WILLIAM MARSH RICE UNIVERSITY

Minutes of the Faculty Meeting

April 29, 1998

1. Announcements

2. Discussion of the Curriculum Review Committee's Proposal

3. Minutes

1. Announcements

President Gillis announced the good news that after rigorous national searches Rice University's Sidney Burrus has agreed to serve as Dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Kathleen Matthews has accepted the position of Dean of the Wiess School of Natural Sciences. A long round of applause ensued.

2. Discussion of the Curriculum Review Committee's Proposal

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The Secretary's Note: The following summary is not a verbatim transcript of any speaker's remarks, partly because an electronic record of the session could not be made. The summary is intended to provide a correct record of the principal ideas expressed during the discussion. Since no vote will be taken on this proposal until the fall of 1998, the summary is intended to spark further discussion. Individuals' names are given in full so that readers can contact faculty members to obtain fuller versions of their views. Only the principal ideas introduced by speakers are noted: that is, if a speaker affirmed another speaker's comments, the affirmation is not shown.

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Dr. Gillis moved directly to the main topic of the day's meeting. He noted that no proposal could be perfect and that faculty should focus on whether the proposal was better than the present curriculum. He also guaranteed that resources will be available to do well what the faculty decides to do. He commented, "The decisions to be made in the fall will not be constrained by lack of resources, but they may be constrained by lack of resourcefulness." As evidence, he reported new gifts from the Hewlett Foundation ($150,000), the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation ($150,000), and the Gordon and Mary Cain Foundation ($5 million). Furthermore, next year's budget will include support for the development of ten new courses in support of curriculum reform and additional gifts are expected over the summer.

The Chair of the Curriculum Review Committee, William Martin, introduced the committee, which has held over 100 meetings over the past two years. The members are
· Brandon Bidlack (Undergraduate Representative)
· Sidney Burrus (Electrical and Computer Engineering)
· Priscilla Huston (Provost's Office)
· John Hutchinson (Chemistry)
· Walter Isle (English)
· Benjamin Lee (Anthropology)
· William Martin (Sociology, Chair)
· Kathleen Matthews (Biochemistry and Cell Biology)
· Carol Quillen (History)

Before inviting comments and questions from the audience, Martin asked Walter Isle, Chair of English and member of the Committee, to review the recent history of curriculum reform at Rice. Many of the documents Isle mentioned that chronicle the Committee's work can be viewed at http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~currrev/ or at http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~facsec/facminhtml.

In his introductory remarks, Martin noted that the Committee has kept the same number of hours available for the majors and has tried to ensure that other requirements would enable students to take advantage of work in their majors. In formulating general requirements, the Committee hoped all students would "learn how to learn," becoming familiar with how intellectual models are developed, tested, and applied so they can react critically and thoughtfully in the future.

The proposal, Martin said, addresses the major opportunities for improving the Rice curriculum by stressing oral and written communication and helping students make connections across fields. Such changes would enable the productive interdisciplinary collaboration that has been the hallmark of Rice scholarship and research over the past decade to emerge in the curriculum as well.

The Committee's proposal attempts to address criticisms raised in the April 1998 Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching Report (also known as the Boyer Report, which is available at http://www.sunysb.edu/boyerreport. The Boyer report emphasized that while many students can obtain a good education at leading research universities, it is also easy for them to miss one at many of them. Many of the Committee's recommendations are consistent with the Boyer Report recommendations, although the report also includes recommendations that have to do with majors, something the Rice Curriculum Review Committee was not asked to consider.

Instead, the Committee has focused on what will be required of all students, requirements that could be phased in beginning as early as the fall of 1999 or the fall of 2000. The implementation must be gradual; the University cannot put all of them in place at once.

In devising a suitable plan, the Committee has collected a large number of documents from other universities, which are available for viewing at http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~currrev/. Martin said that in an unexpected recent meeting, former Rice University President Norman Hackerman reported he is now teaching with great pleasure a science course at the University of Texas that includes writing assignments.

As Martin turned to the general discussion of the proposal, he said that in his judgment, the most important innovation is the sustaining structure to foster ongoing curriculum development. The proposal, available at http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~currrev/proposal, recommends establishment of a faculty committee (CURR) that will review and approve courses for university-wide credit and encourage the development of new courses. He also reminded the audience that many courses will permit students to fulfill more than one requirement simultaneously. He then opened the meeting to a general discussion of the proposal, beginning with the topic of freshman seminars.

Dennis Huston asked for clarification about how specialized the seminars are going to be and what they will focus on.

Carol Quillen explained, as an example, the freshman seminar proposed to the Hewlett Foundation. In that experiment a group of faculty will collaboratively develop a course on "human nature." The residential college course will show how faculty in social sciences, philosophy, biology, and other disciplines approach this topic; each faculty member will teach one section of the resulting course. She added that some freshman seminars could have multiple sections and be developed collaboratively; others may be developed and taught by individuals.

Moshe Vardi voiced concern that faculty attention might be diverted to creation of new and fascinating freshman seminars instead of addressing the question of how to improve the large introductory courses that now exist in many departments.
In response Sidney Burrus explained that since Rice has a good faculty-to-student ratio, Rice should be able to improve its introductory courses as well as create the seminars. Quillen commented that the freshman seminar experience of "learning how to learn" should benefit students when they participate in other courses, large or small.

