Since the Oct. 18 release of the draft proposal for the new Core Curriculum, groups on campus have engaged in various discussions on the document's merits and drawbacks. The Core Curriculum Committee, students and faculty met in two Town Halls on Wednesday, Oct. 28, as well as in a faculty meeting on Sunday, Nov. 1. Discussions are still ongoing and a revised proposal is currently in the process of being drafted.

What makes this proposal fundamentally different from the previous curriculum is its division into two sections: breadth requirements and colloquia. The draft proposal, available to students on private Facebook groups, outlines that the four breadth requirements must be “robustly disciplinary” and spread out across the following areas: Structures of Thought and Society; Cultural Analysis; Art, Technology and Invention and Data and Discovery.

Although there is a new requirement that students enroll in a Quantitative Reasoning course and an Experimental Research course, one faculty member suggested that the proposal, as it stands now, leans more towards subjects being taught by humanities professors.

“[This is] going to be further exacerbated by the fact that the other disciplines, I think most acutely the social sciences, already have a huge burden in terms of the number of faculty relative to the number of students,” said the faculty member, who chose to remain anonymous.

Currently, Economics is the university’s most popular major. This semester, classes such as Introduction to Accounting have upwards of 40 students. Econometrics has over 25 students. Political Science also experiences high enrollment for classes such as International Politics, which has 28 students this semester and had to open a second recitation session.

The faculty member attributed what they saw as a bent in the Core Curriculum to the makeup of the Core Curriculum Committee and the underrepresentation of faculty outside of the Arts and Humanities.

Bryan Waterman, Associate Professor of Literature, the chair of the Core Curriculum Committee and Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Academic Development, said that although courses will be listed in each of the four areas, they will not be limited to faculty from individual divisions.

“So each of the three, Cultural Analysis, Structures of Thought and Society and Data and Discovery, is able to accommodate faculty or courses that might arise within specific disciplines, but they can all include people who cross over,” said Waterman. "It's more about the individual course than it is about the major program in which these people reside.”

With an increasing gap between number of faculty and number of students in the social sciences, as well as the Biology and Computer Science majors, some faculty assert that the current proposal will only exacerbate this imbalance.

“The structure of the Core will create a situation in which some divisions may need to hire more faculty, and others, as a result, won't be able to hire, because those hire lines will be allocated to other divisions,” said the anonymous faculty member.

The faculty member also noted that there were other factors influencing the disparate students-to-faculty ratio across disciplines, such as higher competition with U.S. institutions for sciences and social sciences faculty.

“We need boots on the ground so we can teach classes,” said the faculty member, who saw further implications in these patterns.

“At the end of the day, faculty governance has a big say in what will get adopted and what won't get adopted,” added the faculty member. “Just having more boots on the ground in one discipline than another discipline will make that discipline more powerful.”

Waterman did not believe there was a connection between the Core and hiring patterns.

“I’m not sure if there's a one-to-one correspondence between the teaching needs of the Core and hiring across divisions,” said Waterman. “Divisions all have their own unique hiring needs.”

Waterman instead pointed to the over-reliance on affiliated faculty to fulfill the Core requirements.

These discussions have coalesced around whether the Core should follow the distributive model, in which students take individual classes from a spread of disciplines, rather than Core-specific classes.

“Most systems of general education are designed to give students broad exposure to a range of disciplinary materials and approaches, with the agenda of creating well-rounded scholars and citizens,” said Waterman. “But I think one reason the committee chose not simply to say that you take a few courses from this division and a few courses from that division is that the divisions themselves are extraordinarily diverse.”

The anonymous faculty member suggested a different model for the Core:

“The Core is built around this idea that there are a set of big questions our students need to think about," they said. "As faculty members we need to provide students with structure and opportunity to learn different methods, modes of thinking.”