Just as Brown students are able to tailor their academic experiences to suit their interests, professors have some freedom to structure their course meeting patterns.
Students know the schedule on Banner or Mocha isn't necessarily the schedule a class will follow in practice. Professor of Comparative Literature Arnold Weinstein's COLT 1420T: "The Fiction of Relationship" is listed to meet 10:30-11:50 a.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays. He splits up the course into one 80-minute lecture on Tuesday, but on Thursday, students attend one of a handful of discussion sections offered by him or graduate teaching assistants.
Peter Andreas, professor of political science, lectures for POLS 1020: "Politics of the Illicit Global Economy" Mondays and Wednesdays and has teaching assistants run discussion sections during the scheduled Friday class periods.
"Professors certainly have latitude in the way they structure their courses," said Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron — but within certain limits. Though these limits "aren't necessarily spelled out" in guidelines like Brown's Faculty Rules and Regulations, deans of departments are responsible for overseeing departmental instruction to make sure professors follow both written rules and "good practices."
Class structure is especially important because the University follows the unitary system, meaning one credit is equivalent to one course, with the exception of a few half-credit courses. A science course with three hours of lecture and a four-hour lab counts for the same number of credits as Weinstein's class, which only has one 80-minute lecture and one 80-minute section.
Brittany Katz '12, a human biology concentrator in Weinstein's comparative literature class, said the discrepancy does not bother her because she values the freedom the unitary system allows. She likes how she can select her classes and not worry about their different credit weights, she said.
But Chad McAuliffe '14 said he thinks the structure of Weinstein's course puts a lot of emphasis on teaching assistants' abilities, and though he enjoys his section's discussions, he wishes Weinstein lectured more in the course.
When asked whether the University had given him any rules about his course structure, Weinstein said he wasn't aware of any, and that administrators seemed to be "awfully flexible on that front." He said the unitary system is appropriate because he doesn't think the number of hours in a class is necessarily the best way to measure its academic worth.
Barrett Hazeltine, professor emeritus of engineering, teaches three separate lectures for ENGN 0090: "Management of Industrial and Nonprofit Organizations." When one of his lectures was too full, he worked with the additional students to create a section of the class they could attend. His third lecture section on Tuesdays and Thursdays is only 50 minutes long, but he supplements it with detailed lecture summaries on MyCourses and additional office hours. Hazeltine said he has checked with the dean of his department in the past for clearance on the class structure, and the administration's attitude has always been lenient.
Michele Narbonne '15 said Hazeltine wastes no time in his full-length lecture. Ana Rosenstein '15 attended the 50-minute lecture once when she missed her own and said that though she preferred the longer lectures with Hazeltine, she knows classmates who prefer the shorter ones.
Andreas wrote in an email to The Herald that he could not return a request for comment on his class' structure because he was travelling.
