In an email sent to the Georgetown community on Tuesday, President John DeGioia and Provost James O’Donnell gave some updates about the University’s Diversity and Inclusiveness Initiative.

Last year, faculty, student, and staff working groups recommended a variety of methods to increase diversity on campus, which the University began to adopt during the spring semester. This most recent email outlines Georgetown’s plan to continue promoting “community in diversity.”

After the jump, we’ve listed their updates and the full email.

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Let’s chalk one up for liberal education, folks. In a recent list of the strangest courses taught at D.C.-area schools, the Georgetown’s “Philosophy 194: Hallucinating” took the number one spot.

Taught by Dr. James Mattingly, the course asks some seriously profound questions, such as “How can we be sure that we’re not mistaken about everything?” and “What kinds of things can we know for sure?”

Other courses that made the Washington Post‘s list include “Ancient Egypt: Sex/Drugs/Rock” at Johns Hopkins, “Philosophy and Time Travel” at Maryland, and “Raising Chickens at Home” at Anne Arundel Community College.

While the Post‘s list made us chuckle, we think that they missed much odder courses. “Philosophy and Star Trek,” anyone?

Remember when professors began telling us we couldn’t use Wikipedia as a source for research? How many times has your class collectively groaned when someone asked if it was a legitimate source?

The folks over at Wikipedia have heard our cries, it seems, and they’re reaching out to institutions of higher learning.

Nine professors, including two from Georgetown, have agreed to make creating, expanding, and editing Wikipedia pages a part of the work for the courses they teach. The idea come out of Wikipedia’s Public Policy Initiative, launched to improve the free encyclopedia’s coverage of U.S. public policy.

Rochelle Davis, an assistant professor in the SFS, is helping to pioneer the program. Davis plans to have students post literature summaries on Wikipedia, and then use those summaries as “jumping-off point[s]” for future research papers.

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The Georgetown University School of Foreign Services’s International Politics program will no longer offer trans-state actors as an IPOL concentration, according to an e-mail that Dean Bryan Kasper of the SFS sent to IPOL majors.

The change, Kasper wrote, will not affect juniors or seniors pursuing a TSA concentration, but members of the classes of 2012 and 2013 will not be able to concentrate in TSA, and sophomores who elected to concentrate in TSA will need to choose a new concentration by the end of this semester.

The IPOL Field Committee (the SFS faculty members who manage the major) made the decision to eliminate it in the final weeks of the Fall semester. Here’s the logic behind the change, according to Kasper:

“The TSA concentration as a distinct object of scholarly analysis in International Politics has become anachronistic. All of the research questions of the concentration are now commonly, and more appropriately, studied under the other three concentration fields. In the twenty years since the end of the Cold War, trans-state/trans-national actors have become as common and as important as nation-states.

“Because of the shift in International Political scholarship and practice, the Committee found the TSA concentration to have lost its coherence, becoming a ‘catch all’ concentration for students. The IPOL major and its students and faculty are better served by more precision and coherence within the curriculum.”

The courses offered under the TSA concentration will still be available to juniors and seniors pursuing that concentration, and other IPOL students may take those courses as major electives until the classes are redistributed among the three other concentrations in IPOL: International Law, Norms, and Institutions; International Security; and Foreign Policy and Policy Processes. TSA had the smallest number of IPOL students of the four concentrations that the IPOL major offered.

Read the full e-mail, after the jump.

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Georgetown and George Mason University will be starting a joint biomedical program next year, according to the Washington Post. The program—cutely called “George Squared”—will offer a one-year certificate program and a masters program in biomedical sciences.

According to the Post, the program will start next year and will accept 60 students.  The program will be run by faculty from both schools but will be based at GMU.  Classes will focus on anatomy, biochemistry, human physiology, medical microbiology and molecular biology.

GMU Provost Peter Stearns told the Post that George Squared will allow the two universities to combine their medical resources.

GU Medical Center’s associate dean for biomedical graduate education Adam Myers explained the impetus for the program:

Biological and biomedical sciences are projected to be top growth areas in the coming decades.  This growth will be driven by scientific developments related to the unraveling of the human genome, the aging of our population [and] increased concern about global infectious diseases.

When the School of Foreign Service decided to change the Map of the Modern World curriculum and replace professor Keith Hrebenak with former SFS-Qatar Dean James Reardon-Anderson, SFSers weren’t too happy about it.  The SFS Academic Council heard the protests and decided to investigate the changes.

According to SFSAC member and principle investigator Josh Mogil (SFS ’11), the group did a thorough study of the new and old versions of the class and reviewed “hundreds” of comments from alumni, students and professors.  The report they issued concluded that, “In a school as demanding as the SFS, students must be introduced to a multidisciplinary worldview about all of the forces shaping the world around us. Anything less will not effectively support students in their studies.”

Chief among the SFSAC’s recommendations was to restore the original curriculum:

Our first proposal is to reinstate the former Map Program with its curriculum intact until such time that a new program can be further developed and carefully reviewed. After carefully analyzing the proposed curriculum for the suggested Spring 2010 course, we feel it is too limited in scope (the role of physical geography) and does not adequately serve as a replacement for the original Map Program.

We also feel that the passing rate (65 students compared to the previous 3 students) from the exemption exam demonstrates that this class will be easily passed by many in the SFS and will not contribute to new learning.

