The Wabash Commentary: There seems to be evidence that certain departments miscounted students when asked by the administration for a census of their classes, thus leading perhaps to unfair cuts. Why not go back and review such seeming errors instead of pushing ahead and in effect cutting several positions? Dean Gary Phillips: We did our very best, the division chairs and I, to cover all of those areas, and I’m not willing to say there were not some students missed. But the criteria that we used for helping to identify the positions that needed to be reduced were not simply numbers driven, not simply the head count in a class. There were a range of them, including engagement, and engagement is a function, not just of how many students are in your class, but a whole department’s engagement with all of your students. You could compare music, with its number of faculty and of majors, and compare it to political science, with its number of faculty and majors, and then you can crunch the student load, which is the direct engagement each student has with the faculty, and of course it’s going to be different with a class of 45 than with a class of ten… It’s not a science, but we used criteria that we thought elevated student engagement and kept that at a high level, as well as maintained strong majors, majors that have made historically strong contributions to the College. Now, having said that, someone will say, ‘Classics hasn’t been a historically important major to the College?’ And of course it has been, but you’re also looking at where students are, and one of the important ways student come to the College is they’re coming here and wanting to do pre-med or the life sciences or the health professions, and you have to have a curriculum that services those large numbers of students, as part of the bread and butter, the same way that we have to have high-quality athletic facilities, because lots of our guys play sports.* And that’s part of the liberal arts, of the body and the mind working together, and the College has to support that. |
