joe,

i'm not sure how constructive your black and white distillation of this
issue is. it's a pedantic and patronizing response that does nothing to
further the thoughtful resolution of what is sure to be a very complex
problem for us all. maintaining a quality education with a 120 hour
requirement is possible, in my opinion (and here i tend to agree with
david), but will require some careful and sometimes difficult decisions
to be made-at potentially all levels of the university: in individual
departments, in the gen-ed committee, and in the university as a whole.
that differences of opinion on this issue will best be resolved through
debate is both proper and inevitable. that the debate remain civil and
productive is a choice we make.

On Wednesday, November 5, 2003, at 05:03 PM, Joe Dumas wrote:

> David Garrison wrote:
>
>> In response to Joe Dumas's anti-socialist response to Jim Hiestand's
>> wagon-circling response ...  Their lamentation over the
>> coming 120-credit limit strikes me as both illogical and romantic. The
>> number of required credits does not, as both suggest, have much of
>> anything
>> to do with the quality of education, but only with the amount of time
>> one
>> spends in the classroom--which, we all know, translates only very
>> roughly
>> into quality of learning.
>
> Hmm.  Maybe there are 8 credit hours of coursework in *your* major
> programs in which the students learn nothing of value, but I can assure
> you that such is not the case in computer science or engineering.