Western Front - 1985 March 5

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Six-year-olds
attended school
at Western
/8
Viking season
stopped short
in controversy
/n
WESTERN FRONT
TUESDAY, MARCH 5, 1985 WESTERN WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY, BELLINGHAM, WA VOL. 77, NO. 14
The End
Core classes close
By Ann Evans
The Western Warthogs snuck by Chuckanut Bay Rugby Club for the first time in eight years
Saturday. Above, Chuckanut's Dan Wigg unsuccessfully tries to escape with the ball as
Spring quarter, the Pilot Pro­gram
for the Core Curriculum will
offer its three final seminars under
its grant from the Northwest Area
Foundation of St. Paul, Minn.
Since the program began in
1981, Core classes have only been
filled twice.
"It's not that we're not trying—
the mechanisms are failing," said
Richard Francis, director of the
Pilot Program for the Core
Curriculum.
The Core program offers three
seminar classes under this year's
topic, "The Self." Enrollment is
limited to 16 students to maintain a
discussion atmosphere.
Every quarter 2,000 letters are
mailed-out to students to inform
them of the Core Program, and
less than 1 percent of them are
returned.
"That's worse than political
campaigns," Francis said.
Core began as an experimental
course, for/ seniors and was
expected to become^ compulsory.,
cap-stone c6urse7T&utj' because^of
lack of enrollment, Core slowly
evolved to junior-level course.
Francis said it was hard to create
a course for seniors because West­ern
has a floating student body.
"We are not a four-year liberal
arts institution," he explained.
"Eighty-five percent of Western
students are, under some defini­tion,
transfer students."
Each year, a new topic and
teaching team of three faculty
members are selected. Teachers are
given the freedom to define their
own seminar within a common
framework.
"Perhaps Core is seven years too
late or seven years too soon,"
Francis said.
In the 1970s more seminar
courses like Core were offered. In
the future, as we become exten­sions
of the machines we use, it will
become increasingly more difficult
to define the self, Francis said.
"Seminar rooms are evaporat­ing
on campus. Because of (their)
size and location, they're turned
into computer terminal rooms,"
Francis said.
Francis said people need to start
asking questions: "How is pro­gramming
a computer going to
affect the thought process? What is
the relationship of the person who
learns computers to the process of
learning itself?"
He said that modernism has
caused humans to become so
fragmented in the learning process
that we can only communicate
inner-departmentally.
"We will not prepare our stu­dents
for the future if we keep up
with this highly fragmented disci­pline.
We will be training dino­saurs,"
Francis said.
^•-'^''•wArs'vpe^p^e'="chahge,"J6"b"s, five or
six times in a lifetime, we should go
back to cultivating students to be
analytic and articulate, so they can
confront new issues and master
new areas of learning," Francis
said. . . -
Francis said Core classes
appeal to students who are tired of
passive, information-retrieval lec­ture
classes.
"Student response to Core
classes has been euphoric. They
almost sound like conversion
experiences."
Student response to a survey of
• see CORE, p. 2
S & A fee budget process continues
By Liisa Hannus
New questions arise and old
ones are left unanswered as the
Services and Activities Fee Split
Committee tries to put together
proposals and recommendations
for next year's budget.
S & A fees are deducted from
tuition payments to fund Asso­ciated
Students and Housing and
Dining activities and Departmen-tally
Related Activities Council
(DRAC) programs.
The fee split committee decides
how S & A fees will be divided
between those three areas.
Committee members were asked
at a Feb. 14 meeting how many
DRAC programs were required
for student degrees. An example
would be the Western Front, a
DRAC program that is a required
course for a journalism degree.
Majken Ryherd, committee
member, questioned the legality of
using S & A fees in academically
related programs.
Joan Sherwood, S & A commit­tee
chair, has contacted Wendy
Bohlke, Western's Assistant
Attorney General, in regard to this
matter. A letter presented to the
committee^at Thursday's meeting
from Bohlke did not specifically
answer the question, so the com­mittee
must wait for more
information.
The committee has not yet made
a decision on the process it will use
to distribute the money it will
receive. Committee members
could decide to continue the per­centage
distribution they have
been using, or they could choose to
establish an actual dollar amount
for each constituency.
Don Diebert of the Budget Off­ice
suggested the Budget Office
and the Controller's Office would
prefer a dollar amount, as this
would help these offices identify
Director of University Residences Keith Guy and Associated
Students President Majken Ryherd discuss budgets at an S & A
Fee Split meeting.
shortfalls or excess revenue.
One main topic left for the
"committee to decide is whether
they should make cuts in the
DRAC programs or if DRAC
should do it itself. If the S & A
committee made the cuts,-the pro­cess
would take longer.
Committee member. Dennis
Catrell told the other members
that if they could give DRAC dol­lar
amounts for the funding cuts>.
the heads of each DRAC area
could make the cuts.
"You may not have to live with
the numbers that these people give
you," Catrell said, "but they are the
experts in their field and they have
been living with this for years."
Another main problem for the
committee is setting their time­table.
They have no definite date
for when their recommendations
have to be completed. The reason
given at Thursday's meeting for the
holdup here is waiting for Gov.
Booth Gardner to release his
budget.
At Thursday's meeting, the
committee set March 15 as the
target point to have the recom­mendations
completed.
Sets chilled
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