William Earnhardt Duncan

As we stood in Snyder Hall in Hampden-Sydney College waiting on the H-SC Campus Community Conversation to begin, the nerves began to hit me. Are people going to show up? If so, how many? If not, what do I do? What if only faculty show up?What if only students show up? How are they going to respond to my ideas? These were all thoughts racing through my head right before the first guest arrived. As the night rolled on, my questions were answered. We had a respectably sized crowd, a good mix of faculty and students. I was pleased with the responsiveness of the students and surprisingly, the faculty. My hypothesis was that the students would be much more positively responsive than the faculty. In fact, the faculty who spoke with me offered their mutual concern about the transferring of credits and liberal arts curriculum reform. Below is a comprehensive list of data gathered from both students and faculty. The most important data I gathered came from a survey I had my guests answer before I started talking to them about my wicked problem. I asked, “Do you know that H-SC allows you to design your own major?” Out of sixteen students and faculty that answered the survey, only one (a long-time faculty member) answered in the affirmative. That is 6.25% of a sample of this community who knew that students are able to customize their major or minor to better fit what he wants to learn. While this was not a large enough sample size of the 1100 Hampden-Sydney students, I still believe this statistic would turn out to be significant if tested with the appropriate variable sizes. This statistic shows that the communication of policies like the one stated above by Hampden-Sydney College is poor.

The next step in the process of alleviating this wicked problem is discovering the reason behind such poor communication. My hypothesis is due to the fact that the responsibility of communicating this policy lies with the individual departments, departments either choose to or forget to relay this information because it increases the workload of the teachers who already have to plan out multiple classes for multiple semesters. Further research is necessary to determine the cause of this lack of communication.

Once information about the cause of the lack of communication is obtained, collaboration with the department heads is the next step. The data gathered in the Campus Community Conversation event needs to be presented to begin a discussion about how this policy and the process of designing one's own major can be better communicated to students. The conversation also needs to include what can be done to solve the issue of foreign and transfer credits. How much power are the faculty willing to concede to the students? Is the solution a replica of W&L's model? How can we use rhetoric to prove competency? How can we give students the opportunity to study more of what they are interested in or of what applies to their desired field of work while still incorporating the liberal arts education that we value so highly here at H-SC?

Student & Faculty Data*:

• Broaden Curriculum. The "liberal arts" curriculum is a treasure, however, specific study avenues cause problems with our current curriculum.

• Reduce number of history (Western Culture) classes to allow time to take personal finance classes

• Allow more flexibility w/ majors…agriculture?

• Thin out the core so students can be more creative w/ courses

• Econ minor

• More emphasis on data

• Allow more classes to count for core curriculum subdivisions

• Allow writing/editing for a student publication to count for academic credit. Also academic tutors.

*The data presented are not my own. They represent the ideas of students and faculty who chose to voice their independent opinion on the matter.