An ad hoc committee of faculty members has proposed a radical departure from Linfield’s current class scheduling.
Unlike the present system, the proposal divides the day into six blocks in which a class can be scheduled, although there are a few exceptions.
Richard Emery, business department chair and professor of accounting; Thomas Love, anthropology and sociology department chair and professor of anthropology; Brad Thompson, chair and associate professor of mass communications; and Liz Atkinson, associate dean of faculty and associate professor of chemistry, volunteered to rebuild the class scheduling system.
“Over the years, there has been dissatisfaction with the current schedule,” Emery said.
He added that professors frequently complained that classes can overlap by five or 10 minutes or had fewer than five minutes of transit time between them.
Emery said faculty members became frustrated while creating their schedules for next year last November, and someone suggested creating a new scheduling system.
“This has been festering for some time,” Emery said.
Love said that the Faculty Executive Committee had once looked into rebuilding the scheduling system, but there was no one available to do it.
“One of the huge advantages of this schedule is the common lunch hour, free of class conflict,” Love said. “We can stop having all this time wasted trying to figure out if we can meet.”
Atkinson was charged with creating the new schedule, Love said, calling her a “[Microsoft] Excel guru.” The committee has created 14 versions of the proposal so far.
Atkinson said it was difficult to accommodate all the courses and allow students to take all their classes across different departments in the new schedule.
Atkinson said she thinks there will be additional
changes to the proposal when it goes up for a vote May 9 during the monthly faculty meeting.
One hurdle is the current start time of morning classes. Some professor feel that 8:15 a.m., the current start time, is too early, Love said. The blocks last 75 minutes.
Love said 50-minute classes will be on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule, and longer classes will be held on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
He added that the optimal solution, limiting all classes to four credits, was too inflexible for the desires of the professors, forcing a compromise. Even so, Love has a high opinion of the new system.
“Anything’s better than what we have now,” he said.
If the proposal passes, it may take effect during Spring Semester 2011.
Joshua Ensler
News editor Joshua Ensler can be reached at [email protected]