Number of Gen Ed Courses Unchanged

Despite problems in getting the new General Education program off the ground. Edward T. Wilcox, director of General Education, expects the number of Gen Ed course offerings next year to be roughly the same as this year.

In an interview yesterday, Wilcox also said that he has prepared a condensed version of the new Gen Ed requirement which he hopes will be easily understandable. He will present the streamlined requirements to the Committee on Educational Policy next week.

Difficulties Plague Committee

Wilcox outlined three major difficulties which have hamstrung the new Committee on General Education in its attempt to line up General Education courses for next year:

* The departments have already allocated their professors and section men and submitted their budget requests for next year. The Committee has had to try to find personnel to staff new Gen Ed courses at a time when nearly everyone was already assigned to departmental courses. Wilcox would have liked to begin earlier, but the lengthy Faculty debate meant the Committee could not meet until two months ago.

* A good deal of the Committee's already-limited time was consumed in transforming the Faculty's mandate into a concrete, concisely stated requirement. Wilcox had difficulty requesting faculty members to give Gen Ed courses until the program was complete, and he had a definite set of criteria for new offerings.

* Finally, the Committee has had to deal with the problem of selecting courses that are appropriate to General Education. Wilcox pointed out that new topics have come into prominence in recent years that are not included under traditional definitions of Gen Ed. He used as an example the experimental offering of Soc Sci 111 (History of East Asian Civilization) as a lower level Soc Sci course this fall.

Program Skirts Tangles

Wilcox, in his shortened statement of the Gen Ed requirements, will be trying to rescue the new program from some of the tangles of terminology into which it has fallen. He mentioned the difficulties of labelling courses which will become the second half of "sequence": these courses are officially designated as upper-level, but they satisfy lower-level requirements. If his version of the requirements goes through the CEP without difficulty, it will be presented to the Faculty in April.