Our Dean, along with the higher-ups, has recently made a move to put the entire Arts and Sciences school on a 3-3 load. Our department has a 4-3 load. The trick is that this needs to be accomplished without additional teaching resources. This means either dropping courses or increasing class sizes. Somehow we need to drop 16 sections a year.

We have two main challenges. First, English does a great deal of service work from comp. to gen ed literature to advanced writing courses. Writing intensive courses CANNOT get larger, but dropping them will create problems for students.

We generally don’t offer double sections of our major-specific courses. Our program is not that large. As such, increasing the size of those courses does nothing and dropping the sections will make it impossible for students to graduate on a timely basis.

This leaves us with general education literature courses, but here is the second problem. The majority of these courses are taught by instructors, whose loads aren’t going to be reduced. Increasing the size of these courses just means piling more work on them.

So I have two realistic options. Both work froma numbers standpoint; neither is particularly desirable pedagogically speaking; but then again neither is a 4-3 load.

1. My first option is based on the premise “don’t build it, and they won’t come.” We offer 55 sections of GE each year, around 20 are WI and capped at 25, the rest are capped at 30. That’s about 1500 students. If instead we simply offered 40 non-WI sections, 1200, we’d get the reduction we need, but we would be 300 students short. The premise is that since a significant portion of our students transfer anyway and those who transfer in generally have fulfilled their literature GE, these numbers will never be missed. It will just mean that some students who transfer will do so without having taken the literature GE.

I think this will work. It may even have the added bonus of attracting more students to our lower-enrolled WI courses, since they will need to replace the WI they can no longer get through their GE literature course. However, the Dean may not like this solution as pushing this GE requirement into the Junior/Senior year will interfere with some programs curriculum (e.g. the education students who take blocks of courses together in their upper class years: it will be difficult for them to take a GE then).

2. The second option is to selectively increase the class size of some GE courses. Of the 55 GE courses, 33 were taught by tenured/tenure-track faculty. So here would be my solution. 22 sections taught by instructors or adjuncts, all of them WI and capped at 25. That’s 550 students. The leaves around 1000 students to be taught by faculty. If we did this in 16 sections, one per year per faculty member, the courses could be capped at 60.

Now that seems equitable (complaints about class size aside), and as it is many lit. faculty in their 4 course semester teach two sections of a GE, so this is just basically putting all those folks into one room.

However, it is doesn’t quite work out. You see, we have some professors who teach 4 or 5 GE courses a year, and I’m not talking about junior faculty who get stuck with the job but senior faculty who request this. They then go on to teach a lit survey, one 400-level course and one grad course (these last two being on the same subject).

We then have other faculty in teacher preparation, writing, or new media who teach might teach one GE or maybe none as they are asked to teach a range of different major courses. So what do you do with those faculty?

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