many students already take at least one speech course. The present enrollment of 100 and 200 level speech courses is 3000 plus per year. In view of the importance of good speaking skills and the considerable conflicting advice the committee received, we recommend that the Campus Senate request that the Speech Communication Division work closely with the Campus Senate General Education Committee (see recommendation 15) to design, test, and evaluate a single speech skills course for the General Education Program, and to report the results to the Campus Senate in the fall, 1989 with a recommendation. The proposed speech course should be designed to complement other academic work (e.g., research and writing projects in other courses could serve as the basis for speech assignments as well). The course, while providing direct instruction in speaking skills, must provide a meaningful forum for students in small classes to discuss issues in coherent, reasoned, and articulate discourse. The proposed course should be taught, organized, and administered much like the Fundamental Studies English course (ENGL 101). And like ENGL 101 this course should be a skills course offered in classes that are small enough to provide students with multiple opportunities for various kinds of speaking (and with sections for students with special--those for whom English is a second language, those with a high level of anxiety, etc.) and designed and managed in such a way that properly trained advanced graduate students would be able to teach sections. A testing and exemption process similar to that for the English and mathematics requirements should be developed. Students who complete an appropriate speech course at another college or who have completed a full year of high school speech would be exempted. DISTRIBUTIVE STUDIES The Distributive Studies component aims to cover the broad areas of knowledge that each student should be familiar with: arts and humanities, behavioral and social science (including history and culture), and natural science. Recommendation 4: Each Distributive Studies course should acquaint students with central ways of seeing, conceptualizing, and knowing a significant portion of the world. Each course should give an historical and epistemological perspective of the discipline area and identify its relationship to other disciplines. For many students the only courses taken in one of these broad subject areas are those required by the General Education Program. Great care is needed to construct these courses in such a way that they truly serve the ends of general education. Many Distributive Studies courses planned primarily for the major may be too narrow and specialized or devoted exclusively to providing students with large amounts of information. This is the wrong emphasis for the purposes of general education. For example, a Distributive Studies course taken to fulfill the requirement in social science, must leave the student with, among other things, a sense of what social science is all about. The purpose in this case would not be simply to give the student information about, say, anthropology, or a subfield of anthropology, but also to use anthropology as a vehicle and set of materials to introduce students to the methods and ways of knowing in social science. While studying anthropology, a Distributive Studies course should address questions like what is social science? how does social science view the world? what sorts of assumptions do social scientists make? what sorts of questions do they ask? why? what constitutes evidence? how is anthropology similar to and different from political science, economics, history, etc. In short, Distributive Studies courses should serve as an introduction to the different kinds of knowledge and nature of scholarship in the humanities, physical sciences, and social sciences. Properly constructed Distributive Studies courses can serve both general education and major requirements. The committee assumes that many of the existing Distributive Studies courses already meet or will be able to be adjusted to meet the new, stricter general education guidelines. This would seem especially likely for courses presently offered by the traditional arts and sciences colleges. Some courses will, however, need restructuring and changing of emphasis to qualify as Distributive Studies courses. The goal is to achieve a selection of courses that put information in perspective, facts with theory, and specialization in a larger intellectual context. In those cases where a syllabus simply cannot be rearranged to allow sufficient time to explore the kinds of questions we have described here, or where a course simply cannot be taught in a way that will require active involvement by all students, courses should be dropped from the Distributive Studies list or expanded into four credit classes with extra room added to address the general education concerns. This is, of course, in no way a negative judgment of their value but simply a recognition of the special needs of general education. In reexamining their Distributive Studies courses in order to ensure that they fulfill the purposes of the General Education Program, faculty members should take into account the emerging scholarly literature by and about women and minorities as it relates to their areas. Recommendation 5: The Distributive Studies program should require that each student complete nine credits in arts and humanities: one literature course; one arts course; and one additional arts and humanities course (literature, arts, philosophy, or classics). Recommendation 6: The Distributive Studies program should require that each student complete nine credits in social science: one social or political history course, and two courses in behavioral and social science. Recommendation 7: The Distributive Studies program should require that each student complete ten credits in mathematics, science, and technology: one life science course and one physical science course, one of which must provide a laboratory experience; and one additional course in computer science, life science, mathematics, physical science, statistics, or technology. Recommendation 8: Each student should be required to take one course that focuses primarily on either (a) the history, status, treatment, or accomplishments of women or minority groups and subcultures, or (b) cultural areas outside North America and Western Europe. (This course may but need not be drawn from either Distributive Studies or Advanced Studies; it may be satisfied with any major, supporting, or elective course from the approved list.) The recommended course requirements in Distributive Studies differ from the present ones in the following ways. First, the committee recommends three courses (rather than two) in mathematics, science, and technology (beyond what is required for Fundamental Studies). This is in line with the growth in importance and broadening in scope of these areas in the world today and is consistent with the programs at "peer" institutions. The committee also recommends that every student complete at least one course in the life sciences and one course in the physical sciences; presently a student need not study both. Second, the committee recommends that every student take at least one course in social or political history, reflecting our view of the importance of historical grounding to a well-educated person. Finally, the committee feels that each student should have both a literature course and a fine arts course; presently a student need not study both. Since we live in a steadily shrinking and inter-dependent world, a "global village" increasingly aware of the dangers of chauvinism or parochialism of any kind, it is essential that College Park graduates leave having taken at least one course that will alert them to areas and energies other than those dominant in the traditional western culture. The committee does not insist on narrowly limiting the academic departments from which the designated Distributive Studies courses might be chosen or requiring that every faculty member offering an appropriate course must reside within the traditional arts and sciences colleges. However the committee does concur with the current Campus Senate position that the four traditional arts and sciences colleges have special responsibilities in this area. The committee insists that the content of each course must be consistent with and derived from the traditional arts and sciences methodologies and that the pedagogy in each such course must conform to the philosophy and guidelines outlined in this report. All courses will have to offer evidence of sufficient intellectual centrality to the liberal arts and sciences to merit being counted as part of the General Education Program. These recommended changes will introduce more integrity into the curriculum. If they are adopted, lists of courses that meet these new Distributive Studies requirements will need to be developed by the Campus Senate General Education Committee (see recommendation 15) of the Campus Senate. (Past chairs of the University Studies Program Committee might be enlisted to lend their expertise to speed the initial reconsideration of all Distributive Studies courses.) We strongly urge that courses on these lists of approved courses be carefully examined to ascertain that they meet the intellectual and pedagogical goals of the General Education Program. Too vast an array of approved courses makes quality-control, informed advising, and intelligent selection of courses very difficult indeed. Any list will require careful maintenance by the General Education Committee and the administrator responsible for the General Education Program with the help of departmental monitoring. The committee also suggests that the General Education Committee study the feasibility of creating interdisciplinary courses that meet the goals of the program and identify sets of courses within each area that would complement each other. This pairing would provide coherence to undergraduate choices, even while other options were allowed. We urge college deans to take the lead in helping establish interdisciplinary courses and innovative pairings within and between colleges. In addition, the committee feels that most Distributive Studies courses should be taken during a student's freshman and sophomore years. ADVANCED STUDIES The Advanced Studies component is designed to continue the experience of broadening general education into a student's junior and senior years. Advanced Studies courses are intended to provide students with the opportunity to cultivate higher- level critical thinking skills. These courses should also provide students with the opportunity to reflect upon contemporary problems and to bring the "major" into their general education through the capstone course. In addition, such courses can be used to provide students with opportunities to pursue advanced work in areas outside their majors. At present, students may take these courses only after they have completed 56 credits of course work; the committee recommends that this policy be continued. The committee believes that the Advanced Studies requirements should be structured in the following manner and required of all students: Recommendation 9: Each student should take six credits of Advanced Studies courses: one "Analysis of Social and Ethical Problems" course and one of the following options: (a) a second "Analysis of Social and Ethical Problems" course from a different department also outside the major, or (b) an approved senior- level "capstone" course in the student's major department. As a result of campus hearings and other discussions, the committee is persuaded that the courses identified for the Analysis of Social and Ethical Problems (the present Analysis of Human Problems) meet program goals and receive broad faculty and student approval. The label change to "Analysis of Social and Ethical Problems" is intended to suggest a more specific emphasis than is currently the case. Courses in the Advanced Studies program should not only deal with "human problems" but should also require students to confront squarely moral and ethical issues. The ability to recognize and wrestle with such issues is one of the characteristics of a liberal education. Although most of the current "Analysis of Human Problems" courses would be acceptable under the new description, the committee believes that they should be reviewed to verify this new emphasis. The committee has concluded that the goals of courses in the Development of Knowledge category are