The Faculty Senate convened yesterday to discuss revising general education requirements for Stanford undergraduates.

The conversation followed a brief presentation on the progress of the new Study of Undergraduate Education at Stanford (SUES). SUES is a University initiative that last quarter began the process of examining the undergraduate academic experience for the first time since 1994.

Co-chairs James Campbell, a history professor, and Harry Elam, a drama professor, spoke about what they had learned so far about general education requirements (GERs) and asked for faculty feedback.

“This is not really a report yet, because we’re not at that stage,” Elam said. “This is a time for you to give us some of your opinions on these issues.”

They first summed up the current General Education Requirements (GERs) at Stanford, including Introduction to the Humanities (IHUM), the Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) and breadth and citizenship requirements.

“If one would have to take them all, it consists of 15 courses, or about one third of the courses needed to obtain a Stanford degree,” Campbell said. “It is indeed a lot.”

Campbell and Elam reported that so far the committee has been talking to students about their views on the current GERs. In addition, Campbell and Elam have met with administrators from other schools, including Harvard, to talk about their successes and failures in general education.

Campbell reported that other schools warned that the most important aspect of GERs is to be able to articulate well why they are necessary to a Stanford education.

“What we want to find is a rationale that speaks specifically to Stanford…the Stanford today, and where students will be and where Stanford is in terms of the culture and the spirit of the institution, pushing it forward into the next millennium,” Elam said. “The question is, why do we want students to take that course?”

SUES has already begun the process of engaging with students through focus groups. Every Wednesday night, they have dinner in one of the dorms and talk to approximately twenty students about their experiences with GERs.

“They felt that the freshman year was incredibly packed,” Elam said of the dinner meetings. “And in that sense of packing it didn’t allow for the experimentation and exploration that we’ve said is essential in the first two years at Stanford.”

“They felt that general education requirements were often an afterthought,” he added.

The two went on to talk about two different models of general education generally employed: the core classes approach, which is focused on freshman and sophomore years, and the distributed requirements approach, which is spread across the four years of the undergraduate career.

“We have a hybrid model,” Elam explained. “Are we happy with that hybrid model? Is that what we want?”

After the presentation, the floor opened to faculty members to offer comments and ask questions.

Kenneth Taylor, a philosophy professor, offered the opinion that IHUM hurts humanities at Stanford rather than helps.

“I think because we require them to take this massive and obtrusive IHUM, we turn students…off to the humanities,” he said.

Virginia Walbot, a biology professor, referred to an old Stanford program called Science, Math and Engineering (SME). SME, an experiment by Stanford in the mid-1990s, was an interdisciplinary program in the sciences meant to increase science literacy among non-science majors. The one-year program fulfilled the math, science and engineering GERs.

However, the program was terminated after many students discovered easier, less time-intensive classes to fulfill the requirement.

“I think this was a really robust experience for the rather small group of students,” said Walbot, who taught a SME class. “I think some attention should be paid to pulling together the sciences with some of the other disciplines.”

Jeffrey Koseff, a civil and environmental engineering professor, offered an engineering perspective on the general education requirements.

“The curriculum is really full, and by meeting the accreditation requirements, we’re even more constrained,” he said.

Campbell agreed, saying with 115 units required for mechanical engineering, it’s hard to leave room to explore with 60 units of GERs.

Andrea Goldsmith, an electrical engineering professor and chair of the Senate, offered her own commentary.

“I realized that our engineering students have qualities that are unique, and that students who come to Stanford to study engineering come because we offer something different than CalTech or M.I.T.,” she said. “I think that’s incredibly valuable and something that needs to be preserved.”

However, she said, basic scientific and mathematical literacy should also be required. In addition, she set off a conversation about what constitutes a shared educational experience and whether that kind of common class is valuable.

“Stanford has 74 residence halls, so there’s no way we can set up a residential college system like those of our peers; but we can do a lot better,” Campbell said. “SLE [Structured Liberal Education] is an intensive intellectual experience in the residence…there’s no reason why Stanford couldn’t have a SME and a SLE and a few other residence-based kind[s] of intensive experiences. We don’t have a one-size-fits-all approach.”

Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education John Bravman ’79 M.S. ’81 Ph.D. ’85, who announced this week he is leaving the Farm to become president of Bucknell University, said it is natural for students to not want to take required courses, and that students will find the easiest way out of such a system. He therefore urged the SUES committee to ensure that if it is committed to a program, there are not alternative routes to circumvent it.

SUES will continue work over the summer and into next year and hopes to generate a final report by fall 2011.