Committee holds open meeting in Kauke Tower

Ryan Secard
Contributing Writer

The members of the Educational Policy Committee met with the student body last week to present their “working framework” of possible revisions to the College Curriculum. During the meeting, EPC members Margaret Sestito ’18 and Dean for Curriculum and Academic Engagement Henry Kreuzman introduced and took questions on the framework, which was scheduled to be presented for faculty review on May 1.

Kreuzman opened by crediting the members of the EPC for doing “a tremendous amount of work” in drafting the framework and taking special note of how long it had been since the Wooster curriculum had been updated in 2000. He compared the necessity of updating the curriculum to the growth of technology.

The heart of the new proposal is its outline for a new liberal arts core, which consists of six courses in “Liberal Arts Literacies,” three courses on “Inquiry and Communication,” four courses in “Global Engagement,” and two courses in “Justice and Civic/Social Responsibility.” The six Liberal Arts Literacies requirements are all loosely defined in familiar-looking terms (one course each in Quantitative Literacy and in Historical and Humanistic Understanding, for example); other categories, such as Justice and Civic/Social Responsibility, are less clearly defined.

Kreuzman noted that finding courses appropriate for each category will involve feedback from members of the faculty as well as from students, “The devil’s in the details, and we’re gonna have to hammer out those details.”

While the current plan currently totals out to 15 courses, according to the plan “a student could … with extremely efficient double counting … fulfill all their core requirements with a minimum of 10 courses.” In his question and answer segment, Dean Kreuzman explained that this is about the same number of courses required by the current curriculum.

One proposed introduction to the curriculum that notably incorporates a more individual approach to one’s education is the addition of “Interdisciplinary Concentrations.” Concentrations, as outlined in the handout distributed to attendees, would consist of four to six “related courses or programs already existing in our curriculum” and would serve as a way for students to customize their education in addition to minors.

Student involvement in the discussion was lively. One stu