not as well articulated or understood by either faculty or students. Consequently the committee believes that this area should be dropped. - The Capstone Recommendation 10: Each Department should develop a "capstone" course for its major field of study. The committee endorses the concept of a "capstone" course. The particular design of the capstone should be the responsibility of the "major" and will vary from department to department. The capstone should be taken during the last 30 credits and preferably during the final semester of study. Departments and colleges typically design major requirements to give students an "introduction" to the field and enough knowledge of professional or disciplinary methodology to begin to function as nascent professionals or graduate students. Majors are designed to meet instrumental goals and the driving principle in most, just as in most individual courses, is "coverage." Only rarely is there a course designed to provide a synthesizing experience in the student's senior year. And even less often is there a course designed to put the whole undergraduate education experience in perspective in order to help students see and articulate the interrelationships between the major and the general education program. The capstone course would do this, or at least some of it. As much as possible, the capstone course should be a culmination of the student's baccalaureate study. The "course" should be designed to maximize the student's opportunity to use the discipline(s) of the field, to bring together learning from different parts of the curriculum, to resolve important problems that are raised by the exercise, and to deal with relevant value questions. In other words, the work should require the student to demonstrate the ability to synthesize ideas, to think critically, to exercise judgment, and to communicate the results of her or his work. (Like all General Education Program courses, the capstone courses must be approved for the Program and may satisfy college, major, and/or supporting area requirements at the discretion of the college or department.) The committee believes that all students would benefit from the learning experience of a capstone course but does not recommend it as a university-wide requirement at this time. We urge the Campus Senate to call for a thorough review of the capstone courses in fall, 1990 to consider the merit of making the capstone course a required part of the General Education Program for all students. The development of a capstone course will be accomplished more quickly and easily in some departments than in others. Some departments already provide this type of integrating educational experience. Most do not. Some departments have the staff and resources to do so now. Some do not. In some academic units the structure and content of the course is not immediately obvious. It will take time and, for some academic units, additional resources to develop and put in place an appropriate educational experience. Implementation of this recommendation requires both funds and flexibility. The committee recommends that every department design a capstone course but defers to each department the decision as to whether to make the course an option or a requirement for all majors. (The capstone course is one of two ways to meet the Advanced Studies requirement described in recommendation 9. Students may, instead, take a second Analysis of Social and Ethical Problems course outside their majors.) PEDAGOGY Recommendation 11: The campus should set high academic standards for courses taken to fulfill requirements for the General Education Program, discontinuing the pass-fail grading option for these courses. Currently, Fundamental Studies courses (English and mathematics) cannot be taken pass-fail. The committee recommends the same policy for all courses taken to fulfill requirements for the General Education Program. Based on the testimony received by the committee and the studies we read, we believe that students typically perform to expectations. The pass/fail option generates a low expectation and some students use this option in order to make only the minimum effort to "pass." Removal of this option will in itself set a higher standard for students. Recommendation 12: Every effort should be made to staff Distributive and Advanced Studies courses with regular faculty members and to provide laboratory or discussion sessions in large classes. The regular teaching faculty with proven teaching experience should have the primary responsibility of providing an outstanding general education to undergraduates. Graduate students and new faculty with no prior teaching experience should be required to participate in an intensive and multi-day "teaching workshop" prior to teaching in the General Education Program and departments should be especially generous in providing guidance to these beginning instructors. We call on the campus administration to help locate funds to support this essential General Education Program teacher training: faculty participation should be rewarded financially. All instructors should be knowledgeable about the philosophy, guidelines, and expectations of the General Education Program and know which, if any, of the courses they teach are part of the Program. Recommendation 13: General Education Program courses should feature modes of teaching which require that students take responsibility for their learning and should have enrollments sufficiently small to make this possible. Pedagogically, all general education courses should help students process information and ideas and reach substantiated conclusions. Each course should focus on at least one basic intellectual skill (critical, analytical, or numerical thinking, writing, or speaking) and should emphasize at least one form of active learning (oral reports or written papers, projects, laboratory exercises, etc.). The administrative and resource complexities of providing adequately small classes for all our students are beyond the reach of the committee. But it is clear to all that many sections of general education courses have enrollments that compromise quality education. Presently, some sections of Distributive Studies courses have 500 students and many have enrollments of 150 plus. Quality education requires that students actively process the material being studied and this means working through case studies, doing experiments, writing and re-writing, giving speeches, doing lab exercises, projects, or term papers. Such enrollments may be acceptable in some courses where there are laboratory or discussion sessions and students are given the task of active involvement in the learning process. However, the academic value of large lecture classes without such active sessions is questionable. Teaching is a labor-intensive activity. No professor can reasonably guide, monitor, and continually evaluate the learning of more than 100 students per semester--probably fewer if all his or her students are actively involved through extensive written assignments. After months of consideration the committee decided not to recommend a ceiling on Distributive Studies and Advanced Studies course enrollments but to urge that academic unit heads, led by the Provost/Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, seek to ensure that class sizes are appropriate to allow effective teaching and active student learning. ADMINISTRATION Recommendation 14: A senior campus administrator with an enabling budget should be responsible for all elements of the General Education Program. This administrator should serve ex officio on the Campus Senate Committee on General Education, should be responsible for implementing the Committee's actions, and should report biennially to the Campus Senate on the state of undergraduate education on campus. The need for a powerful, respected champion of general education to fight for resources and respect for the program is obvious if the General Education Program is to succeed. The last time the Campus Senate approved changes in the general education program (April 19, 1979) it required that it be given an annual report on the state of undergraduate education. So far as we have been able to learn, there has been no report in the last seven years. This lack of attention allows undergraduate education to pushed aside in the fight for resources. Recommendation 15: The Campus Senate should have a standing committee solely concerned with the General Education Program. This committee will replace the current "USP committee" and will be specifically responsible for initiating action to implement the curricular recommendations of this report which are adopted by the Campus Senate and for monitoring and ensuring the integrity of the General Education Program. It is essential that all General Education Program courses, including the College Park Seminars, Distributive and Advanced Studies courses, and the capstone courses, be carefully selected and periodically reviewed by a Campus Senate committee empowered to ensure that both content and pedagogy of such courses meet the goals of the Program. This Campus Senate Committee on General Education should establish effective criteria for: 1. ensuring that both faculty and students understand the goals of the General Education Program and each of its components; 2. maintaining control of the number and quality of College Park Seminars, Distributive Studies, Advanced Studies, and capstone courses; 3. ensuring that multiple sections of the same course meet the General Education Program goals; 4. adding and deleting courses from the approved lists of General Education Program courses; 5. ensuring periodic review of each component of the General Education Program--Fundamental Studies, Distributive Studies, and Advanced Studies--for the Campus Senate. We strongly suggest that this Campus Senate Committee on General Education be chaired by a member of the faculty and include, at minimum, one faculty member from each of the traditional arts and sciences colleges (Arts and Humanities; Behavioral and Social Sciences; Computer, Mathematical and Physical Sciences; and Life Sciences), one dean from one of the same four colleges, representation from the professional colleges, and two undergraduate students. The senior administrator responsible for the General Education Program should serve as secretary to the committee. This committee must of course work closely with the deans and heads of other academic units. Service on this committee will be arduous; some means should be found to lighten the other responsibilities of at least the chair of this committee. Recommendation 16: Department Chairs should review annually all General Education Program courses in their departments to ascertain if each course is meeting the intellectual and pedagogical goals of the General Education Program and should report the findings to the senior administrator responsible for the General Education Program. The need for this kind of review is obvious. On this large campus, the departments have a vital role to play in keeping the General Education Program strong. While the departmental evaluation will not be sufficient to ensure the maintenance of high and appropriate intellectual and pedagogical standards, it will alert the faculty to what the expectations are for these courses and help the administrator of the General Education Program in his or her work. THE UNDERGRADUATE MAJOR Recommendation 17: Each department should develop a rationale for its major as a coherent body of knowledge, including an explanation of the need for each required course and should reexamine the adequacy of its contribution to general education on campus. This recommendation is taken from the Middle States self- study and supported by the national reports. The committee recognizes the necessity for strong majors or, as the Association of American Colleges report, Integrity in the College Curriculum, prefers to call them, "studies in depth" as part of the undergraduate program. The committee agrees with the Middle States self-study that majors should offer clear philosophical justifications of their requirements and is convinced that virtually every major would benefit by reviewing the intellectual coherence of its program. The committee recommends that each academic unit prepare a statement of purpose for its major. Such a statement should show students how each requirement fits into the major's overall educational objectives. Courses which are not essential to the major, the General Education Program, or the supporting course program of other