The Working Group must communicate its proposal to the Senate in December making sure that it takes these questions into consideration:
- Students and faculty typically have extremely tight schedules–the former with degree requirements and the latter with broad commitments to research, teaching, and service. How does the proposed requirement take that into account?
- What is the goal of the requirement and how is it different from the various diversity/inclusion-related requirements that currently exist?
- Is the rationale behind the university-required swim test relevant?
- Just about every degree program has some kind of math/quantitative reasoning requirement. Can a case be made that the proposed requirement is justified via similar arguments?
- How might the Intergroup Dialog Project, the Knight Writing Programs, and Engaged Cornell, relate to the proposed requirement in terms of content? What can be learned from these large-scale programs in terms of how they go about delivering their programs with quality training?
- If the requirement involves selection from a menu of options or if each college is allowed to have its own specific implementation, then what would a well-defined low-overhead approval mechanism look like? The course menus for the CALS diversity requirement, the Arts and Sciences Social Difference Requirement, and the Inequality Minor are instructive and should be assessed for their relevance to the proposal.
- How are all of the above applicable to graduate and professional students? Because the layout of ugrad and grad education is so different, separate “delivery systems” need to be developed. Graduate education at Cornell is much more decentralized than undergraduate education. There are close to 200 relatively autonomous degree programs at the masters and doctoral levels. Oversight of PhD programs and research masters programs is by the Graduate School while each professional degree program connects to a college. This synopsis outlines Graduate School efforts in matters that concern diversity, equity, access, justice, and inclusion.
- Would the proposed Center have a role in the delivery of this requirement and would there be a connection between it and the mandatory program for faculty?
