Author: Alex Zeldin
This semester I hit a crossroads in my Occidental education. Being a second-semester junior and essentially having fulfilled my major and core requirements, I wanted to branch out and take classes in fields I have never explored. What I found was that almost every introductory level course had filled up before I could register and/or it was reserved exclusively for first- or second-year students.
With that said, how can Occidental fulfill its mission statement of a “…commitment to producing well-rounded graduates” if half of its courses are not easily accessible to upperclassmen? The college has the opportunity to remedy this situation by providing more adjunct faculty at the introductory level to satisfy this growing demand.
Because of Occidental’s core requirements, gaining a fundamental understanding of topics outside one’s major is almost impossible. Since the core program is so extensive, one would have to allocate roughly two-thirds of their schedule to satisfying it by their junior year. It is also recommended they take a few courses in their prospective major to get a feel for it before the beginning of junior year. Add a minor to the mix, and quickly one’s Occidental career is limited to core classes, a major and a minor.
The obvious solution to this problem is to lift the ban on upperclassman enrollment by hiring more adjunct faculty to provide additional sections of introductory classes. But this is challenging for a number of reasons.
Firstly, the school decided two years ago to increase the student body size and also implement a two-year hiring-freeze on tenure-track professors, according to a faculty head who spoke on a condition of anonymity out of respect for the administration. This has made it harder for students to enroll in desired courses than ever before because the faculty can no longer support the size of the student body. Also, student demand for an individual course often cannot be determined until the first week of classes. However, a department has to submit a request to hire an adjunct faculty member a full year in advance, which comes from a fund separate from their standard operating budget. There is one potential downside to this idea: More intro courses could lead to more students choosing a given major, and because adjunct faculty cannot advise students, this places an immense burden on tenured faculty.
Occidental can do a few things to address these concerns. The first is to fix a fundamentally broken system that requires a year’s planning to hire an adjunct faculty member when the need for one is not apparent until a few months before the start of a semester. This is particularly important given that the increased student body places newfound demand for classes that the current faculty cannot accommodate. This way, if a wait-list exceeds a certain size, the school can quickly open a new section.
The next solution would be to have a dedicated section in each intro level course exclusively for upperclassmen, as junior and senior years offer the most flexibility to branch out. This way, there is no risk of an increase in majors or placing an excess burden on tenured faculty. An added benefit of this is that course material could be more demanding as well.
While this raises fiscal concerns, costs would be easily covered by the increase in tuition revenue from the larger student body. The department head that commented for this story informed me that Occidental pays an adjunct professor a mere $6,000 per four-unit course. Out of 300 new students, two of their tuition’s would be more than enough to accomplish the goal of providing an intellectually diverse experience for all students.
Alex Zeldin is a sophomore AHVA major. He can be reached at zeldin@oxy.edu
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