majors should be assigned a low priority. Some departments may be able to identify courses which can be discontinued. (We urge all departments to search for and eliminate redundancy in courses within and between departments.) This would free some faculty to teach Distributive and Advanced Studies courses or the College Park Seminars recommended in this report. The committee believes that the "major" is an important and integral part of the General Education Program. Just as the General Education Program contributes to professional education by providing students breath of knowledge and basic communication skills, the major provides students with a study in depth that develops powers of informed judgment and the dual capacities of appreciation and criticism. The major makes its contribution by illuminating the power of concentration and the strengths of its own approach. Each is essential to undergraduate education. The relationship is reciprocal. The committee firmly believes that every major area of study should consciously promote the larger goals of undergraduate education and provide students with substantial opportunity for primary reading and considerable writing. The committee urges each department to assess the extent to which it contributes to the General Education Program and, if appropriate, institute changes to extend and improve the central values and skills of liberal education. - Restricted Electives, Restricted Majors Two important matters which directly involve "major" fields of study are the absence of "free electives" and the presence of "selective admissions" ("pre-majors," "restricted majors"). The committee makes no formal recommendation on either of these matters. As a matter of philosophy, the committee believes that students should be able to earn the baccalaureate degree (satisfy all general education and major requirements as well as take some elective courses) in four years of study, 120 credits. The committee agrees, in principle, with the Middle States self- study (draft) recommendation that "students should have an opportunity as undergraduates to choose a few courses at will, without any regard for requirements. . . .A distribution of 60 [credit] hours for the major, 40-45 hours of general education, and 15-20 hours of free electives seems about right. . . ." The committee believes that every program of study should be designed to encourage each student to take at least one unencumbered elective each academic year but does not make this a formal recommendation for fear of creating undue hardships for some programs of study--primarily professional programs which must satisfy imposed state or national minimum accreditation requirements and even now require more than 120 credits. The committee urges each department to try to design a program of study that allows students to satisfy general education and major requirements and still leaves them some free electives to explore other intellectual areas. Perhaps fields of study which are not able to do this because of the demands of national accreditation boards will force the issue in their professional associations or decide to advertise themselves as four and a half or five year programs (which some of them in fact already are). It is time for offending departments to face seriously the question of whether their required program of study is in fact limiting the overall quality of their students' undergraduate education. In a world in which increasing numbers of people change careers (even several times) during their lives, narrow preparation for today's job must never be allowed to push aside the broader education that prepares one to cope with change and long life. The committee is also convinced that it is time for the campus to make a clear, intelligent, and equitable decision on the issue of restricted admission to some major areas of study. Presently, five colleges (Architecture, Business and Management, Education, Engineering, and Journalism) and four departments (Computer Science, Design, Economics, and Radio, Television, and Film) have selective admissions. This situation is causing negative educational effects for students and faculty alike both inside and outside of the affected academic units. The committee is concerned that far too many students are being encouraged by the present system to continue hoping they will be admitted to majors when statistics demonstrate that few of them will. This puts students in an untenable position academically as they try to satisfy all the requirements of two majors (their first choice and the "alternative") and emotionally as they often disdain the value of their "imposed" second major. It is difficult for many students in this situation to accept the fact that they will not be admitted to the selective major and that they need to get about the business of making a good education out of their alternative. This also compromises the integrity of undergraduate education and makes administration of some academic units formidable, advising almost impossible. For example, the cumulative nature of these problems has already resulted in major logistical problems for the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences and especially for the Departments of Economics and Psychology. The committee believes that something decisive must be done to stop students from wasting the opportunities they do have while wishing for choices they will not have. The Office of Academic Affairs is developing new admission procedures that, in particular, will address the issue of selective admissions. These procedures will be submitted to the Campus Senate for review this fall. ADMISSION REQUIREMENTS At this time the campus has four admission requirements for freshmen: four years of English, three years of social science/history, two years of laboratory science, and two years of mathematics (algebra I and plane geometry). Beginning in fall, 1988, algebra II will also be required. The campus has no foreign language admission requirement, nor do any colleges or universities in the state of Maryland. FOREIGN LANGUAGE The importance of foreign language study to an understanding of other cultures is conventional wisdom. Language study is a major escape route from parochialism because its study has a broadening and humanizing effect. It helps one understand and identify with other cultures. Fluency in a foreign language is often necessary for employment in a vast array of college graduate jobs. The need for superior foreign language competency by government for matters of international policy; by industry, in the state of Maryland and the nation; and by pre-college educators is crucial. The importance of foreign languages to a sophisticated understanding of other cultures is more crucial now than it has ever been. Major undertakings are now required to fulfill the humanizing purposes of education, to afford students a more global view of the world, to promote a better understanding of other peoples and cultures, and to contribute to a more peaceful world environment. This is especially urgent for conducting foreign policy at all levels of government and for carrying on international trade. But equally important, U.S. travellers abroad, especially those who are engaged in agricultural and other scientific exchange, can attest to the initial importance of being knowledgeable about the language and the culture in which they find themselves. It is through language that we come to understand the diversity of other cultures. . . .This is important. . . .for citizens in the United States [with its] large number of immigrant groups who, while acquiring expertise in English, are increasingly retaining their native language, thus contributing to the nation a rich and unparalleled pluralism. ("University-wide Task Force on Foreign Languages," June, 1984). Because foreign language study is one kind of learning that can be done effectively before college, we think it should whenever possible be done there. Foreign languages are most easily learned at an early age and therefore should be studied before college whenever possible. Moreover, it seems to take at least three years of foreign language study in a secondary school to gain a minimal competency in the language. The State Board of Higher Education recommends that college-bound high school students complete three years of foreign language (including at least two years in the same language). The campus undergraduate admissions office "strongly encourages prospective students to take at least two years of foreign language." Both the Middle States self-study and the "Walton report" (both completed last year) recommended that the campus have an admission requirement of three years of high school foreign language study. We make the same recommendation. Recommendation 18: The campus should phase in a foreign language admission requirement of three years of one high school foreign language. The committee recommends that the campus establish a foreign language admission requirement equivalent to the level achieved by completion of three years of high school foreign language study. Students who, by virtue of residence abroad or independent study or any other means, have attained the standard ordinarily reached on completion of three years of high school foreign language study shall be deemed to have satisfied this requirement if they are able to demonstrate this competency by achieving a sufficiently high score in an examination acceptable to the appropriate foreign language department. This admission requirement should be phased in cautiously and slowly over a period of years with full consideration for its consequences. First, the timing of this requirement must be carefully sorted out in consultation with high schools throughout the state to ensure that they have sufficient time to make the necessary adjustments. Parents and prospective students must be given adequate notice to plan student schedules. (Of the freshmen entering in fall, 1985, 97% had completed one year of high school foreign language; 87% had completed two years; 59% had completed three years, 25% had completed four years, 9% had completed five years, and less than 1% had completed six years.) Second, implementation of this requirement must be conducted in such a way that it does not damage the campus recruitment program. We have concluded that handled properly, this need not be a concern, but we recommend constant vigilance to ensure that recruitment needs are considered as the campus works towards the goal of a three year foreign language requirement. THE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT ACADEMIC ADVISING Recommendation 19: All academic units should affirm that advising is an integral part of teaching and should offer a systematic program of advising that guides students from matriculation through graduation. The committee believes that academic advising is a central component of undergraduate education. The limitations of the present advising system are well-known (see Appendix 7). The quality and coherence of academic advising varies from one department and college to another. Although a number of people on campus are doing excellent work, advising is one of the weakest links in the education of our students. Many faculty do not do any significant advising of undergraduates. Most academic units slough the problem off onto one or two people who are typically overworked and sometimes overwhelmed. Peer "advisors" are too often untrained or poorly trained and rarely understand the dynamics and objectives of academic programs. Students have a right to expect and should be encouraged to demand excellence in the classroom and excellence in academic advising. Without guidance, students cannot experience the University fully. Students need more than course advice; they also need suggestions on appropriate intellectual resources, campus activities, and career steps. And they need mentors and role models from the faculty. The committee strongly urges that all academic units (1) identify qualified faculty or provide advising by trained, professional advisors adequate to student demand (undergraduate peer advisors and graduate students should not be relied upon to provide effective guidance), and (2) develop workshops or orientation programs (perhaps as one-credit courses along the lines of the orientation course in Engineering) to facilitate academic advising and to help their students understand the relationship between a liberal education, the "major" field of study, and the practical, moral, and political world they will enter after