General Education Committee Minutes, 2/5/10
Members present: J. DeBoer, J. Edwards, J. Eglin, J. Luckowski, D. MacDonald, D. Potts, T.
Thibeau, K. Shanley, D. Sloan, A. Williams
Ex-officio member present: B. Holzworth
Members absent: F. Rosenzweig
Guest: S. Lodmell – ASCRC Chair
The minutes from 11/18/09 were approved.
Communication:



The Committee will be meeting every other Friday at 3:10 for spring semester. Meeting
dates are: 2/19, *3/5, 3/19, 4/2, 4/16, and 4/30. * Camie will be on annual leave, so the
committee may wish to reschedule for 2/26.
The next meeting on February 19th will be at 4:10 so that Linda Gilison, Chair of Modern
and Classical languages may attend to discuss the exceptions to the Modern and Classical
language requirement.
It is hoped that the committee will have a resolution to the symbolic systems issue by the
March 19th meeting so that it can be presented to the Faculty Senate on April 8th.
Business Items:
MUS core courses – updates to UM’s list

Professor Samson is UM’s representative on the Board of Regents General Education
Council. The Council approves the general education courses from each campus that satisfy
the MUS Core. She sent the revised course listing to the Committee for input. Many of the
core categories correspond to UM’s general education program. It seems that all of the
Indigenous and Global courses satisfy the Cultural Diversity category. There are also
several courses in Social Sciences and Historical and Cultural Studies that may also meet the
criteria of this category. Please review the list and send any comments to Professor Samson
as soon as possible. The updated list will be sent to the Commissioner’s Office on Monday.
Procedures for summer or spring offering of courses approved in the fall

Normally courses approved during fall curriculum review are activated the following fall
when advertised in the catalog. However, there are often requests for courses to be offered in
the spring or summer. This is an exception to the normal procedure. It presumes approval
and faculty recruit students even though the course status is pending. After discussion,
ASCRC recommended that the General Education Committee re-evaluate its one-time only
general education designations for experimental courses. There are circumstances when
experimental courses are appropriate for general education. The committee decided to retain
the policy and clarified that “one-time-only” refers to single semester approval.

The committee briefly discussed the appeal for MGMT 101. The subcommittee should
review the materials and make a recommendation to the committee.

The Ethics Subcommittee is working with Military Science on revising MSL402 so that it
meets the criteria.
The meeting was adjourned at 4:00 p.m.