This past November, the faculty voted to create a new Curriculum Committee to address many of the concerns about enrollment pressure and course compression that have arisen this year after the faculty moved from a six-course to a five-course teaching load.

Though the original proposal for this committee included student representation, the Division Chairs decided to strike this provision on the final version in favor of consulting students “as needed for additional information.”

This solution ignores how full student participation can improve the educational environment at Whitman.

This semester, Provost and Dean Timothy Kaufman-Osborn and ASWC President Carson Burns have sent letters to the student body addressing what steps the administration and ASWC are each taking to relieve the current enrollment pressures and improve the quality of a Whitman education. The creation of the Curriculum Committee is one of these steps.

The Curriculum Committee is mandated to make decisions primarily pertaining to when classes are offered and which classes are offered. The committee will also consider credit requirements for major completion as well as how enrollment pressure affects academic departments. These are all issues that are currently addressed with minimal coordination across departments.

These are all issues that directly affect the educational experience of Whitman students and warrant active student  involvement  in the decision-making process.

Having students invited to participate on an “as needed” basis does not fully address these concerns. Under the present provisions, students could be called to report on issues but would not be active and equal participants in debates on curriculum issues for the simple reason that their participation still lies at the discretion of the faculty.

Ultimately, the students have a different perspective from the faculty: a perspective that can only help the committee make the most informed decisions that improve the Whitman education experience.

There is no satisfactory middle ground on this issue. Either students are full members of the committee or they are not. Much of the decision to eliminate student representation on the committee was due to concerns of confidentiality and appropriateness of student involvement in high-level policy decisions made by the faculty. These concerns over student confidentiality ignore the fact that students already discuss comparably important if not more serious issues in the President’s Budget Advisory Committee as well as the Council on Student Affairs.

Other institutions that Whitman compares itself to, such as Grinnell, Pitzer, Pomona and St. Olaf, all have Curriculum Committees with at least three student members who participate without faculty invitation. Why do these schools trust their students to be a part of the discussion on a Curriculum Committee, when Whitman–a school that prides itself on student engagement and participation–does not?

The educational experience at Whitman thus involves not only classroom learning, but also student representation in matters that directly impact students. Whitman encourages students to be active citizens in their community and what better place to start than at Whitman itself? With that in mind, having students participate in the decision making process on the Curriculum Committee can be both an important policy decision as well as a further educational opportunity.

Though we believe the faculty’s ability to make decisions with the interest of Whitman at heart, we encourage the faculty to reconsider this decision to exclude students from fully participating in the Curriculum Committee. As part of the Whitman educational experience, students must be given the chance to demonstrate their ability to actively debate and discuss the future of the Whitman curriculum. Students must have a voice in what they are taught. After all, what can having a student in the room do except add one more voice and perspective to the conversation?