On Tuesday, various committees updated Academic Council members on the progress of their initiatives.
The New Residential College/School Curriculum Team presented a 39-page report that included the mission of the program and curriculum requirements, including possible courses.
The residential college, or school, would be housed in renovated Snyder and Phillips halls and have a focus on the humanities.
This summer acting Provost John Hudzik will review the report, receive input and make additional comments on it. He will then return it to the academic governance system in the fall for further consideration.
A group assembled to look at the relationship between integrative studies, writing and quantitative literacy supported instituting quantitative literacy across the curriculum.
The committee first reviewed a report on quantitative literacy, which measures student's skill with mathematics, statistics and computing.
The group approved a suggestion made by the Quantitative Literacy Task Force to incorporate the concept into courses in all departments. This means students in English classes could be required to calculate statistics.
But some members of Academic Council were unsure about the feasibility of this proposal.
"There is a great deal of skepticism about carrying out quantitative literacy at the course level," said Richard Peterson, a philosophy professor. "People are not quite sure how to do this in courses such as literature."
It is important to be willing to bend when it comes to changing courses to include quantitative literacy, said Norman Graham, associate dean of James Madison College and professor of international relations. He serves in a consulting position to the quantitative literacy group.
"It was commonly mentioned it was an area where there would be a real need for flexibility," Graham said. "I think there are ways to deal with this, but it's not a small problem."
Committee members will look in the coming weeks at reports on how to improve integrative studies and writing and work on finding correlations between the two and quantitative literacy.
"The most important charge they have is to weave together and find the linkages," said Jon Sticklen, chairman of the Executive Committee of Academic Council and associate professor of computer science. "The three areas are the common core of undergraduate education. They are charged with something very massive."