graduation. The campus should (3) make funds available to encourage and facilitate these enterprises. In addition, appropriate administrators (usually Deans of Colleges) should (4) report annually to the Provost/Vice-chancellor for Academic Affairs on the status of advising in their units. These reports should indicate how advising is being maintained and improved, how advisors are compensated, and whether staff, space, and resources are sufficient for the task. The committee believes that if the recommendations of this report are passed, the problem with advising will be partially alleviated by the resulting changes. The College Park Seminar will be an obvious place where students will make the kind of intellectual contact with faculty members that will help them in their academic and career decisions. Well-run Distributive and Advanced Studies courses which actively involve teachers and students will provide models and mentors now often lacking. As long as the campus thinks of advising merely as reciting rules and counting credits, our students' needs will remain unmet. NEW STUDENT ORIENTATION Recommendation 20: The campus should expand and re-focus the orientation program, instituting a new program required of all new students that will have a strong academic emphasis. Students should be introduced methodically to their intellectual task on campus. We recommend a required multi-day academic orientation for new students that will: (1) orient them to the intellectual life of the campus; (2) help them plan their approaches to their education and curriculum through graduation; and (3) help them learn to use the full range of academic support services available. This campus-wide orientation program should be organized and managed jointly by the Provost/Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs. Most faculty should be involved in the orientation program on a rotating basis. RECOGNITION OF ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE Recommendation 21: The campus should expand and improve activities to recognize the academic excellence of students. The committee believes that it is important for the campus to recognize the academic achievements of students. This is necessary not only because students earn such distinction but also because student recognition contributes to improved quality and vigor in the academic programs and helps undergraduates define the spirit of campus life in terms of academic rather than only social values. It is both necessary and appropriate that students understand that the campus community takes great pride in celebrating their academic achievements. Such activities bring credit both to the university and to the students. The committee recommends that existing programs which celebrate the academic excellence of students be reviewed to ensure that these efforts are undertaken on a scale and with the pomp and style befitting outstanding students at an outstanding university. Moreover, the committee believes that there should be annual honors convocations for undergraduate students only, at both the campus and college levels. Departments, as well, should be funded and encouraged to conduct comparable recognition ceremonies. The committee also suggests that the campus consider establishing a permanent public record of students who have achieved academic excellence (perhaps in the form of wall plaques inscribed with students' names and located in the library). More transient forms of publicity like The Diamondback and Outlook and MediUM (the new publication sponsored by the Student Government Association) should be expected to print lists of names and information about students achieving academic distinction. HONORS PROGRAMS Recommendation 22: Departments which do not have honors programs should consider establishing them. Some of the best ways of recognizing and supporting the academic excellence of our students lie in the various honors programs. The committee strongly urges departments which do not have honors programs to consider establishing them. The committee believes that the General Honors Program is a necessary and important part of the total undergraduate curriculum and urges support for its work. The committee applauds "its emphasis on the vital importance of a liberal and general education core for academically superior and gifted students." While many changes may well be needed to strengthen the rigor and appeal of the General Honors Program, we recommend strongly that its open and inter-disciplinary qualities be maintained and supported. Recommendation 23: The Campus Senate should issue guidelines and enforce standards for all honors programs. The committee recommends that the Campus Senate issue guidelines for all honors programs on campus to ensure that they are sufficiently rigorous and well supervised, setting minimal standards for such matters as the number of required hours of honors work, the grade point average necessary to graduate with honors, and the number of full-time faculty who must evaluate the final honors thesis or project. Much of the value of honors programs, General or departmental, depends on the whole campus community knowing that standards are rigorous and are uniformly enforced. The Campus Senate has in the past supervised all honors programs; it should do so again. WOMEN AND MINORITIES The committee received a great deal of information concerning needs and interests of women in connection with undergraduate education. Some of the people who testified are genuinely worried that not all students are treated equitably and given the same chance to grow and develop, and that faculty expectations of students frequently vary according to sex and/or race. Campus policy requires that all students, regardless of sex or race, must be treated equitably and with equally high expectations. High standards for academic performance and classroom decorum must be enforced. The committee also acknowledges the need in many areas on campus for more role models for women and minorities among faculty, administration, and staff. THE TEACHING MILIEU CENTER FOR INSTRUCTIONAL EXCELLENCE Recommendation 24: The campus should establish a center for the improvement of teaching and instructional development. This center would exist solely to support and encourage effective teaching. The University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Texas, and many other peer universities already provide their faculty this kind of support. The center should provide teaching support to faculty through such activities as in-service training and development of new teaching skills; support for the development of new courses; support for restructuring existing courses and curricula; support for course design and assessment strategies; support for the development of instructional resources; and on-going workshops on the full range of teaching skills. The center should assist individual professors and academic programs develop effective means of evaluating student learning and teaching performance. The center should have funds for subsidizing leaves to prepare new courses, summer salary supplements for special course preparation, funds for summer faculty workshops, etc. CLASSROOM FACILITIES Recommendation 25: The campus should increase efforts to improve classrooms. There are many features that can greatly enhance learning in the classroom: hands-on objects, films and slide projection material, video capability, computer display equipment, and desktop terminals for the students. Few classrooms on the campus are equipped for film and slide projection, only a couple are equipped for computer displays, and none have desktop terminals for students. The trend across the United States is to install such equipment in the classroom to enhance classroom lectures and discussions. One of the ways the campus can continue to attract outstanding students is to be creative in adapting the classroom to modern technology. The committee is encouraged by the campus proposal for a Teaching Center, with classrooms furnished with the latest equipment. The classroom atmosphere should be conducive to learning with adequate temperature control and ventilation, effective lighting and sound systems, and adequate seating and chalkboards. Classrooms must be clean and equipped with chalk, erasers, and lecterns. It is essential for the campus to allocate resources to maintain the classrooms in good repair. Many classrooms are presently inadequate; there are too few useful seminar rooms. REWARDING TEACHING EXCELLENCE Recommendation 26: Heads of all academic units should ensure that faculty members maintain appropriate standards of teaching performance, should increase the public recognition of excellence in undergraduate teaching, and should give heavy weight to teaching in the process of hiring and determining retention, tenure, promotion, and compensation. In recent years many colleges and departments on campus have initiated or improved efforts to encourage and recognize outstanding teaching. The committee supports these changes and recommends that colleges and departments which do not already do so should develop programs and awards for undergraduate teaching. We urge the Chancellor and the Provost to take the lead in this regard by establishing campus-wide awards for outstanding teaching. Similarly, a number of academic units have substantially improved efforts to evaluate undergraduate teaching. The committee applauds these efforts. We believe that each college should develop an effective teaching evaluation process to be approved by the Provost/Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs. These processes will not be identical for all Colleges and may not be identical for all academic units within a College but all should include evaluation by peers, students, and selected former students who have graduated, as well as careful consideration of syllabi and other course materials. What is needed is a means of evaluating the quality of instruction in a form which can command respect and will be communicated up through the levels of tenure, promotion, and salary decision-makers. More is needed than the standard perfunctory comment that the faculty member up for tenure and/or promotion is "an above average teacher." Few of the changes which the committee recommends will be entirely effective without concomitant changes in the way the campus regards and rewards undergraduate teaching. The policy and administrative procedures to effect these changes are already in place (see Appendix 8). What is now needed is a change in practice. Administrators regularly profess that teaching, along with research and service, are the triad of faculty activities which are evaluated to determine tenure, promotion, and annual salary raises. This is current campus policy. By word and deed, however, most campus administrators at all levels, with the complicity of most faculty, reinforce the commonly held perception that research and scholarly productivity are by far the dominant factors in these decisions. One of the common themes of the recent national reports and the Middle States self-study is that improving undergraduate education requires increasing the rewards for outstanding undergraduate teaching. Indeed, one of the most frequent and forceful statements the faculty made to the committee was to recommend a significant increase in the rewards that go for outstanding teaching. According to the Middle States self- study: "A majority of professorial faculty (69%) believes that teaching does not now have substantial importance in the distribution of rewards on campus (e.g., tenure, promotion, and salary increases), but 85% believe that it should. Ten percent or less of the faculty respondents regard teaching evaluations as very important in contract renewal, promotion, tenure, and salary decisions and teaching assignments; yet, over 90% of the faculty respondents believe evaluations of undergraduate teaching performance should be important or very important in these decisions." We agree with our colleagues. So does the Chancellor. So do the Provost and the deans with whom we had an opportunity to discuss the issue. The committee firmly believes that research and other scholarly work is and must remain an important faculty activity. Indeed, we believe that evidence of quality research and scholarship should continue to be required at each level of promotion, especially in tenure decisions, and in determination of annual salary increases. Any change in practice must be accomplished in such a way that the research effort of the campus is not compromised. The