During its last meeting of the academic year on April 23, the KSC Senate discussed the motion to pass the upcoming curriculum pause.
Senator and Professor of History Nick Germana, chair of the senate curriculum committee (SCC), presented a document regarding the upcoming pause and provided some insight.
“We met to finish up our business for the year,” Germana said in regard to the past meeting of the curriculum committee. “The first thing we did was finalize or tweak our curriculum pause for the academic year of 2025 to 2026 with three categories of potential exemptions. One for changes required for accreditation, a second for staffing reasons and a third category for program proposals that had already been submitted during the fall 2024 semester.”
Senator and senior Jacob Favolise of the executive committee raised some questions about the pause before Germana presented it for the whole Senate to see.
“I will support the pause, but I will ask the question of why course deletions for reasons other than staff deletions aren’t carved out specifically in here,” Favolise said. “I think it’s necessary if the goal is to focus departmental work around a curriculum of making sure we have a gen ed [general education] model that has filled out courses and that students know what they can take and know what they’re going to be taking. There’s greater transparency and flexibility in this gen ed model than what we have right now, and it seems to me that deleting courses would be a part of that.”
Germana responded, “Part of it is that we want departments to be considering their offerings. We’re anticipating a whole lot of curriculum proposals the following year, and activations will be part of those packages. We see them as part of the curriculum reform, which will come the following year when the departments have had an opportunity to look at their offerings.”
Afterward, Germana presented the proposal to the gathered senate.
“We need curriculum to move forward and there are questions that both the dean might ask about resources and there are questions that the registrar’s office might ask about programming. We can keep having those conversations but the curriculum proposals need to move forward. They get to the SCC, and that’s the place where we would bring everybody together to make sure that all those questions are raised and answered before it moves on to the next step,” Germana said.
“What you see [on the board] is a very simplified timeline because we will be receiving very, very few proposals next semester because of the curriculum pause,” Germana said. “In the fall, the CAP [college wide academic policy] committee is going to be working on devising their own procedures for how they are going to review general education proposals that come to them.”
Once the presentation was concluded, the curriculum pause passed unanimously.
Following the approval of the curriculum pause, the Senate held a follow-up meeting to elect chairs for the different committees.
Professor of History Greg Knouff, who previously served as chair of the now-defunct academic policy committee, was elected the chair of the academic policy and standards committee, Germana for the curriculum committee, while Professor of Mathematics Karen Stanish remained as chair of the Executive Committee and Senate chair, with Professor of Mathematics Mike Cullinane as the chair for CAP.
Chloe Erno can be contacted at
cerno@kscequinox.com
