Many of the students who find their way into GE 5: "Mars, Moon and the Earth" are first-years looking to experiment with a new subject or seniors looking to balance rigorous courses with less intense offerings.
Professor of Geological Sciences James Head said he knows that the class he's taught, with a few interruptions, for more than 20 years, attracts those who will probably never take a geology course again. However, he said he is also "painfully aware that people can go through their career at Brown without ever taking a science course."
Common student wisdom assigns courses like Head's and EN 9: "Management of Industrial and Nonprofit Organizations" the pejorative designation "gut course." But Head and Professor Emeritus of Engineering Barrett Hazeltine, who teaches EN 9, say their courses and similar ones in other departments serve an important purpose that is slightly outside the larger missions of their respective departments.
Large, well-taught, unintimidating courses can serve as an introductory gateway to a discipline, but more often they ensure that students do not leave Brown and its New Curriculum without some grounding in a subject outside of their concentration focus or subject-area comfort zone, Head and Hazeltine both said.
"Everybody sees it as an important service to the University as a whole," Head said of GE 5. Though it's not "a course dedicated to those who are going to major in the field," GE 5 allows Head to pull in a few recruits and give a few more students a "fundamental appreciation" of science, he said.
Contrary to rumors, the University is not planning any unusual crackdown on those courses perceived as guts, Dean of the College Paul Armstrong said. "Every university, I am sure, has some courses that are easier than others," but the process of feedback and review by department heads and the College Curriculum Council ensure that Brown courses maintain an acceptable level of rigor in the amount of reading and frequency and difficulty of assignments, he said.
Armstrong said he steers his first-year advisees towards balance in their schedules by recommending courses with different types of assignments in diverse subjects. Brown students are only required to take four courses each semester because "if you take four courses, you can take four courses that are challenging," he said.
Hazeltine, who is in semi-retirement but still teaches EN 9 and 90, and Head both said they had not changed the number or difficulty of their assignments much over the evolution of their courses, and that they had not been pressured by deans or department chairs to change anything.
EN 9 "is outside the mainstream of engineering," Hazeltine said. Fundamentally a business practicum, it has remained under the auspices of the department, he said, because engineering accreditation favors business skills and because it might face opposition from administrators if it were established as a department-neutral University Course.
"A lot of people in the administration have a lot of trouble with courses that deal with the real world," Hazeltine said. EN 9 does not succumb to the "academic temptation to make your material complicated, obscure and esoteric," he said.
Course selection at Brown is "a buyer's market," Head said. His course enrollment has fluctuated from a high of 420 to a low of 70. One year, he said, he wondered about the lower-than-usual enrollment until he was reminded that his exam would fall on the last day of the exam period "and no one wants to stay that late."
Hazeltine said that it is important to him that "people are here because they want to be here." He uses surveys at the midpoint and at the end of the course to choose which business case studies to use and refine assignments, allowing students to shape the class for the coming year.
In the end, Head said, "you get out of the course what you put into the course," and though most GE 5 students never take another geology course, several alums now work for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and California Polytechnic University's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
