The dean of the Virginia Military Institute has put forward a controversial and unusual plan that could prevent students from choosing popular academic majors so that the institute can equalize faculty workloads and spread out its 1,500 students more evenly across disciplines. The plan has upset some professors, including one who called it “academic socialism.”
VMI is a four-year, public military college with a liberal-arts curriculum, including 14 academic majors. Its seven most-popular majors have attracted 83 percent of students, while the seven least-popular majors have attracted just 17 percent.
“This uneven enrollment distribution strains resources for the larger majors and underutilizes resources for the smaller ones and prevents effective resource planning,” says a memo that Brig. Gen. R. Wane Schneiter, deputy superintendent for academics and dean of the faculty at VMI, distributed on the Lexington, Va., campus this month. “In the smaller majors, faculty workloads are relatively light, class sizes are small. … The opposite may be true of the larger majors.”
The memo, which details other controversial plans, including changing the focus of the English department from literature to rhetoric, was sent anonymously by e-mail to The Chronicle.
The institute’s two most popular majors—international studies, and economics and business—enroll 32 percent of its students, who are referred to as cadets. Among the least popular majors are English, physics, mathematics, and modern languages and cultures.
The dean’s plan would tie admission more directly to academic majors, so that applicants’ chances of admission would be greater if they wanted to study less-popular majors. The institute also would counsel incoming students upfront to ensure that cadets—who are required to choose a major before enrolling—are likely to choose one that fits their long-term interests, reducing the chance that they would want to switch to another major.
Under the plan, students could still transfer to another major after they arrived, but they could only choose a new major if it enrolled fewer than 200 students. The only way a student could transfer into a major that had more than 200 students would be if another cadet transferred out.
“What I really don’t want to happen is that we end up with just a few, three or four, popular majors, and then you have a bunch of students with the same instruction and no opportunity for real debate and dialogue,” Mr. Schneiter said in a telephone interview. He has appointed a faculty committee to work out the details and put his plan into effect over the coming academic year.
Some professors at VMI have praised the plan, saying it would add more diversity to the student population by evening out enrollment and strengthening fields of study that are less popular. “Our dean wants to make sure that all of our majors are really robust,” says Christina R. McDonald, director of writing at the institute and a professor of English. “This was driven by an interest in making sure that undersubscribed departments don’t eventually disappear.”
But other professors oppose the plan. An anonymous e-mail message sent to The Chronicle said faculty members were “outraged” by the dean’s memo.
A senior professor in the humanities at VMI who asked not to be named said in an interview that students’ interests evolve, particularly at a liberal-arts college. Undergraduates, said the professor, should not be prevented from choosing something different simply because lots of other students have already chosen it.
The dean’s plan, the professor said, would cause the institute to admit students primarily because of their interest in particular majors rather than because of their academic qualifications, and could lead VMI to turn away talented students who are interested in the most popular majors. “We could be telling a highly qualified international-studies major that, No, you can’t have your major. If you want to come here, you can choose these others,” the professor said.
“This takes away cadet freedom,” said another VMI professor who asked to remain anonymous. The faculty members who talked to The Chronicle have tenure but said they still worry about being fired for criticizing the dean’s plan.
Overcrowded Majors
VMI is not the only institution facing the problem of overcrowded majors. But rather than cap enrollment, most other universities have dealt with the issue by increasing the standards for admission into popular majors.
For example, Cornell University has increased the number of courses required for some popular majors and made it easier to complete coursework for some that are less popular, according to Ronald G. Ehrenberg, a higher-education expert and director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute. Mr. Ehrenberg said Cornell also has increased the number of minors in popular subjects like business to accommodate students’ interest.
While Mr. Ehrenberg said he understands faculty complaints that the VMI approach strays from the “American” way of doing business in higher education, which includes giving students choice, he said it is not necessarily a poor plan. “Faced with fiscal constraints and pressures from the political process to offer courses in fields that will lead to high-paying jobs (and tax revenue for the state), many public universities are being pressured to alter their staffing and enrollment patterns,” he said in an e-mail message to The Chronicle. “The VMI solution is a way to continue to offer a balanced curriculum and will help preserve the institution’s faculty in the humanities.”
Besides its broad attempts to spread enrollments and faculty workloads, the VMI dean’s plan would:
- Try to bolster student interest in English, which has fewer than 50 majors, by de-emphasizing the study of literature and focusing instead on the development of students’ writing, speaking, and general rhetorical skills. “Rather than literary study,” says the dean’s plan, “the department’s focus will be on the production and analysis of texts of a variety of forms and types.”
- Restrict psychology to a Bachelor of Science degree because that fits more directly with the institute’s interest in bolstering science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines, even though the Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology at VMI is much more popular.
- Discontinue the teaching of German and Japanese and add Mandarin Chinese as, the plan says, “China emerges as the dominant global economic and rising military competitor to the United States.”