New General Requirements

Colleges & Universities A-Z Pomona College
1

<p>This is an e-mail I got about the new general requirements that will go in effect next year. I thought prospective students might be interested to know since it will affect anyone who decides to come. It seems like they cut the current GER (PAC) system in half. </p>

<hr>

<p>ANNOUNCEMENT REGARDING GENERAL EDUCATION CHANGES EFFECTIVE FALL 2005</p>

<p>TO: All Pomona College Students</p>

<p>FROM: Margaret Adorno, Registrar</p>

<p>Yesterday the faculty of Pomona College voted in a new General Education component to replace the ten PAC requirements, and also eliminated the writing- and speaking-intensive requirements. </p>

<p>These changes take effect this coming Fall 2005, and students who will return in the fall are free to follow the new requirements. </p>

<p>The new "Breadth Requirements" are fewer than the PAC system required (five, versus the present ten areas); the PE requirement and the foreign language requirement are retained. </p>

<p>By the middle of next week the Claremont Colleges Course Schedule on My.Pomona will display which Breadth Area each course fulfills. All courses except lower-division foreign language requirements, independent studies, and pre-calculus courses will satisfy one of the five breadth areas. This includes courses from all of the Claremont Colleges.</p>

<p>While courses at our neighboring Claremont Colleges are eligible to satisfy General Education requirements, students are still subject to cross-registration restrictions. Sophomores are limited to one cross-registration per semester; juniors and seniors may take half their load from cross-college courses. </p>

<p>If you prefer to follow the PAC system, you need only contact my office. The following is the break-down for the five Breadth Areas. </p>

<p>Breadth Requirements of the General Education Program of Pomona College, </p>

<p>Effective Fall 2005</p>

<p>Students will take one course in each of the following five areas; each of these courses must come from a different department or program. In all areas except Area 5, the courses are classified according to the 2-4 character discipline code at the start of the course number, or, in the case of Area 3 courses, also by the suffixes AA, BK, or CH. Senior exercises, independent studies, and lower-division foreign language courses do not satisfy any area requirement. </p>

<pre><code> Area 1: Creative Expression

                Art and Art History (ART and ARHI)

                Dance (DANC)

                Literatures* (SPAN, SPNT, FREN, FRNT, GERM, GRMT, RUSS, RUST, CHIN, CHNT, JAPN, JPNT, KORE, KRNT, ITAL, “LIT” @ other CC’s)

                Media Studies (MS)

                Music (MUS)

                Theatre (THEA)

</code></pre>

<p>*All literature courses in translation, and foreign language courses numbered 100 and above.</p>

<pre><code> Area 2: Social Institutions and Human Behavior

                Anthropology (ANTH)

                Economics (ECON)

                Environmental Analysis (EA)

                International Relations (IR)

                Linguistics & Cognitive Science (LGCS)

                Politics (POLI)

                Psychology (PSYC)

                Public Policy Analysis (PPA)

                Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE160)

                Science, Technology, and Society (STS)

 Sociology (SOC)

    Area 3:  History, Values, Ethics and Cultural Studies

                American Studies (AMST)

                Asian Studies (ASIA)

                Asian American Studies (-----AA)

                Black Studies (_____BK)

                Chicano/a Studies (_____CH)

                History (HIST)

                Latin American Studies (LAST)

                Philosophy (PHIL)

                Religious Studies (RLST)

                Women's Studies (WS)

    Area 4:  Physical and Biological Sciences

                Astronomy (ASTR)

                Biology (BIOL)

                Chemistry (CHEM)

                Geology (GEOL)

                Molecular Biology (MOBI)

                Neuroscience (NEUR)

                Physics (PHYS)

    Area 5:  Mathematical Reasoning

                Mathematics (except pre-calculus) (MATH)

                Computer Science (CSCI)

                Formal Logic (PHIL/LGCS060:  if Logic is taken to fulfill Area 5, it cannot also fulfill Area 3 (PHIL) or 2 (LGCS)

                Statistics*

    *Statistics courses in any department

</code></pre>

<p>Please send an email to <a href="mailto:registrar@pomona.edu">registrar@pomona.edu</a> if you have any questions regarding this matter.</p>

<p>Margaret Adorno~Registrar, Pomona College~Phone 909-621-8147~Fax 909-621-8671~<a href="http://www.registrar.pomona.edu%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.registrar.pomona.edu&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

2

<p>To quote Napoleon Dynamite, you guys are </p>

<p>LUCKY!!!</p>

<p>These are very few requirements, so you will have so much freedom to take whichever courses strike your fancy. It will be much easier to fulfill double majors, because your schedules will be so much more open.</p>

<p>Irene, '03</p>

3

<p>Here's more info on it. My overnight room mate guy forwarded this to me.</p>

<p>To: Pomona College Students</p>

<p>From: Gary Kates, Dean of the College</p>

<p>Re: Beyond the PACS: Towards a New General Education Program</p>

<p>Date: April 20, 2005</p>

<p>You have been informed that last Friday, April 15, the faculty passed a new structure for General Education at Pomona College. The Registrar has already informed you that you are eligible to adopt this general education program, if you choose, and has provided resources for converting to it; I am using this message to reflect with you upon this important change.</p>

