Present at beginning of the open meeting: Bob Haymes, John Bennett, Judith Brown, David Minter, Mary Tobin, Steve Baker.

GENERAL ADVICE:

No one should get out of Rice without a broad survey course in HISTORY. In addition, WRITING is critical.

Students need to be able to formulate, articulate, criticize ideas, to read and understand difficult material, then stand up and talk about it. Vital to learn oral communication as well as written. A SENIOR THESIS might be useful in this regard.

Some sort of freshman seminar, separate from Huma 101, was favored. Perhaps once a week for two hours. Specially trained instructors would teach written and oral communication. Then, more writing and speaking across the curriculum.

Intensive writing course in first year. Some believe there are good models for writing across the curriculum and that good people can be found to do this. (Emory requires students to take at least one writing-intensive course each year. Courses are identified as such and professors are committed to doing what needs to be done.) Students with problems are sent to a writing center and are required to go.

More emphasis on revision.

LANGUAGES:

Create a language center. Give a competency exam, oral and written (Not just a paragraph to translate). The burden would be on students. They could prepare in high school and test out of courses, but the requirement would be substantial and real. This could be aided by study abroad and foreign internships, with encouragement and financial assistance. The incoming director of the new language center has worked to send engineering students to Germany. (Rice has arrangements with some programs in Germany that could work for some engineering students.)

ENGINEERING CURRICULUM:

Some feel that at least some engineering curricula could be streamlined, with the same material taught in fewer courses, thereby relieving some of the pressure on students and perhaps making possible a reduction in overall course requirements. Majors need to be looked at carefully, perhaps seriously reworked. ABET (the accrediting board for engineering) is shifting focus from numbers of courses to outcome-based criteria.

FRESHMAN SEMINARS:

The numbers could work. To teach,say, 50, seminars a year, enough faculty (as well as post-docs and graduate students, perhaps part-timers) could be recruited so that no person would have to teach such a course more than every third or fourth year. It would be a mistake to imagine that a high percentage of our faculty could teach writing. Such courses could also offer graduate students an opportunity get real teaching experience, which serves them well when seeking a job. To use them effectively would require a set of courses with enough commonality to facilitate effective training of the teachers. Graduates could play a central role in such courses, and the courses could help to provide additional funding for graduate students, a strong need.

POSSIBLE ROLE OF COLLEGES:

Sid Richardson College upper-class folk are holding informal seminars in which they critique the writing of freshmen.

All freshmen could take (in addition to or as an alternative to the kinds of freshman seminars we have been considering) a course in which 6-8 students would meet with a faculty member (usually a college associate) for one hour a week at lunch to discuss one or a small number of short readings (10-15 pages of "high journalism," deliberately selected so that intelligent people could understand them) on important topics, drawn from a variety of disciplines. All freshmen would read the same articles at the same time. Good attendance would be fully expected. This would have the double advantage of having a large number of people engaged intellectually with a common problem, serving as a means of revitalizing the role of associates in the colleges and helping them achieve the kind of intellectual-leader role they were originally intended to serve. These might meet for only ten weeks during the semester and be for one hour of credit.

Students should be conversant with technology and its implications, at least at the level discussed in Science and Scientific American. Regarding the Natural Science foundation courses, someone observed that it was flawed to think there were foundational materials that would give students access to all of science. Better to offer a selection of courses from various areas.

QUANTITATIVE REASONING:

Aren't SAT scores a sign of competence? Rice students are not terrified of math. Math skills of non-SE students are not high. A course designed to force-feed math will be doomed to failure. Build math into a range of courses. Teach probabilities. Get tutors. Find ways of linking it to various aspects of courses. Devise a quantitative reasoning competency test. Make it significant, expect people to pass it. (Harvard urges early passing of such a test.)

INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH:

All should have some taste of significant individual research.

THE PASS/FAIL OPTION:

There was general agreement that the pass/fail option can ruin a small course. Most felt that too many students used the option as a way of doing little work. (A check with the registrar indicates that the average student uses the pass/fail option only twice during his/her Rice career.) In general, there was sentiment toward eliminating the option. Another option might be to raise the threshold, so that a C would be the floor for passing.

COMMUNITY SERVICE REQUIREMENT:

Some community service or other volunteer activity might be a requirement. Some schools have this.
Perhaps we should make better use of Houston as a resource. Explore art museums, etc. All felt this was laudable, but difficult to make a requirement

INTERDISCIPLINARY COURSES:

A number of interdisciplinary courses could be tried such as those that have been developed at Brown and Stanford.

VARIOUS CULTURES: Teams of professors might deal with a set of cultures across a wide span of time (e.g, the 20th century).

Some of these could be interdivisional.

RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION COURSES:

Restricted distribution courses might be a good idea, but would need some oversight, to determine which courses would fit the needs of general education.