committee is equally convinced that a change is in order. The campus must dedicate itself to excellent teaching no less than to excellent research. Outstanding teaching, especially undergraduate teaching, should be much more heavily weighed in faculty evaluation and reward than is presently the case. Much of the responsibility for accomplishing this change rests with departments. Moreover, we call upon departments and colleges to consider alternative ways for institutionalizing this change. For example, it is common wisdom on campus that faculty whose teaching performance is modest but who have made outstanding research contributions will be promoted up through the ranks with ease. Tenured faculty with good but modest research records who are outstanding teachers should be promoted as well. There are several important ways of serving the university and many years of outstanding teaching is one. Teaching is noble. IMPLEMENTATION Recommendation 27: The Campus Senate and the Office of Academic Affairs should establish a committee to implement all approved recommendations of this report which are not strictly curricular matters assigned to the Campus Senate General Education Committee or to another Campus Senate Committee. If the recommendations contained in this report are approved, implementation will be complicated, expensive, and time-consuming. Successful implementation will require additional funds. The campus is already underfunded. Improvement of undergraduate education must not come at the expense of graduate education or research. The administration should vigorously pursue new, additional, outside funding. Moreover, many of the changes we recommend should be phased in over a three or four year period, some, like foreign language will take even longer. The committee recommends that the Campus Senate, working closely with the Office of Academic Affairs, establish an ad hoc committee to implement all approved recommendations which are not strictly curricular matters assigned to the Campus Senate General Education Committee. This implementation committee should be charged with developing a timetable for achieving the recommended changes. This timetable should be presented to the Campus Senate for its consideration before May, 1988. Beginning with the fall, 1988 semester, the implementation committee should make annual progress reports to the Campus Senate. 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"`Only Connect:' The Illusion of `Coverage' in High School and College Education, Phi Kappa Phi Journal (Spring, 1986), 36-37. Shoenberg, Robert E. "On Intellectual Adulthood." Liberal Education, pp. 189- 197. Shoenberg, Robert E. "Point of View: Questions as Important as Answers in Education." Teaching (August, 1986), p 5. Slaughter, John B. "Innovation and Tradition in Higher Education." David Dodds Henry Lecture, University of Illinois at Chicago, October 17, 1985. Slaughter, John Brooks. "Making A Difference" (The Inaugural Address of John Brooks Slaughter, Chancellor, College Park Campus, May 3, 1983). Precis, XIII (May 16, 1983), 1-4. Slaughter, John Brooks. "Values for a Stronger Community." Remarks at the Faculty and Associate Staff Convocation, University of Maryland, College Park, September 17, 1984. Smith, Peter H. K. Upgrading Classrooms. London: Applied Science Publishers, 1979. Stauffer, Thomas M. "Sixty-seven Steps to Advance Quality." 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San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1984. APPENDIX 1: THE CHARGE TO THE COMMITTEE A. Copy of the Letter Charging the Committee (February 10, 1986) [not available on line at this time] B. Excerpts from Professor Bennett's Remarks at the First Meeting of the Committee (March 14, 1986) The fact remains that the Senate ad hoc committee (on Reorganization) during its work in the early fall [1985], came up with a series of concerns, campuswide, about undergraduate education which went far beyond what I think the Chancellor understood the reorganization to imply and I want to review those with you because they really constitute the impulse for the creation of this Committee. The first is . . . the general quality of the curriculum leading to the distribution requirements (that are currently in place). There was widespread and, I think, in large part, unexpected reaction against the current arrangement (all by themselves). Do they in fact constitute an explicit commitment to an undergraduate education? A lot of people think they don't, think they represent a lowest common demoninator, an effort to resolve a lot of complexities on the campus through the provision of courses--but not a clear . . . [statement] of what an undergraduate education ought to be. Secondly, . . . is the definition of what a liberal education ought to be because there must be a theoretical basis of any re- formation of the requirements that are in place . . .. One of the . . . most striking aspects of the reorganization and [one of] the concerns . . . received by the Senate was the potential insularity of the professional education that is represented in the reorganization. There's a lot of concern . . . regarding the aspect of the new organization as being that of a professional curriculum--that in fact the university is suddenly transformed from a university into a series of professional schools with all the . . . insularity that that implies. [There is] a good deal of concern about the role of the professional schools, what the students in the professional schools will be doing, and what their relationship will be to the traditional academic disciplines. And, correspondingly, [a concern for] the potential for diminishing the impact and importance of what are taken to be the traditional disciplines in undergraduate education. A very big concern. Some correlates, more local still than these issues, are, first, the conduct of undergraduate education on campus at the moment and secondly, of course, the role of advising. The . . . study . . . which will inform your work is that of "The Middle-States Accrediting Group" . . . and that report is in progress at the moment--and one wants to avoid duplication and therefore I've sought . . . delaying the work of this Committee until that report's in hand. That seems to be stretching on and on hence this meeting. Now, given that, why does the Senate do this? Why are you here? . . . the more the Executive Committee thought about it, the more the focus shifted to your topic and it seemed therefore, at the early part of February 1986, that the most appropriate way to deal with it was to put in place a committee like this one, of people interested specifically in undergraduate education and deal with that issue explicitly . . .. You are here at the impulse of the Executive Committee who felt that this is the single most important issue immersed in the reorganization. Yours is an issue which the Senate perceived to be the basic issue of reorganization. Think high. APPENDIX 2: EXCERPTS FROM PROFESSOR MACK'S REMARKS AT THE REORGANIZATION HEARINGS (November, 1985) I want to speak in opposition to the proposed reorganization. I see no substantial merit in the plan from the point of view of the paying clients of this institution, only administrative ease, tidiness, and some serious intellectual drawbacks. In my view the plan furthers the disintegration of the central college experience here. Liberal arts, and the ideals of an informed and enlightened not just a trained) college graduate have perhaps never been paramount at this state school. The shift to a Divisional system, dividing knowledge up formally in to five areas was a blow to the unified intellectual organization of the college. It put research, training, existing departments, and administrative chain of command ahead of what should be our center, the paying and needing student. A shift to 12 colleges would be worse still. To see a flow chart that puts Public Policy on the same level with Mathematics and Physics should make our heads spin and maybe some stomachs turn. "Trade schools" here on campus already that make a liberal education almost impossible by requiring so many self-serving and self-inflating hours for the major are in this proposal put on the same plane with Arts and Humanities charged with trying to keep live the full richness of the 3,000 years of human experience and experiment. This is, I maintain, intellectually preposterous. The proposed plan has little or nothing to do with the undergradute who comes seeking an education. Instead it puts everything in order for the few who come here seeking pre- professional training, and it puts them nicely in order for research and for administration. Talk about a strong deans as much as we like, in terms of power this proposal has divided to conquer, and 12 small deans will not even to able to mount the mild opposition to centralized control that five Provosts did. But to return to those students. We need to remember that our typical freshperson is 18 or 17 years old. The student comes here entirely unaware of and properly uninterested in the administrative divisions on our campus. He, she wants a degree, wants some skills, and can rather easily at the start be lured into wanting an education. But she, he can only be so lured if we say through our structures that we know and care what a liberal education looks like. This will not be done by presenting these young people who are beginners in the area of higher knowledge with 12 colleges each apparently as important and fundamental to them as the others. We should present him, her with a structure that reflects the interrelatedness and essentiality of all the basic ways of learning and knowing. There is plenty of time in these youngsters' long long lives to focus later increasingly on how to earn a living-- our first job is to help them be ready to shape a life. There is no chance they will not hear what the supposedly "real world" is calling for; there is a very real chance that without our guidance they will not hear what humanity requires. The proposed reorganization is an intellectual Tower of Babel and our undergraduates will be, properly, even more confused, their intellectual curiosity dampened. At least each of theexisting five Divisions contains within it some of the core studies of undergraduate education. Several of the new colleges would not even pretend to be other than professional schools. And our eighteen year old needs some guidance towards living richly rather than just becoming rich. Our eighteen year old needs to understand that she, he is entering a community devoted not just to preparing him or her to survive in the world we know, but a community devoted to creating, remembering, discovering worlds that none of us know enough about. Training, like politics, is the art of the possible; education, however, is preparation for the unknown. We should listen, perhaps, to the nearly unanimous cry from various recent studies of higher education, and find some structures that will open up creativity, independence, and interdisciplinary work for our students. Until someone comes up with a better idea--and I can`t see this proposal as it--maybe we should reestablish a single College of Arts and Sciences that is the core of undergraduate education, with peripheral and thoroughly secondary professional schools. It`s an old idea, and tried. Maybe we need to try it again. APPENDIX 3: RE-AFFIRMATIONS OF THE CHARGE A. Excerpts from Professor Bennett's Remarks at the Open-forum (November 3, 1986) Your task was identified in response to concerns which surfaced during the debate over campus reorganization. These concerns are related to potential fragmentation of the curriculum with the perceived ascendency of professional curricula-which are seen as narrow and parochial. I am here to represent one of those professional curricula and to advocate precisely the agenda you have established. The success of the professional curricula, in fact, depends on the quality of the undergraduate curriculum--we must have cultured, reasoning students--without them, our education becomes training--accommodating weakness, rather than reinforcing strengths. B. Excerpts from Professor Hunt's Remarks at the Open-forum (November 3, 1986) Let me provide some brief background on the movement to improve undergraduate education at College Park. Last year at this time, another ad hoc committee of the Senate held hearings on academic reorganization. One of the serendipitous results of that process was the emergence of a set of concerns about the integrity of the general education or liberal arts