<p>While the changes are significant, the faculty did not reject the core principle of the old curriculum: that students should achieve a breadth of study before they graduate. Both the PAC structure, divided by skills, and the new Breadth of Study, divided by departments and programs, carve up the curriculum so that all students sample widely across the disciplines. Rather than focusing on particular skills or courses that every student should know, this new general education program accepts that all the courses we offer are part of the liberal arts, and none seems more or less important than another. We also accept that fields change and are not set in stone; more and more books and articles are written and published such that no one person could ever cover even a fraction of the whole of what is known. We prefer to affirm our belief that any broadly educated person should be exposed to the arts, humanities and sciences (both natural and social), since through the engagement with different disciplines and methodologies, she or he will have the ability to continue to learn in any field after graduation. We have therefore divided the entire curriculum into five areas which span the range of disciplines and include every department and program at Pomona College: "Creative Expression"; "Social Institutions and Human Behavior"; "History, Values, Ethics and Cultural Studies"; "Physical and Biological Sciences"; and "Mathematical Reasoning." Some fields are interdisciplinary and could be placed in multiple areas, and so a particular department may seem arbitrarily placed, but this does not trouble us because these five areas are simply a device to ensure that students will achieve minimal breadth of study. Rather than worry about boundaries between and among categories, we are more concerned that students think long and hard about what matters most to them and that they choose the most challenging course, given their interests and curiosities, and see where that takes them, in consultation with an advisor. </p>

<p>The faculty has reaffirmed its commitment to other parts of General Education that will be familiar to you and will be required in the same form. The Critical Inquiry program for first-year students remains, because we believe it is an excellent way to introduce students to our highest educational beliefs: that established truths and theories should always be interrogated and that students should begin to learn how to express ideas, orally and in writing, logically as well as gracefully. Since exercising our minds so deeply depends upon the health of our bodies, we also expect our students to enroll in courses in physical education. Our general education program requires that students gain proficiency in a foreign language, and we hope that many of you will consider the study abroad experience when planning your education at Pomona, since study abroad develops global perspectives and the capacity for intercultural understanding. </p>

<p>The faculty have waived both the Writing and the Intensive Speaking requirements, but only because they feel that most faculty have incorporated intensive instruction in both skills in many of their classes. The faculty believe that communicating clearly is a fundamental skill necessary to all liberal arts endeavors. Faculty believe that ideas are often discovered through the experience of writing, and the joys and sorrows of expression will be a life-long pursuit. Similarly, our students must be given the opportunity in every small seminar to speak conversationally with each other, learning to listen and respond thoughtfully to others, as well as practice giving formal presentations, since so much of what they will do in the world will depend on their ability to be persuaded by and in turn convince others of different points of view.</p>

<p>Most of you come from highly structured, comprehensive high schools -- whether public or private, urban, suburban, or rural -- in which your choices of what you studied and how you studied were sharply circumscribed. You are all high achievers and excellent performers. At Pomona, we want to help transform you from performers who meet expectations, to thinkers who risk learning what is difficult and, more profoundly, to be passionate actors who choose to study what you care about most. We want to give you more freedom of choice in your general education, because we believe that given more choices, you will become more reflective about and more invested in your education. Accordingly, the faculty has cut the number of courses that are required to fulfill the Breadth of Study portion of General Education in half compared to the PAC system. </p>

<p>The well-known inscription on the College gates, "They only are loyal to this college who departing, bear their added riches in trust for mankind," gives us a vision of what a Liberal Arts education at Pomona College should strive to achieve. The end product of students' residence at the college should be individuals who have not only gained "riches" while at the College, but will go forth to bestow those riches on humanity. This encompasses not only the idea of equipping our students for "lifelong learning" stated in the current College Catalogue, but also the idea of educating socially responsible individuals who are able to engage the many pressing issues that affect our world today, at both the local and the global level, from a diversity of outlooks in a thoughtful, critical and balanced way. </p>

<p>Finally, according to James A. Blaisdell, Pomona's fourth president, "The center of a college is in great conversation, and out of the talk of college life springs everything else." We would like to encourage that conversation among students, and between students and faculty, to continue and extend outside the classroom. We hope that our students will seek out opportunities to write and speak, in classes but also outside of them, in student journals, in student government, in reading and writing workshops they organize informally, as well as those that might be organized more formally by the faculty outside of the classroom. Pomona College means to locate at the heart of its educational mission ongoing conversations, discussions, and debates about what a liberal arts education means and what it ought to do in the world. We will ask students to begin, therefore, even before they arrive as freshmen, to examine their own educational goals and aspirations. And we also plan on inviting faculty to write essays about the liberal arts based on their own educational experience and their hopes for students that would be disseminated throughout the college and could serve as the beginning of ongoing conversations about what it means to be liberally educated.</p>

4

<p>do we have all 4 years to fulfill these new general requirements?</p>

5

<p>yeah im pretty sure</p>

6

<p>it brings tears to my eyes....its so wonderful...i heart you, pomona.</p>