Curriculum Committee Minutes
February 1, 2000
Present: Barry, Breitenbach, Cannon, Ives, Kerrick, Livingston, Mitani, Neff-Lippman, Neshyba
(chair), Pasco-Pranger, Pinzino, Stevens, Tomhave, Washburn
Neshyba called the meeting to order at 4:05 p.m. The minutes for the meeting of November 30
were approved as posted.
Announcements.
Neff-Lippman announced that Nancy Sommers, the director of the Expository Writing Program at
Harvard, will visit campus on February 25 and 26. Members of the committee are invited to
attend her talk and her workshop, which will focus on the role of writing in undergraduate
education.
Neff-Lippman also announced that the deadline for the Writing Excellence Award is February 8.
She urged committee members to encourage students—especially juniors and seniors—to
submit papers.
Report of the Study Abroad Subcommittee.
ACTION: Neff-Lippman M/S/P that the University of Durham and the University of
Lancaster be added to the list of affiliated study-abroad programs that we offer to our
students. In speaking for the motion, Neff-Lippman noted that these institutions are currently on
“approved status.” Granting affiliated status will allow our students to use state, federal, and UPS
financial aid when attending these universities for study abroad. Moreover, UPS seniors who
enroll at affiliated institutions are considered to have satisfied the requirement that they take their
last eight units in residence.
Report of the Communication I Subcommittee.
ACTION: Ives M/S/P that the following courses be reapproved as Communication I Core
courses:
Education 110 (Contact Zones: Ways of Being, Knowing, and Writing at the University)
English 101 (Freshman Seminar in Writing)
History 100B (The History of Exploration: A Freshman Seminar in Writing)
History 100C (Scholars and Warriors in China and Japan: A Freshman Seminar in
Writing)
Honors 101 (A Freshman Seminar in Writing)
Humanities 110 (Utopia/Anti-Utopia: A Freshman Seminar in Writing)
Humanities 120 (Crisis and Culture)
Foreign Languages and Literature 150 (Film, Memory, and the Imagination of Disaster)
Ives noted that the subcommittee has not yet received syllabi for Humanities 111 and Humanities
113. Ives offered several general observations occasioned by the subcommittee’s review of the
syllabi for courses in this Core rubric: (1) There is a noticeable difference between English 101
sections that focus on writing and sections that focus on literature. (2) Core guideline III.B. states
that courses should “pay careful attention” to grammar, punctuation, rhetoric, and usage. Some
syllabi explicitly mention these matters as course subjects, but others do not. (3) Core guideline
III.D. states that courses should require students to write on “a wide range of academic subjects
and for a variety of situations and audiences.” The subcommittee was uncertain about how to
apply this guideline, especially for non-English 101 seminars that focus on a particular subject. In
such cases, it might be difficult to create writing assignments on a wide range of academic
subjects. (4) The subcommittee encountered many references to “process writing,” but was not
certain that the phrase meant the same thing to all who used it. (5) The subcommittee noted that
these syllabi raised once again the familiar question of whether the course proposal or the
syllabus is the appropriate place for a statement of how a course meets Core guidelines.
In response to a question from Neshyba, Ives reported that most syllabi did not provide an explicit
discussion of Core guidelines, although most did provide some statement about the importance of
writing. Barry observed that as Core guidelines have grown more elaborate, with long lists of
criteria and requirements, it becomes more difficult for instructors to create satisfactorily
comprehensive syllabi and more tempting for reviewing subcommittees to wink at omissions. The
solution, he opined, may be to trim the guidelines to their essentials.
Other subcommittee business.
In reply to a question by Pasco-Pranger, Washburn stated that the deadline for Bulletin copy is
March 1, so subcommittee work on reapproval of Core courses should be finished by that date.
Washburn also noted that the provisional approval that had been granted to four Business and
Public Administration courses has now expired, so those courses should be given high priority for
review by the BPA Subcommittee. In addition, several new courses that have been submitted by
individual faculty members for approval as Core courses in the Historical and Humanistic
Perspectives categories need to be dealt with by March 1.
Because of a scheduling conflict affecting members of the Women Studies Subcommittee,
Livingston will shift from that subcommittee to the Special Interdisciplinary Major Subcommittee,
which Pasco-Pranger will now chair. Cannon will take Livingston’s place on the Women Studies
Subcommittee.
At 4:40 p.m. Stevens M/S/P that the meeting adjourn.
Respectfully submitted,
William Breitenbach
Secretary