The faculty of UW’s University College of Arts and Sciences elected last week to eliminate certain core requirements.
The university as a whole had previously voted to eliminate Global Awareness and Diversity requirements from the curriculum. The College of Arts and Sciences chose to use its own internal decision making process to vote on whether or not it still wanted to keep these requirements at the collegiate level. An email was sent to faculty members with options to keep the G and D requirements or to keep just the existing core.
Dr. Karen Bartsch, chair of UW’s Psychology Department did not foresee any major changes for students in the psychology department with the vote.
“This is because a psychology degree is a fairly inclusive degree in the sense of we make people already take biology and statistics. Students also have to take a wide variety of psychology courses as well as other social sciences such as sociology and anthropology. So I think for psychology students the impact of the change will not be very large,” said Bartsch.
Bartsch did agree that there could be issues for other majors.
“[I’m] speaking from the perspective of the psychology department. For other majors there may be those kinds of issues. I’m not denying there will be those kinds of issues, but I don’t know as much about that.”
The decision to keep the Global Awareness and Diversity requirements was an important decision for the college.
“Students from Wyoming need to be prepared for an increasingly diverse global environment because most people leave the state to go work elsewhere, but also because you’re coming to a campus that is predominantly white you need to have that kind of grounding within other cultures in the U.S domestic environment and that’s what we teach,” said Dr. Kerry Pimblott, visiting assistant professor for the Department of African American & Diaspora Studies.
The loss of the requirements from the USP may cause a loss of enrollment in G and D classes and therefore a loss to certain departments as a whole.
“We’d really struggle to get students. I recruit students out of those basic classes. My concern about the practical implications of the new USP devastating my classes has dissipated because I know now that 80 percent of students in the college of A&S will still be required to take my classes through the G and D requirements and that makes me feel great,” said Pimblott. “I just hope that eventually we can fight a good battle to get the Global Awareness and Diversity requirements back at the university level.”
