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Board Overrides Faculty Recommendation on Curriculum At George Mason University
When the faculty senate at George Mason University voted 21 to 9 to censure the school’s governing board on May 18, it was responding to several years of what it believed was board interference with faculty control of the curriculum. The event that precipitated the censure resolution was the board’s alteration of the faculty’s proposal for the general education requirements for GMU undergraduates.
No one disagreed with the need for updating the general education requirements. At the board’s request, a special faculty committee had just spent six months putting together a proposal that tightened and increased the requirements in most areas. When the board voted on the program, it accepted all but one of the faculty committee’s recommendations. But it rejected a key proposal that required a one-semester course titled "United States and Western institutions, traditions, and economies," replacing it with two new required courses of its own—one in Western civilization, the other in American history.
As many faculty senators saw it, that action was just another example of the board’s tendency to micromanage the curriculum. Two years ago, there was a flap when the board decided to relocate to the College of Arts and Sciences a controversial experiential degree program called the New Century College, despite a faculty committee’s recommendation that the independent college continue for a few more years. A similar conflict erupted last year over the board’s decision to overrule the faculty senate and give more credit for ROTC courses than the senate had suggested.
Board member Jack Herrity, the main proponent of the two new history courses, has argued for the need to "go back to basics," so contemporary intellectual politics may have been involved in the recent board action. But the professors’ main concern was procedural, not ideological. As the senate resolution noted, the school’s faculty handbook gives the "primary role" in "the university’s academic offerings" to the faculty. By adopting specific courses that would result in what the censure resolution called "an academically inferior curriculum," the board violated the university’s own regulations. But board chair Edwin Meese II, the U.S. attorney general in the Reagan administration, disagrees, explaining that his body has "ultimate responsibility for the educational policy of the university."
Governance issues aside, the faculty will now have to implement the board’s decision, a task that falls to the history department, which has a year to create and staff the two new courses.
It’s unclear what impact the censure resolution will have. The fact that few faculty leaders were willing to speak on the record reveals considerable ambivalence. On the one hand, they recognize that the board encroached on faculty prerogatives; on the other, they worry that censuring it might create a backlash. The next few months will be crucial.
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