component of our undergraduate program. The Executive Committee of the Senate perceived this to be one of those significant moments when a grass-roots issue arises on a university campus. We wanted to do more than recognize this initiative among a set of recommendations on reorganization. We wanted to provide a vehicle for keeping the initiative alive and moving it to fruition. Thus we created in February [1986] the Senate Ad Hoc Committee on Undergraduate Education . . .. The charge to the . . . Committee, most specifically, was to advise the Senate with respect to accomplishment of the recommendations of the Wolvin Reorganization Committee pertaining to undergraduate education. More broadly, it was to make its own recommendations regarding any aspects of undergraduate education the Committee deemed appropriate. The Committee was urged to think boldly and theoretically about the definition of undergraduate eduation and the best possible ways to truly educate. It is important to stress that the charge to this Committee goes beyond curricular review. While a sound curriculum is essential, quality education is also a matter of proper pedagogy, advising and learning environment. And attention to all of these requires first coming to terms with the most basic question: what is undergraduate education? APPENDIX 4: LIST OF INDIVIDUALS AND STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS ESPECIALLY INVITED TO SPEAK AT THE OPEN-FORUMS A. Individual Faculty, Students, Administrators, and Staff Michael F. A'Hearn Astronomy Program Marta Albert Women's Studies (Undergraduate) Edward F. Ansello Center on Aging Richard Arends Department of Curriculum and Instruction Jon Auerbach Department of English Richard Austing Department of Computer Science Kenneth Aycock Department of Agronomy Ferdinand Baer Department of Meteorology Drury Bagwell Student Affairs Office John R. Baras Systems Research Center Jewel B. Barlow Wind Tunnel Victor Basili Department of Computer Science Kathy Beardsley College of Behavioral and Social Sciences John R. Beaton College of Human Ecology Evelyn Beck Women's Studies Ralph Bennett College of Architecture Robert L. Bennett College of Behavioral and Social Sciences Computer Laboratory Marilyn Berman College of Engineering Jon Boone College of Arts and Humanities Charles Brand Curriculum Laboratory Richard D. Brecht College of Arts and Humanities Lowell W. Bridwell Transportation Studies Center Stephen Brush Department of History John L. Bryan Department of Fire Protection Engineering John J. Burt College of Physical Education, Recreation and Health E. G. Campbell College of Education John Carr Department of Curriculum and Instruction David Carlson Chancellor`s Student Advisory Committee (Undergraduate) Erve Chambers Department of Anthropology Luke Chang Department of Geology Susan Clabaugh Educational Technology Center Marilyn Church Center for Young Children David Clarke Department of Physical Education Helen Clarke Undergraduate Advising Center Reese Cleghorn College of Journalism Linda Clement Undergraduate Admissions Office Caroline Cody College of Education Robert Cohen Department of Music James Colville Department of Civil Engineering Ulysses J. Connor Special Student Support Services Thomas Cooper Student Government Association (Undergraduate) Michael Coplan Chemical Physics Program John O. Corliss Department of Zoology Richard Cross Department of English John Cumberland Bureau of Business and Economic Research Deidre David Department of English Marie Davidson Academic Affairs Office Larry S. Davis Institute for Advanced Computer Studies Yesmeen Day General Honors Program (Undergraduate) Thomas DeLio Department of Music William Destler Department of Electrical Engineering George Dieter College of Engineering J. Robert Dorfman College of Computer, Mathematical and Physical Sciences F. Susan Dowden Survey Research Center Richard Dull Chancellor's Office Robert Dunn Department of Dance Stewart Edelstein College of Behavioral and Social Sciences A. Edwards Vice-chancellor for Institutional Advancement Ekpo Eyo Department of Art Jeanne Fahnestock Department of English Richard Farrell Department of History David Falk Academic Affairs Office William Falk Department of Sociology Richard Farrell Department of History Cathy Ferrell Engineering Cooperative Education William Fourney Department of Mechanical Engineering Linda Gast Career Development Center Alfred Gessow Department of Aerospace Engineering Glen Gilbert Department of Health Education James A. Gilbert Department of Art Barbara Gill Undergraduate Admissions Office Patti Gillespie Communication Arts and Theatre R. Lonnie Gillian Chancellor's Office Barbara Goldberg Returning Students Program Irwin L. Goldstein Department of Psychology Jacob Goldhaber Department of Mathematics Jean B. Grambs Department of Human Development Hans K. Griem Laboratory for Plasma and Fusion Energy Studies James Greenberg Office of Laboratory Experiences Beverly Greenfeig Returning Students Program John Guthrie Center for Educational Research and Development Effie Hacklander College of Human Ecology William Hall Department of Psychology Eugene Hammond Department of English Robert Hardy Department of Human Development Robert A. Harper Department of Geography Eugene Helm Department of Music Cindy Henning Campus Senate (Undergraduate) James Henretta Department of History David Hershenson Counseling and Personnel Services Diane Herz Department of Economics (Undergraduate) Ralph Heyndels Comparative Literature Program William Higgins Undergraduate Studies Eva Hornyak University Community Concerts John Howarth Honors Program Mary Ellen Hrutka Experiential Learning Programs Darrell Hueth Department of Agricutlural and Resource Economics Charles R. Hulten Department of Economics Frederick Humphrey Department of Recreation Janet Hunt Campus Senate Larry Hunt Department of Sociology Diana Jackson Chancellor`s Commission on Women`s Affairs Richard Jaquith Academic Affairs Office Sammy W. Joseph Department of Microbiology Stuart Kaufman Industrial Relations and Labor Studies Gordon Kelly Department of American Studies Janet Kerr Campus Senate (Graduate) William E. Kirwan Provost/Vice-chancellor for Academic Affairs Richard Klank Department of Art Albert Klavon College of Life Sciences Rudolph Lamone College of Business and Management Jerrold Levinson Department of Philosophy Herbert Levitan Department of Zoology Jerry L. Lewis Upward Bound David Lightfoot Linguistics Program Robert Lissitz Department of Measurement, Statistics and Evaluation Chuan S. Liu Department of Physics and Astronomy Myron Lounsbury Department of American Studies Nancy Love Health Professions Advising Office Douglas MacLean Center for Philosophy and Public Policy Thomas Magoon Counseling Center Donald Maley Department of Industrial, Technological and Occupational Education Nelson G. Markley Department of Mathematics Paul Mazzochi Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Gerald McCall Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences Earlean McCarrick Department of Government and Politics Jean McDevitt Learning Assistance Service Janet McKay Chancellor's Office Robert E. Menzer Marine and Estuarine Environmental Studies Program Joe Metz Undergraduate Advising Center Pat Milkie Cumberland Hall Gerald R. Miller Undergraduate Studies Merl E. Miller Agriculture and Extension Education Raymond J. Miller College of Life Sciences Alan Mintz Jewish Studies Program Sashi B. Mohanty VA/MD Regional College of Veterinary Medicine Jorge Mora Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures Claire Moses Women's Studies Program Frank Munno Nuclear Engineering Samuel Myers Afro-American Studies Program Michael Nacht School of Public Affairs Umberto Neri Department of Mathematics James N. Newton Minorities in Engineering Elizabeth Nolan Department of Philosophy (Undergraduate) James Osteen Stamp Student Union Rose-Marie Oster Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures Leslie Palmer Maryland English Institute Cindy Parks General Honors Program (Undergraduate) Glenn Patterson Department of Botany Gary Pavela Judicial Programs Carla Peterson Comparative Literature Program Guenter Pfister Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures Murray E. Polakoff College of Behavioral and Social Sciences Richard Price Department of History Bruno Quebedeaux Department of Horticulture George E. Quester Department of Government and Politics Herbert Rabin Engineering Research Center Merrill Read Department of Food, Nutrition and Institution Administration J. Thomas Rimer Department of Hebrew and East Asian Languages and Literatures Merian Rosen Department of Dance Azriel Rosenfeld Center for Automation Research Marvin L. Roush Department of Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Robert Rowland Department of Classics James R. Royalty Language Media Center Roger Rubin Department of Family and Community Development Sharon Rubin Undergraduate Studies Charles Russell Department of French and Italian Languages and Literatures Stephen Sachs College of Architecture S. Sargent Department of Hebrew and East Asian Languages and Literatures Dale P. Scannell College of Education Adele F. Seeff Center for Benaissance and Baroque Studies David Segal Department of Sociology Ronald Seibel Institute of Applied Agriculture Arnold E. Seigel Instructional Television System Robert Shoenberg Academic Affairs Office John B. Slaughter Chancellor Michael Slote Department of Philosophy Betty Smith Department of Textiles and Consumer Economics Shirley Sorensen Department of Mathematics Saul Sosnowski Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures Marie Spiro Department of Art John Steffian College of Architecture Allen Steinhauer Department of Entomology Gerry Strumpf Orientation Charles Sturtz Vice-chancellor for Administrative Affairs Ralph Tarica Department of French and Italian Languages and Literatures Owen P. Thomas Department of Poultry Science William Thomas Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Nelita True Department of Music Thomas C. Tuttle Maryland Center for Productivity and Quality of Working Life Ben J. Unkle Board of Regents (Undergraduate) John Van Brunt Counseling Center Claude Walston College of Library and Information Services Ronald Walton Department of Hebrew and East Asian Languages and Literatures Donald Warren Department of Education Policy Planning and Administration Alcine J. Wiltz Department of Dance Peter Wolfe Institute of Applied Mathematics Charles Wellford Institute for Criminal Justice and Criminology Loretta Wertheimer Academic Affairs Office Wendy Whittemore Undergraduate Studies Aubrey Williams Department of Anthropology Thelma Williams College of Computer, Mathematical and Physical Sciences Valerie Woolston International Education Services Jerry Wrenn Department of Physical Education James A. Yorke Institute for Physical Sciences and Technology B. Student Organizations ADHAN Agricultural Student Council Aikido Club of Maryland Air Force Reserve Office Training Corps Alpha Chi Omega Alpha Chi Sigma Alpha Delta Pi Alpha Epsilon Phi Alpha Epsilon Pi Alpha Epsilon Rho Alpha Gamma Delta Alpha Gamma Rho Fraternity Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Alpha Kappa Delta/Sociology Alpha Phi Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity,Inc. Alpha Phi Omega Alpha Queens Organization Alpha Tau Omega Alpha Xi Delta Alpha Zeta Amateur Radio from the Universe American Association of Textiles American Civil Liberties Union American Institute of Aeronautics American Marketing Association American Society for Microbiology American Society for Personnel American Society of Agriculture American Society of Civil Engineering American Society of Interior Design Americans of European Descent Amnesty International of Maryland Angel Flight (AFROTC) Animal Husbandry Club Anthropology Student Association Arnold Air Society Art History Association Art League Art Students Association Association of Collegiate Entrepreneurs Association of Scholars and Students B'nai Brith Federation Hillel BACCHUS: Boost Alcohol Consciousness Baha'i Club Bangladesh Student Association Baptist Student Union Barbarian Social Club Bel Air A Bel Air B Bel Air Country Club Beta Alpha Psi Beta Theta Pi Bible Study Group Black Business Society Black Engineers Society Black Explosion Black Student Union Black Women of Tomorrow Bowling Club Calvert Cambridge A Cambridge Area Council Cambridge D Campus Bible Fellowship Campus Crusade for Christ Campus Literary Society Caribbean Students Association Caroline