Dale Sawyer reasoned that it seemed more efficient to address deficiencies such as those in writing with required courses in specific areas.
Dean Judith Brown recommended that distributions in enrollments would probably be balanced if the names of instructors were not included in the enrollment forms, forcing students to make choices on the basis of topics only.

Alan Grob took up the issue of staffing, and described the difficulties that have occurred in maintaining the two-semester introduction to humanities sequence now required of engineering and science students. Further, he noted the proposal has not addressed the desirability of one freshman seminar versus a two-semester general education requirement in fields complementary to the one in which a student will major. The wide-ranging list of sample seminar topics is not supported in the proposal by a rationale explaining why these topics would be more valuable than the texts that give the humanities sequence its primary value for students. Why does the Committee want to substitute specialization (in a freshman seminar) for introduction to the outstanding texts of the Western tradition? Quillen responded that she was a product of the sort of education Grob was championing. The Committee had not tried to specify what students should learn, she said, but that they should experience how to learn. The Committee would certainly like to have students experience content that was broad and significant, and she felt certain that Rice faculty would teach such substantive content. There are pluses and minuses to each approach, she said.

Sidney Burrus emphasized the value of interdisciplinary possibilities in the proposed seminars that were not available in the present distribution system.
John Freeman changed the direction of the discussion by asking about how the Committee believed Rice could go about developing the kind of teaching implied by the recommendations for writing intensive courses, freshman seminars, and the new criteria for distribution courses. Martin replied that workshops to be given, similar perhaps to the one recently conducted by Al van Helden, would be one avenue. Freeman believes the costs of fostering development will be high. Gillis reminded the audience that the principal constraint will not be financial resources but resourcefulness.

John Polking asked whether it would be possible to develop a freshman seminar for first-year students concurrently enrolled in calculus and physics on how mathematical models are developed in the biological sciences for a wide spectrum of phenomena. It appeared to the Committee that this seminar might be very attractive to students, and many first-year students are simultaneously enrolled in these two courses each fall, providing a good pool of possible participants.

Joan Strassmann, responding to Freeman, suggested that other faculty who are teaching exciting courses can be a good source of expertise. She intends to pursue that possibility someday.

Deborah Harter responded that the key word in faculty development is the troubling "someday." She drew on her experience with the HUMA 101/102 courses, praising the value of learning from our colleagues. However, without necessary time, which may come at the expense of research or teaching of existing courses, faculty cannot engage in learning from one another. She expressed hope that the Committee's final proposal will guarantee and encourage faculty collaboration and camaraderie that make it worthwhile to work 10 times as hard on these newly created courses.

Susan McIntosh emphasized that the Committee's proposal not only calls for new courses but for teaching in a way that is not the hallmark of most social science courses. She singled out "inter-" as the key to the proposed changes: "interactive" and "interdisciplinary" teaching. Much of the interactivity, she observed, seemed to be technologically mediated. The start-up costs of changing teaching styles are daunting, and the learning curve may be steep. The 24-hour day limit will make the balance between teaching and research hard to achieve during this transformational period. Scientia is making plans to assist as a sponsor of workshops. She recommends visiting the Committee's site to choose links to other university's descriptions. Her main concern is support for innovation.

Jane Chance introduced questions about the impact of 45 new freshman seminars on the teaching of current courses. She asked who would teach these courses and whether unequal distribution among the divisions would occur. She also expressed concern over the feasibility of accomplishing so many goals in one course because the proposed freshman seminars try to do so many things. She asked what training instructors would be given and noted the difficulties graduate students have had in trying to teach writing. She pointed to the severity of the challenge in teaching writing, given the use of lower standards on the composition examination the last three years in order to keep the number taking English 103 within the limit available staff could teach. She also wondered how the writing requirement was going to be defined.

Provost David Auston responded that with a faculty of 450 plus 200 non tenure-track instructors teaching 1400 courses per year, an additional 45 courses would amount to a 3 percent increase, and that with a faculty growth rate of one percent and a three-year period of phasing in requirements, a 3 percent increase in faculty would coincide with the 3 percent increase in the number of courses

Tim Cochran, who had taught a freshman seminar at MIT, expressed his satisfaction with the experience and asserted that all the goals did not have to be accomplished in every course there.

John Stroup suggested that if there were complaints about writing, Rice might adopt the British universities' tutorial system, which was well established and effective. He also suggested that more details on CURR and its director were needed.

Harvey Yunis spoke on behalf of the foreign language faculty and expressed their distress that the study of foreign languages no longer received encouragement either by being eligible as ways of knowing courses or by being required.

Bill Camfield raised the issue of how creative arts courses would be dealt with in the new curriculum. The present proposal treats arts courses as a future phenomenon, whereas there already exist many studio arts courses, music courses, and creative writing courses that are not acknowledged in the proposal. Because the time for adjournment had already arrived, the discussion was concluded without further comments on this concern, but Martin assured Dean Michael Hammond a discussion of arts courses will be continued in the fall.

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3. Minutes

Revised minutes of the March 12, 1998 meeting were approved.

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