Department Approval

Offering a new course means meeting the many requirements the department, the school, the state have in place to safeguard quality of education and their own interests in education. We needed to balance our desire to offer a student-enticing course with the department’s desire to have courses fill, with our colleagues desire not to have our course fill at the expense of theirs, with the state regulating office’s edict to maintain standards and level of instruction.
Getting all these departments, divisions, and individuals to agree is not easy.
Our first task was to get discussion for the course onto the department meeting agenda. We were already full-up with talk of computer carts, classroom keys, enrollment, artifact assessment, how to committee the department, the Sunshine Fund, and training classes. The department spent forty-five minutes deploring the state of the hallways and restrooms, and trying to find a solution (physical plant denied any knowledge of dirt, or claimed they were understaffed). It took two months to get us on the agenda. Why did we need to be on the agenda? We needed to convince the department members to give us permission to develop the outline for a course. Once we had the outline, we were to come back to them for review and (we hoped) approval.
And we understood their points. Last semester, my teaching schedule was changed 7 times during the first week of classes. No instructor likes coming to the first class unprepared. No student enjoys having instructors switched out on him. The last week before the semester begins as well as the first week of the semester is a collection of cancelled classes, split classes (42 people sign up for a class; the size limit is 24), and room changes. We had all arrived at our classroom to find a note taped to the door telling us to re-locate to a room in another building. Adding a class to the offerings complicated an already stressed class master list.