No band-aids for graduation

Temporary steps to accommodate seniors who are struggling to fill the upper-level fine arts requirement need to be followed by a comprehensive solution.

Four years into the new curriculum, the supplemental education fine arts requirement has proven to be especially onerous for students.

“We know the division of fine arts is a small division. There is a bottleneck there,” said Bobbi Owen, senior associate dean of undergraduate education.

With only three departments from which students can draw — art, music and dramatic art — and with options limited within those departments, the curriculum has placed an unfair burden on the students who are desperate to fill the requirement.

Yet these departments are also burdened with the formidable task of maintaining educational standards while accommodating the demand for their courses.

Any solution will have to address this by either increasing course offerings or removing the requirement.

The obvious solution is to offer more sections of the above-199-level fine arts classes that students need to take. Even better still would be to expand the options for students to meet the supplemental education requirement through the “integrative” option.

The integrative approach allows students to take three related courses in a “cluster” of courses to meet the requirement. Students still have an interdisciplinary experience bound by an overarching theme.

And because students need only take cluster courses from two of the four College of Arts and Sciences divisions, greater cluster participation would ease demand for fine arts courses.

Owen is extremely supportive of clusters, but cited that they can be difficult to develop, especially in the budgetary climate. But it would certainly be worth the effort to actually make the curriculum work rather than face the same situation again next spring.

A comprehensive reform with a greater emphasis on clusters, in tandem with greater course offerings, could vastly improve the general education curriculum.