When the SFS School Council met last week to review the SFSAC’s report, they did not agree to the curriculum reversal. They did, however, accept the SFSAC’s recommendation to create a panel to review the new version of the class and “possibly integrate some of the elements who’s removal was previously suggested,” according to Mogil.  The SFSAC will also advise Reardon-Anderson on the selection of a group of students to “review and oversee” the class this spring.

Mogil writes in an e-mail:

We are glad that we were able to effectively represent the masses of students protesting the initial curriculum change, and the process of that change. We hope that in the future, the SFS administration will be open to discussions and reviews before it makes an important alteration in the education of its students.

Check out the SFSAC’s full report after the jump!

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You learn a fair amount about Christopher Columbus and how he sailed the ocean blue in 1492 in elementary school, but now one Georgetown professor has a new theory about everyone’s favorite destroyer of indigenous populations: he was a Catalan-speaking Jew!

Estelle Irizarry, a professor emeritus in the department of Spanish and Portuguese, studied the language and syntax Columbus used in his letters and noticed a strange punctuation pattern.  He frequently used a slash symbol to indicate pauses in sentences, a style found only in texts from Catalan-speaking areas of the Iberian peninsula.

Furthermore, Irizarry found that much of Columbus’s linguistic habits are associated with Ladino, a dialect spoken by Spanish Jews in late medieval Spain.  This finding led Irizarry to conclude that Columbus must have been a convert to Christianity who hid his Jewish roots.

Bring back the old Map!

As we reported yesterday, the School of Foreign Service institution, Map of the Modern World, is undergoing major changes this year.  Turns out SFSers aren’t taking too kindly to the alterations.

They’ve started a Facebook group in protest, “Take Back Map of the Modern World.”  The group currently has 392 members, including SFS Academic Council Representative Josh Mogil (SFS ’11) and former Map TA Helen Burdett (SFS ’11).

The group’s description explains their grievances:

Just because Dean Reardon-Anderson wants to take over the course, it doesn’t the course material should change … Map of the Modern World is a pillar of the SFS, and we urge the new Dean to reconsider his changes, not to the class called Map, but to that SFS institution called Map.

Keep Map and its cherished contents intact. Some additions to the course are always warranted, as there have been new developments occuring all the time. That isn’t the same as gutting the course. It’s just one of those binding forces that brings all of us in the SFS together

The group encourages members to invite all their friends in the SFS so that the deans will understand that students don’t support the “watering down” of Map.

All you will need to know to pass the new Map of the Modern World course

Map of the Modern World, the School of Foreign Service rite of passage, is undergoing significant curricular changes and getting a new instructor this year, as The Hoya first reported yesterday.  Instead of the surly and demanding Professor Keith Hrebenak, the course will now be taught by former SFS-Qatar Dean James Reardon-Anderson.

So how will the class be changing?  According to an email from Reardon-Anderson:

The course content has been modified to provide a greater emphasis on physical geography (what is sometimes called “environment”) and to demonstrate how physical geography has influenced large scale human behavior (what is sometimes called “international affairs”) …

The content of the exam will be modified to reflect the new course content.  Therefore, there will be more emphasis on physical geography and its influences and less on topics that were the focus of the previous version of this course [such as political boundaries, colonial legacies and border disputes].

Reardon-Anderson wrote that the change is “partly” related to the effort to add science to the SFS core curriculum.

According to the syllabus Reardon-Anderson used when he taught the course in Doha (posted in full after the jump), four of the 14 lectures will be devoted to science topics like “The Atmosphere,” “Plate Tectonics” and “Global Climate Change.”  The other 10 lectures will be devoted to specific regions.  The course will include lectures on North America and Europe, regions that were previously not covered.  The class will maintain the 100 multiple choice question final exam.

When asked if Hrebenak wanted to stop teaching the course, Reardon-Anderson replied, “I will let him speak for himself concerning his interests in teaching.”  Hrebenak has not yet replied to requests for comment.  Reardon-Anderson did say he would continue to teach other courses at Georgetown, though.

Check out the full syllabus for the revamped course after the jump!

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Survey Says…

GUSA has compiled the results of their “Omnibus Student Survey,” the summer survey which polled the student body on everything from GUSA’s structure, student diversity, and GUTS buses, to student safety, academics, and the free newspaper program and earned its chief organizer, GUSA President Calen Angert (MSB `11) high marks on the Angertometer.

Here’s what the 1,020 student respondents said, according to an email from Angert (because of a glitch with UIS, the are no breakdowns available for individual questions):

• 29 percent of students said they felt unrepresented by GUSA last year

• 77 percent of respondents rated GUSA’s student advocacy track record “poor” or were unsure of how they felt, but 20 percent approved of their past programming

• 66 percent felt that Georgetown is a diverse campus and the same number felt there is “sufficient programming, as organized by faculty and staff, on campus that engages students on the subject of diversity”

• Over 90 percent said they would support a continuation of Saturday GUTS bus routes and an expanded GUTS route to include a bus to a grocery store (GUSA recently accomplished the latter)

• 91 percent said they felt safe on campus, but two-thirds of respondents would like to see increased DPS patrols

• 92 percent agreed that “the university fosters an environment that is conducive to intellectual learning.”

• 89 percent said that they had read a free newspaper provided on campus by the Collegiate Readership Program that was recently suspended due to funding issues

After the jump, see all the results Angert provided in his e-mail!

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