Have you ever wondered why arts and sciences are grouped together into one college? Would it make more sense to separate the performing arts and the humanities from the "hard" sciences?
University President John T. Casteen III recently put forth the idea of restructuring the College and Graduate Schools of Arts and Sciences because of the large size and the scope of the disciplines included in their fields of study.
But professors at an Arts and Sciences faculty meeting decided overwhelmingly that splitting up the sciences and humanities would not benefit the University and may do more harm than good.
"I think the danger would be that it would isolate the humanities and ultimately lead to the weakening of some of our best programs," said Spanish Prof. David T. Gies, former Faculty Senate chairman.
In a panel discussion at the faculty meeting, professors presented various perspectives on the proposal.
College Dean Melvyn Leffler took a straw-poll vote of the faculty members present to gauge faculty support for the proposal.
Only three of about 60 faculty members favored the split into two separate schools.
"Generally speaking, those in favor [of dividing the College] are from the natural sciences," said Alison Weber, associate professor of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. "It is hard for them to get grants with the amount of teaching they do" and the split would make it easier for them.
"We have very good science departments, and we want to make them better," but separating them from the rest of the fields of study included in the College of Arts and Sciences is not the way to go about improving those departments, Gies said.
Other comparable universities divide subjects differently, Music Dept. Chairwoman Judith Shatin said. Shatin spoke on the panel.
For example, Shatin said at Columbia and Duke, as at the University, the performing arts are considered part of a well-rounded liberal arts education.
But "Indiana University and the University of Michigan have chosen different paths" that focus more on performance than a broad-based curriculum, she said.
"U.Va. has a long history of strength in liberal arts education," Weber said.
"From the perspective of the language departments, language and literature are becoming more and more inter-disciplinary," she said.
A lot of students double major, and the split would make that more difficult, she added. "Many students enter the College thinking that they will become doctors and quickly discover that pre-med. classes are not for them. [The split] would create a tremendous dislocation for those students."
Despite strong opposition, she said, the suggestion might receive more consideration in the future if there were a definite proposal rather than an indefinite plan.
But Gies said, "My guess is that it's done."
"One of the great strengths [of the College] is the conversion of different disciplines and ideas," he said. "To isolate subjects would be un-Jeffersonian."
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