Are Cutbacks In Faculty A Reality?

stacy
Tue, 14 Mar 2006 08:55:24 +0000

my class sizes have been pretty good–even those larger intro classes like geology for nonmajors, world religion, and “intro to political thinking” have sectioned into groups of 20 or less, each taught by a prof. I think the largest class I’ve had that didn’t section was about 50 people, and that was international politics. This semester (my last one, but I’m taking an intro language and another lower-level course) none of my classes have more than 15 people.

my numbers might be slightly off, but i believe that smith’s faculty-student ratio had been about 1:9 for a very long time, and for a variety of reasons went down about 5 years ago to 1:7 or 8. Now they’re trying to get it back to the old levels–which i think are still pretty decent, since at least at Smith all of the faculty actually teaches, not like at some schools where there is a great faculty-student ratio on paper but you’ll never see most of the profs.

While there are some departments that are lacking a bit at the moment, I’ve also heard about a lot of great profs getting tenure, and some good applicants for open positions. I think Smith just has to do a bit better job of keeping or placing faculty in the positions where students have large and growing interest (anything middle east- religion, politics, language, history,etc.; sign language; etc.) and things will be all right.