[2707] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
[Mit-talk] Faculty meeting discussion of the task force
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael Lieberman)
Thu Oct 19 12:50:44 2006
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 12:49:32 -0400 (EDT)
From: Michael Lieberman <mathmike@mit.edu>
To: mit-talk@mit.edu
Errors-To: mit-talk-bounces@mit.edu
As one of the few undergrads who attented yesterday's faculty meeting, I
figured I'd tell people what happened, and mention my thoughts on the
meeting.
The formal minutes will be available sometime before the next meeting, at
https://web.mit.edu/dept/libdata/libdepts/d/archives/facmin/
In general, I was impressed by the concerns of various faculty members.
First of all, for any interesting motions, they traditionally give the
faculty until the next meeting to think about it. Two motions were
proposed at this meeting.
The first motion was to submit the task force report to CUP (the Committee
on the Undergraduate Program), so that CUP go come up with more specific
suggestions, guided by the report, to propose to the faculty. It also
seemed to include CUP going ahead and doing some things that did not
specifically require approval of the faculty. It was unclear to me how
much that was. I wish I could find the actual text of the motion.
The second motion was made by Professor Leeb (after much confusion over
parialmentary procedure), to postpose the vote on the first motion until
February. Professor Leeb did not express any specific criticisms of the
report, but said he made many concerns, and that he thought the faculty
should have time to discuss the report in a varient of ways amongst
themselves.
The motion to postpone will be voted on in November, before the original
motion.
There wasn't very much time for discussion at yesterday's meeting
(discussion will continue in November's meeting). I'll mention a few
comments I remember.
An advocate for international opportunities expressed concern over the
Freshman Experience. She wants freshmen to be able to take a language
first term freshman year.
Professor Sussman expressed disappointment that the task-force changes
were not radical enough. He would like to see the sceince core subjects
merged into classes that cover a variety of disciplines. He gave a
detailed example of a class that would study planetary orbits, and would
include math, physics, hands-on data-collection, readings from galileo,
etc.
Professsor White (course 6) expressed disappointment that the two required
math classes were both calculus, and thinks that a discrete math class
would be better than 18.02 (my thoughts on this later).
Lukmann, one of the few undergrads with speaking privileges, mentioned two
major concerns that he had heard from undergrads. 1) undergrads like the
ability to choose from all the HASS classes first term. 2) there was
concern that orientation would focus more on academics and less on
residence exploration.
I'm sure I'm missing one or two comments, but the biggest thing to take
away from this is that the faculty are far from agreeing to everything in
the task force recommendation.
Now I'd like to share my two cents on the specific issue of the math
requirement. While I don't see discrete math taking the place of 18.02 in
the requirement, I think it's within the realm of possibility that 18.03
can replace 18.02. I hope people will correct me if I'm wrong, but I think
that most majors already require 18.03, while many of those majors could
do without 18.02. With this change, people would then have a real choice
for their third math class (either take 18.02, or some form of discrete
math which is likely more useful to their major). I talked with Professor
White after the meeting, and he think's it's a good idea with a chance of
working. What do people here think? (I feel obliged to mention this was
not my idea, but I stole it from Tim Abbott).
-Mike Lieberman
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