A heated debate between student senators at the Associated Students Inc. Senate meeting last week ended with a resolution that opposes revisions made to the 2011 general education policy by the Academic Senate.
The Academic Senate revised their proposal for changes to the humanities and arts section to open more course options to students by allowing them to take three units of arts, three units of humanities and an additional three units from arts or humanities.
The initial proposal would have allowed students to take three units of arts and six units of any humanities to satisfy their C2 GE requirement.
The current policy mandates students take one course in the arts and six units in two of three humanities areas, literature, philosophy or foreign language.
ASI’s resolution recommends keeping the current mandate. It will be presented to the Academic Senate on Thursday for consideration.
“Some faculty want a much more structured GE policy … other faculty say, let’s open it up a little bit,” said Lynn Mahoney, associate vice president for undergraduate studies.
Senator Jorge Soriano insisted during the ASI Senate meeting that, by opening more liberal arts courses, the new GE policy would value ease of class accessibility over the quality of education.
According to Soriano, students would be able to avoid such courses as foreign languages in favor of “hyper-specializing” in other subjects.
He further pressed that specializing in a GE subject would allow students to avoid challenging GE courses in humanities and arts, increasing grade point averages and devaluing Cal State Long Beach’s degrees.
Mahoney remains skeptical of Soriano’s GPA argument.
“I’d love to see data on that,” Mahoney said.
“I guess you could argue that if students take what they like, they might do better, but I don’t see that as grade inflation or skewing their GPA,” he continued.
Senator Lucy Craig argued that students should have the option to “hyper-specialize” in a subject for their humanities and arts GE if they wish.
“I used to be confused as to why Americans don’t want to specialize,” Craig said. “I’m concerned with jobs. We can’t keep churning out people that are too generalized.”
According to Craig, allowing students to focus in one particular area would encourage critical thinking and permit students to delve deeply into a few subjects rather than graze several unrelated subjects on the surface.
Senator-at-Large Jason Neas disagreed with Craig, arguing that specialization should be restricted to major and minor programs.
“Basically what the pattern does now is protect us from going too far off the mark and going into narrow niches,” Neas said.
Neas said he hopes that the Academic Senate will heed ASI’s resolution against the humanities and arts GE revisions.
According to Mahoney, the Academic Senate’s approval process is slow, meticulous and unpredictable.
Academic senators will review and approve individual parts of the 2011 GE policy change proposal at each meeting.
Once this review is finished, the revised points will be combined into a final policy proposal, which will then be read by the Senate for a final vote.
So far, the Academic Senate has finished only a quarter of their review.
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