Recently, the Faculty Senate voted on a change to the curriculum process to reduce the time necessary to implement curricular changes (Docket Number: 1519). This was done with minimal discussion.
I propose that the faculty senate reinstate the college senates into the curricular process.
As a former chair of the CHAS senate, I am well acquainted with the role that the college senate plays in the curricular process. The CHAS senate has a minimum of three people reading all curricular changes from each department in CHAS. Numerous mistakes are found and proposed curriculum are often sent back to departments for a variety of reasons (topic overlap, course redundancy, missing consults, formatting issues, leapfrog issues, etc.).
The college senate is uniquely poised to scrutinize curriculum proposals coming from its own college in ways that do not necessarily occur in the UCC/GCCC/Grad Council/Faculty Senate. For example: If Chemistry proposes a Physical Chemistry course, the Physics department is uniquely suited to determine if this class is simply a duplicate of Quantum Mechanics or merits its own class.
We find ourselves in a situation where control over our university and its curriculum is taken from us by outside forces more and more frequently. Why should we be so willing to give up more control over the curriculum on our own accord to speed things up by a few months?