Dorm Government CARP (Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles) Carroll Hall 69ers Carroll Hall Society Catholic Charismatic Prayer Group Cecil Hall Centerville E Centerville F Centerville H Cercle Francais/Circolo Italia Chancellor's Student Advisory Committee Chess Club Chestertowne A & B Chestertowne B Chi Epsilon Chinese Culture Club Chinese Student Association Circle K College Republicans Collegiate 4-H Club Cornerstone Criminal Justice Student Association Cultural Conservation Society Cumberland Ducks Cumberland Hawks Dance - UM Dancers Against Cancer Delta Delta Delta Sorority Delta Gamma Sorority Delta Phi Epsilon Delta Sigma Pi Fraternity Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Delta Tau Delta Fraternity Delta Upsilon Fraternity Democratic Socialists of America Denton Area Council Department of Campus Darkroom Disabled Student Alliance Dorchester Hall Easton Eight Easton Four Easton Hall Easton One Easton Six Easton Three Edmund Burke Society Egyptian Cultural Club Egyptian Student Association Elegant Elkton Eight Ellicott Area Council Ellicott Seven Ellicott Six Warriors English Undergraduate Association Environmental Conservation Organization Equestrian Association Erasable, Inc. Eritrean Students Association Eta Kappa Nu Association Family and Community Development Filipino Cultural Association Finance Banking and Investment Fire Service Dormitory Flying Camp of Smallwood's Bat Food Nutrition Institution Administration Forestry Club 14 Karat Club Free University Friends of the Food Coop Future Farmers of America Future Managers of America Gamma Phi Beta Gamma Theta Upsilon/Geography Gay and Lesbian Student Union General Honors Program Gentle East Tae Kwon Do Club Geology Club German Club GI Club Glass Onion Concerts Goju Ryu Karate Club Golden Gauntlet Interest Group Golden Key National Honor Society Gospel Choir Government and Politics Club Graduate Indian Student Association Great Commission International Great Commission Students Hagerstown Seven Hagerstown Six Hagerstown Two Yacht Club Hellenic Club Help Center Heterosexual Club Historical Simulation Society History Undergraduate Association Home Aid Homecoming Committee Horticulture Club INAG Club Ice Hockey Indian Student Association Indonesian Student Association Institute of Agriculture Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Inter-varsity Christian Fellow Interfraternity Council International Organization of Undergraduates International Committee Against Racism International Student Council Israeli Student Society Isshin Ryu Karate Club Japanese Culture Club Jewish Activity and Social Organization Jewish Student Union Kappa Alpha Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity Kappa Alpha Theta Kappa Delta Kappa Kappa Gamma Sorority Kappa Kappa Psi (Band) Kappa Sigma Kappa Sweetheart Kourt Korean Graduate Students at Maryland Korean Sudent Association LaPlata 4 LaPlata 1 LaPlata 3 LaPlata 2 Latin American Student Union Latter-Day Saints Student Association Leonardtown Area Council Leonardtown Forty-niners Life Line Magazine Society Malaysian Student Association M.A.N.I.A.C.S. Maryland Armenian Student Association Maryland Bridge Club Maryland Floor Hockey Club Maryland Gymkana Troupe Maryland Images Maryland Sailing Association Maryland Shotokan Association Maryland Space Future Associationr MARYPRIG MBA Association MD Leadership Development MD Medieval Mercenary Militia Men's Rugby Club Minority Computer Science Society Minority Pre-Professional Psychology Mitzpeh Model United Nations at Maryland Monarchist Party Mortar Board National Honor Society Moslen Student Society Mu Phi Epsilon Muslim Student Association NAACP/UMCP National Association of Accounting National TGraditionalist Causes Navigators North Gym Karate Club North Hill Area Council Northern America Student Center Objectivist Club Omega Psi Phi Omicron Delta Kappa Order of Omega (Kalegethos) Organizatin of Arab Students Oriental Defense Arts Club Oxen Hill Commuters Association P.A.C.E. (People Active in Community Effort) Pakistani Student Association Panhellenic Council Panhellenic Association Parapsychology Club Personal Computing Association Phi Beta Sigma Crescent Club Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity Phi Beta Sigma Squires Phi Delta Theta Phi Gamma Delta Fraternity Phi Kappa Sigma Phi Kappa Tau Fraternity Phi Sigma Delta Phi Sigma Kappa Phi Sigma Sigma Philosophy Student Association Physical Therapy Club Pi Beta Phi Sorority Pi Kappa Alpha Pi Tau Sigma (Mechanigal Engineering) Poultry Science Club Pre-Dental Society Pre-Medical Society Pre-Professinal Hispanic Society Pro-Life Organization Progressive Student Alliance Psi Chi National Honor Society Public Relations Students Society Queen Anne's Hall Raquetball Club Recreation Society Residence Halls Association S.A.I.N.T. (Students Against Intelligent Nonterrestrials) Semper Fidelis Society Shades of Harlem Sigma Alpha Epsilon Sigma Alpha Mu Sigma Chi Fraternity Sigma Delta Pi (Spanish Honor) Sigma Delta Tau Sigma Kappa (Beta Zeta Chapter) Sigma Nu Fraternity Sigma Phi Epsilon Sigma Pi Fraternity Sigma Tau Delta Society for the Advancement of Laura Kurie Society of American Military Engineers Society of Automotive Engineers Society of Fire Protection Engineers Society of Manufacturing Engineers Society of Professional Journalists Society of Women Engineers Sociology Collective Solid Rock Ministries Somerset Third and Fourth Floor Spanish Club Special Olympics (TKE) Square Dance Club Standard Model Management S.T.A.R. Center Student Alumni Board Student Entertainment Enterprise Student Government Association Student Health Advisory Committee Student Voice Students Against Bad Guys Students Against Multiple Sclerosis Students for America Students for Change Students for Conservative Causes SUPC Executive Board SUPC Outdoor Recreation Committee Surf Club Table Tennis Club Tau Beta Pi Honor Society Tau Beta Sigma Sorority Tau Epsilon Tau Kappa Epsilon Terp Christian Fellowship Terrapin Terrapin Flying Club Terrapin Ski Club Terrapin Trail Club Terrapin Vision Productions Thai Student Association The Crescent Club The Diamondback The Eclipse The Maryland Bridge Club Theta Chi Fraternity Thurgood Marshall Pre-Law Society Toastmasters Training Center for Emergency Transcendental Meditation Club Turkish Student Organization Twenty-Twenty Ultimate Frisbee Organization UMPepco Undergraduate Teacher Education United Jewish Appeal University Bible Fellowship University Communters Association University Sports Car Club University Talent Show Committee Vantage Vedic Cultural Society Veterans Club Veterinary Science Club Vietnamese Student Association Water Polo Club Wicomico Hall Government WMUC Women's Center Women's Political Caucus Women's Soccer Club Women's Softball Club Wonhwa-do Karate Club Worcester Hall Worker's Rec Klub (WRecK) World Do Hap Sool Association Young Americans for Freedom Young Democrats Zeta Phi Beta Sorority Zeta Psi Fraternity Zeta Psi Little Sister Zodiac Club of Zeta Phi Beta Zoology Undergraduate Student Committee APPENDIX 5: SPEAKERS AT THE OPEN-FORUMS A. Those Who Provided Written Material Dick Atlee Computer Science Center Evelyn Beck Women's Studies Program Betty Beckley Department of English Ralph Bennett College of Architecture Marilyn Berman College of Engineering Linda L. Blankenship Alumna Vincent Brannigan Department of Textiles and Consumer Economics Richard Brecht College of Arts and Humanities Stephen Brush Institute for Physical Sciences and History John Burt College of Physical Education, Recreation and Health John Carr Department of Curriculum and Instruction David Clarke Department of Physical Education H. Robert Cohen, et al. Department of Music Kathleen Copus Undergraduate Student (English) Laura Curtin Undergraduate Student (General Honors) Rachel Dardis Department of Textiles and Consumer Economics Avron Douglis Department of Mathematics David Falk Academic Affairs Office Liska Friedman Undergraduate Student Robert Gaines Department of Communication Arts and Theatre James Gilbert Department of Art Rennie Golec Graduate Student (Counseling and Personnel Services) Francis Gouin Department of Horticulture Eugene Hammond Department of English Ruth Heidelbach Department of Curriculum and Instruction James Henretta Department of History David Hershenson Department of Counseling and Personnel Services John Howarth General Honors Program Rolf Hubbe Department of Classics Darrell Hueth Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics Janet Hunt Campus Senate Sally Jacob Undergraduate Student (Dietetics) William E. Kirwan Provost/Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Thomas LeMay Undergraduate Student (Communication Arts and Theatre) Herbert Levitan Department of Zoology David Lightfoot Department of Linguistics Robert Lissitz Department of Measurements, Statistics and Evaluation Edwin Locke College of Business and Management Martin Maier Undergraduate Student (Electrical Engineering) Robert Merikangas Hornbake Library Raymond Miller College of Life Sciences Lawrence Mintz Department of American Studies Umberto Neri Department of Mathematics Scott Ollar Undergraduate Student (English) Glenn Patterson Department of Botany Richard Price Department of History Robert Ridky Department of Geology Dale Scannell College of Education David Segal Department of Sociology Robert Shoenberg Academic Affairs Office John B. Slaughter Chancellor Allen Steinhauer Department of Entomology Jordan Thomas Department of Animal Sciences Bonnie Tyler Institute for Child Study Debbie Ullman-Yates Alumna Ben J. Unkle Undergraduate Student (Board of Regents) Unsigned Undergraduate Student Wendy Whittemore Graduate Student (Counseling and Personnel Services) Aubrey Williams Department of Anthropology Mark Williams Undergraduate Student (Business) Ellis Yochelson Department of Geology E. P. Young Department of Animal Sciences B. Those Who Spoke (partial list) Azizuddin Abdur-Ra'oof Undergraduate Student (Chancellor's Student Advisory Committee) Marta Albert Undergraduate Student (Women's Studies) Richard Austing Department of Computer Science Jonathan Barrett Undergraduate Student (College of Business) Kathy Beardsley College of Behavioral and Social Sciences Evelyn Beck Women`s Studies Betty Beckley Department of English Ralph Bennett College of Architecture Marilyn Berman College of Engineering Marcie Berman Undergraduate Student Linda Blankenship Alumna Vincent Brannigan Department of Textiles and Consumer Economics Richard Brecht College of Arts and Humanities Edward Britton Undergraduate Student Stephen Brush Department of History John Burt College of Physical Education, Recreation, and Health Sharon Campbell Undergraduate Student Michael Canid Undergraduate Student Beverly G. Carlisle Undergraduate Student (Individual Studies) David Carlson Undergraduate Student (Chancellor`s Student Advisory Committee) John Carr Department of Curriculum and Instruction David Clarke Department of Physical Education Linda Clement Undergraduate Admissions Sherwin Collette Undergraduate Student (Department of English) Tom Cooper Undergraduate Student (Student Government Association) Kathleen Copus Undergraduate Student (Department of Communication Arts and Theatre) Michael Corbin Undergraduate Student (Department of American Studies) Jonathan Crowell Undergradute Student (Department of Marketing) Laura Curtin Undergraduate Student (General Honors Program) Rachel Dardis Department of Textiles and Consumer Economics Robert Dorfman College of Computer, Mathematical and Physcial Sciences Jeanne Fahnestock Department of English David Falk Academic Affairs Office Sue Ferrara Graduate Student (Department of Communication Arts and Theatre) Faith Gabelnick General Honors Program Robert Gaines Department of Communication Arts and Theatre Jim Gilbert Department of History Barbara Gill Undergraduate Admissions Rennie Golec Graduate Student (Department of Counseling and Personnel Services) Francis Gouin Department of Horticulture Jean Grambs College of Education James Greenberg College of Education Ben Gribbing Undergraduate Student Gene Hammond Department of English Susan Hendel Undergraduate Student (Department of English) David Hershensen Department of Counseling and Personnel Services Diane Herz Undergraduate Student (General Honors Program) William Higgins Undergraduate Studies John Howarth General Honors Program Bob Hoyla Undergraduate Student (Campus Senate) Mary Ellen Hrutka Experiential Learning Programs Rolf Hubbe Department of Classics Janet Hunt Campus Senate Pat Hyer Central Administration