After more than a year of uncertainty, the Dean of Faculty Office has decided to keep the College's education department, but the department could evolve to take on a very different form.
Last spring a review committee of senior professors recommended the department either be terminated or significantly restructured to be less pre-professional and more consistent with a liberal arts philosophy.
A new committee consisting of seven professors will propose how to revamp the department's structure and curriculum.
"They have finally come to the conclusion that education is important to Dartmouth and should stay as it has for 100 years," Acting Department Chair Robert Binswanger said.
Although the senior faculty committee report has not been released, sources who have seen it said it cited internal strife as a reason to close the department down.
Last October, the department submitted a response to the report, suggesting provisions for structural and organizational change.
Students, professors and alumni have awaited the Dean of Faculty Office's word on the department's fate since that submission, but Associate Dean of Faculty George Wolford said the office was operating without a deadline.
"You can only have delays if you have a timetable, and no one ever said that we have to reach a final decision ... by December 1st or March 1st or anytime," Wolford said. "Things move slowly in academia."
Wolford said the Dean of Faculty Office reached the decision to keep the department gradually, after hearing many different points of view.
The office received more than 200 phone calls, letters, faxes and visits from alumni and students expressing support for the continuation of teacher training at the College.
The education department currently offers two types of courses -- those that examine educational theory "as a part of a liberal arts education" and more pre-professional courses that lead to a teaching certificate, according to the Organization, Regulations, and Courses book.
The new committee, composed of four education professors and three professors from other departments, met for the first time Monday to begin redefining the department's status.
Education professors Thomas Callister, Faith Dunne, Andrew Garrod and Binswanger will serve on the committee but Wolford would not release the names of the other three professors.
The committee plans to submit a report by the end of the term outlining its proposal and a means for implementation beginning next Fall.
"We are continually wrestling with the best way to address this problem with the education department, so it isn't exactly like we've actually reached a final decision yet," Wolford said.
One possible recommendation would turn the department into a program, limiting course offerings to the more practical classes and leaving the theoretical topics to other departments, Wolford said.
Such a transformation may solve many of the department's structural problems related to its two types of course offerings, Wolford said.
"I don't pretend to know enough about the best way to train teachers to say whether that's the way we should go," Wolford said. "To me I can see some sense administratively in having it go the direction of a program, and that's exactly why this committee was formed, was to see whether that makes sense."
Binswanger said the new committee has not come to any conclusions.
"The committee hasn't discussed anything yet," Binswanger said. "We don't know what we're going to have as a program. The idea is that hopefully it will be in effect by Fall term 1995."
The committee plans for 1994-95 to be a transition year, during which "every effort will be made to honor the approved minors and existing D-Plans of current undergraduates but some changes are possible," Binswanger wrote in a statement.
