Cuts To Courses

Many academic departments at St. Lawrence University are reducing the range of their course offerings due to the smaller number of students enrolled at the university. Some departments have not found course reductions necessary yet.   

Chair of the English Department, Sarah Gates, said that with fewer students and faculty, her department is forced to offer fewer courses. When it comes to what courses must be cut, she is prioritizing the required courses for the English major. Gates and other English faculty have lowered the caps limiting the class section size of the required courses so that they can keep offering the same number of sections for these courses. The courses that English Department faculty have needed to cut are upper-level electives. They can now offer only three such courses, although some others may still be offered on a less regular basis.   

The English course reductions come with a substantially lower number of students majoring in the subject than historically has been the case.  

“The English major has lost, I’d say, about 30 percent,” Gates said. “We used to have about 100 majors, and now we have about 70.” She added that the English department is rebounding, with more majors than last year, but the number of students enrolled at SLU has decreased.    

In-Sil Yoo, professor of music at SLU, said that the smaller size of the overall student body coupled with having fewer adjunct professors in the Music Department is forcing department faculty to reduce their course offerings. The faculty are offering more 100 and 200-level courses, but they are sacrificing some 300-level courses as a result. Additionally, more music students are currently showing interest in double majoring and minoring, which has led Music Department faculty to offer fewer courses that have prerequisites in favor of providing more dual-listed courses that can accommodate students who have not taken any prior music courses.  

Yoo sees a positive side to these changes, as the lower number of upper-level classes is an opportunity for majors to create a more individualized and project-based course of study for themselves. “I see it a little bit differently, even though the course [offerings], number-wise, are smaller, but we are having more students do independent studies or senior experiences,” she said. Independent studies can count in place of upper-level music courses and enable students to take on a project that is unique to their goals and interests, such as combining music and theater.   

Things are looking up for the Music Department next semester, as every lower-level music class is currently full. Yoo hopes that some of the students in those classes will be interested in participating in a music ensemble, an aspect of the Music department that needs rejuvenation after COVID-19. 

The Performance and Communication Arts department has not yet been affected by the decreased size of the student body, although PCA Professor Angela Sweigart-Gallagher said that lower numbers of students could eventually mean fewer majors. She said that there is currently a reduced number of upper-level course options for PCA, but this is because several faculty members are on sabbatical or facilitating study abroad programs, and the Academic Affairs Dean’s Office did not approve their requests to have adjunct professors temporarily replace them. “We think we’re still offering a pretty wide range of classes with the faculty that we do have on staff,” she said, “But it is obviously a slightly fewer number of classes overall.”   

The Biology Department has not yet had to decrease its course offerings, according to Professor of Biology Alexander M. Schreiber. He said that biology courses are consistently in demand every semester, but there are not enough professors to keep up with that popularity. “We do not have enough faculty to teach all of the courses that we want to teach,” he said.   

Schreiber added that both the demand from students and the supply of professors dictate how many courses the department can offer. “As professors retire, as they naturally do, will they be replaced? A lot of it is up to the parents when, you know, parents don’t like it when students can’t get in the classes, or they can’t get into, let’s say, anatomy and physiology because we don’t have enough labs to teach them all,” he said.