New course catalogs mark the coming of spring. Students anxiously await the moment when displaying an ID card will mean a paperback-bound hint of the year to come. But this week as students began the search for classes, they made a startling realization. Making up a schedule would be almost impossible: the catalog does not contain the times or days when classes will meet.
The decision not to print dates and times in the 2002 edition of the course catalog was made by a committee of administrators consisting of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Dean of the Conservatory, the Registrar and members of the Office of College Relations.
Since days, times and even courses are liable to change before the catalog comes back from the publishers, the committee decided that it makes little sense to print information that could mislead students trying to make up their schedules for upcoming semesters. The committee believes that this move is a permanent one.
Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences Robert Geitz said that approximately 20-30 percent of the information contained in the catalog is inaccurate by the time it returns from the publishers. He also said that the decision to omit dates and times was partially based on last year’s hiring of 50 new faculty members after the catalog had been sent out to the publishers, making even more of the information inaccurate. The course catalog has to be prepared far in advance of its publication. In fact, the fall semester courses must be decided eight months before publication, and spring semester courses, 13 months beforehand, making it very difficult for some departments to accurately represent the courses they will be offering.
However, the bare course catalog has disappointed many students who depend on the catalog to block out possible schedules. While the committee that decided to omit dates and times had hoped that this change would encourage the use of the registrar’s supplement as the main source of information, this seems to defeat the purpose of printing a course catalog in the first place. All the information found in the catalog may now be accessed through the online catalog or the online supplements provided by the registrar’s office and the various departments and programs.
This decision was only a small part of the entire process that goes into creating the course catalog. The majority of the work on the course catalog is done by faculty members, who along with their departments decide which courses will be offered in the upcoming year. For some departments, such as mathematics, it is relatively simple to make these decisions. The mathematics department has a number of courses that are offered each year and sometimes even each semester, such as calculus and statistics.
Other courses are on a two-year rotation. For example, geometry and topology are offered in alternating years. Decisions on which faculty member will teach a course are also not very difficult. “We sometimes need to make changes from the usual pattern based on people being on leave, visiting faculty, etc., but we have enough flexibility in the department (i.e. — all of us can teach many different courses) that this is only a secondary factor,” Jeff Witmer, professor of mathematics, said.
For other departments, however, these decisions are not as straightforward. In the history department, the courses are decided mainly by which courses need to be offered due to their relation to the major and which areas of expertise are represented within the department for that particular semester. Although some of the 100- and 200-level courses are offered every year, the majority of courses are decided by faculty interest.
“The faculty have a tremendous amount of autonomy when deciding on which courses will be offered,” Chair of the History Department Steven Volk said. Many courses are offered on a regular basis, simply because “[incorporating] a new course into the curriculum is a huge amount of work,” he said.