Barbara Jacoby Commuter Affairs William E. Kirwan Provost/Vice-chancellor for Academic Affairs Jonathan Kraut Undergraduate Student (Department of Marketing) Rudolph Lamone College of Business and Management Alan Lang Undergraduate Student Nancy Leaderman Undergraduate Student (General Honors Program) Harry Lee Undergraduate Student Thomas LeMay Undergraduate Student (Campus Senate) Mary Leonard Counseling Center Herbert Levitan Department of Zoology Brad Lewis Undergraduate Student Thomas Magoon Counseling Center Evelyn Maharis Undergraduate Student (Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences) Paul Mazzocchi Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Jean McDevitt Learning Assistance Center Margaret Meixner Graduate Student (Department of Electrical Engineering) Bob Merikangas McKeldin Library Meredith Michel Undergraduate Student (Department of Health Education) Gerald R. Miller Undergraduate Studies Raymond Miller College of Life Sciences Larry Mintz Department of American Studies Elizabeth Nolan Undergraduate Student (Mortar Board Honor Society) Scott Ollar Undergraduate Student (Department of English) Glenn Patterson Department of Botany Logan Perkins Undergraduate Student Murray Polakoff College of Behavioral and Social Sciences Richard Price Department of History George Quester Department of Government and Politics Robert Ridky Department of Geology Carol Robertson Department of Music Sharon Rubin Undergraduate Studies Dale Scannell College of Education Gaynor Sales Parent (Greenbelt, Maryland) Pat Schaefer Undergraduate Student (College of Journalism) Raymond Schellinger Undergraduate Student (Department of Sociology) David Segal Department of Sociology Mady Segal Department of Sociology Robert E. Shoenberg Academic Affairs Office John B. Slaughter Chancellor Muriel Sloan Academic Affairs Office Barri Standish Shuttle Bus Service Gerry Strumpf Orientation Dwight Sullivan Graduate Student (Department of Communication Arts and Theatre) Shari Sussman Undergraduate Student Jordan Thomas Department of Animal Science Ben J. Unkle Undergraduate Student (Board of Regents) Ray Weil Department of Agronomy Aubrey Williams Department of Anthropology Mark Williams Undergraduate Student (College of Business) Thelma Williams College of Computer, Mathematical and Physical Sciences Jerry Wrenn Department of Physical Education E. P. Young Department of Animal Sciences Eric Young Undergraduate Student (Maryland Images) APPENDIX 6: MEETING WITH THE EDUCATIONAL POLICY COMMITTEE OF THE BOARD OF REGENTS (February 6, 1987): Remarks of John Pease We're happy to be here. Thank you for inviting us. I'm working with a Campus Senate Committee which has been asked to take a look at Undergraduate Education, and I've been asked to present a very brief summary of the charge to the committee and the process the committee has followed as well as what it is trying to accomplish.A year ago last fall the Campus Senate held hearings on the academic reorganization (from five divisions to 14 colleges) and of the things which emerged from these hearings was an expressed concern about the integrity of the undergraduate education and especially the general education component. The faculty was concerned that the reorganization not compromise the undergraduate curriculum by transforming the campus from a university to a collection of insular professional schools and thus diminish the place of liberal education while emphasizing professional training. It was this faculty concern about the value of liberal education and longstanding faculty questions about the distributive studies requirement of the general education program which compelled the Senate to ask for a review of undergraduate education. The committee was asked to: 1. draft a brief, general definition of what an undergraduate education ought to be; 2. assess how the current general education requirements serve the aims of liberal education; 3. consider the implications of the administrative reorganization for undergraduate education; and 4. make any other recommendation about undergraduate education the committee considers appropriate. This committee of eight faculty and two students has met weekly since March. We have read and discussed about a dozen major reports and many more minor ones. We have received the good advice of more than 250 faculty, students, administrators, and staff -- many of whom were good enough to participate in a week-long series of open forums. Last November we invited the entire campus community to a week of (2-hour) open discussions about undergraduate education. We were pleased with the response, by the number of people who participated and by the fact that every segment of the campus was involved. We heard approximately 125 people express genuine concern about the quality of undergraduate education here at College Park and cheer us on. We had the good fortune of hearing from the Hon. Ben Unkle and Chancellor Slaughter and Provost Kirwan and deans and staff members and undergraduates and department heads and graduate students and alumni and parents. A number of common themes emerged during these forums. Students asked us to try and improve advising, to reduce class size and, most of all, to improve the quality of teaching. Faculty called our attention to matters of curriculum, class size, unsatisfactory classrooms, and, most of all, inadequate reward for undergraduate teaching in promotion, tenure, and pay. We hope to make a final report to the Senate by semesters end. This report will be sensitive to the fact that this University is the flagship of the State and is obligated not only to provide an outstanding undergraduate education to thousands of students but also to be a leader in research, graduate education, and service. We all take enormous pride in how fast and how far we've sailed in research and graduate study and we very much want and expect this progress to continue. Now that graduate education and research are securely under full sail it is time to rescue undergraduate education which has been drifting about with just a jib. It is time to cast undergraduate study three sheets to the wind and let it sail along to excellence with graduate education and research. Our report will recommend a great increase in the time and energy and attention and resources and spirit committed to undergraduate education, especially to the liberal arts/general education component and especially to the freshman and sophomore years. Moreover, it seems to us that the campus must do a much better job of rewarding outstanding undergraduate teaching; the size of many classes must be reduced; and students must become more actively involved in their coursework, etc. There is much to be done. In the main, the recommendations that are likely to come from this committee will echo those of the fine "Middle-States Self-Study Report" and the major national reports of recent years. APPENDIX 7: ACADEMIC ADVISING For twenty years, academic advising has been studied by committees of the University. The recommendations made by these task groups have always pointed to the same problems. Yet, implementation has lagged severely behind identification. For this study, interviews were held with assistant deans and directors for undergraduate studies in 12 colleges. Several kinds of problems were identified, but the historic problems identified in previous studies remained unsolved. Most of our recommendations, therefore, are not new. As a general rule, faculty should have the primary responsibility for advising undergraduate students from freshman orientation to commencement. However, not all faculty should advise. Advising, like teaching, is a calling. Faculty should be selected to advise who care about the welfare of the students. While we recognize that some colleges have central advising, this service cannot replace faculty/student involvement. Advisors in central advising offices should be full-time professionals who can provide academic guidance in curriculum choice and information about university resources and campus activities. Under such systems, faculty should be identified to provide academic or professional advice beyond that of course identification. Faculty can better provide the rationale behind course selection and can help design a coherent educational program for undergraduates. Some colleges, particularly those with mandatory advising, utilize students as peer "advisors." The Committee feels that a few students might help as clerical assistants but should not be given responsibility for providing suggestions on course selection. The stamping of forms should not fulfill the "mandatory advising" requirement, a current practice. Similarly, graduate students who work for two-year terms, can only begin to master the complexity of the university in the limited amount of time that they serve colleges. Graduate student advisors should only be used as supplementary staff to full-time professional advising staff in central offices. Academic advisors, whether they are faculty or professional staff, should have appropriate training, consisting of initial workshops, apprenticeships, and on-going orientations to changes in policies or resources available on campus. Academic advisors should also become familiar with courses outside the major in order to make recommendations on electives in support of the major. The responsibility for this training should fall to the deans, assistant deans and directors for undergraduates studies of individual colleges. We believe the Provost should monitor the effectiveness of academic advising in individual colleges. Accordingly, advising load should be considered as an important consideration in hiring, retention, tenure and promotion evaluations. In addition, faculty should receive appropriate support, and merit pay commensurate with the advising load carried. Correspondingly, it is apparent that the advising work of full-time advisors and of assistant deans and directors of undergraduate studies is undervalued when their salaries are compared with other full-time professionals, assistant deans, and directors. This matter should be evaluated and appropriate action taken to reward the administrators of student affairs and undergraduate studies in a manner commensurate with other administrative functions. Deans, assistant deans, or directors of undergraduate studies of colleges, at the direction of the Provost, should be responsible for evaluating the quality of academic advising received by students on an annual basis. Student opinion and information should be requested on all academic advisors and areas related to academic advising. The information should be used to retain, reward, remove, expand or modify approaches to academic advising in colleges. Only one of 12 colleges at the University currently has defined a budget for undergraduate studies and academic advising. The lack of specific budgetary allocations for student services corresponds with the historic unimportance of academic advising on this campus. It is desirable that student academic services be considered in terms of the services that must be delivered and those that are optional. Realistic budgets should be defined to pay for individuals and resources required to accomplish those services. If budgets are allocated, then academic advising and student services will not be ignored when fiscal decisions affecting colleges are made. We suggest that the Provost and Deans establish and publicize guidelines. Good advising programs not only deserve money adequate to the task, they deserve adequate space and equipment and secretarial support too. One of the most pressing needs in almost all colleges is the lack of appropriate space for academic advising. In colleges with central offices, often no particular space is exclusively designated for advising. Rather, any available table or corner is utilized in a multi-function office environment. The absence of computers, printers, typewriters, cabinets and other helpful equipment used in the support of academic advising severely hampers most colleges. These essentials affect the quality of information given to students and affect the manner in which records are maintained. APPENDIX 8: CURRENT UMCP POLICY REGARDING ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS, PROMOTION, TENURE AND APPEALS PROCEDURES A. Revision of Policy of UMCP Regarding Academic Appointments, Promotion, Tenure, and Appeals Procedures (January 23, 1976) [not available on line at this time] B. Format for Promotion and Tenure Recommendations (September 9, 1985) [not available on line at this time]