Despite efforts to pare down the 700-page Organizations, Regulations and Courses book, nearly one out of every 12 courses listed in the tome is not offered over the next academic year.
Of the 1,523 courses listed in the ORC, 105 are not offered in the period from Fall term 1995 through Spring term 1997. Another 27 courses are not offered this academic year.
In 1993, the administration vowed to work to remove the high number of untaught courses from the ORC. A count by The Dartmouth in 1993 revealed that almost 25 percent of the courses listed in the ORC would not be taught over the 1993-94 academic year. About 200 out of the 1,678 courses listed in the 1993 ORC were not scheduled to be taught through Spring term 1995.
"It's matter of inertia," Religion Department Chair Hans Penner said. "It's a hell of a lot easier to just leave them in than to go through the registrar."
But College Registrar Thomas Bickel, who spearheaded the effort to weed out unoffered courses from the ORC, said that is not really the case.
While completely new courses require the approval of the Committee on Instruction, classes that are removed from the ORC can easily be returned, Bickel said.
Over the past two years, the COI, a faculty committee that handles issues relating to the curriculum, asked departments to take courses out of the ORC if they were not being offered. This came after only two of 14 department heads contacted in 1993 knew how to go about having an unoffered course pulled from the ORC.
Some departments are worse than others. For instance, there are 49 comparative literature courses in the current ORC, of which 18 are not offered in the next two years. On the other hand, only one of 42 listed anthropology courses is not offered in the next two years.
Bickel said another reason for the high number of listed classes that are not actually available is that some departments offer courses on a cyclical schedule. For example, the Spanish department offers its advanced classes on a three-year cycle.
The COI also cut the number of unoffered classes in the ORC by excluding any one that would not be taught over a three-year period. But this still allows a class to remain in the ORC even if it is unavailable for up to 11 terms.
Even with the administration's efforts to remove unoffered courses from the ORC, Bickel admitted there still are a large number of unoffered courses in the course book.
The administration went through the ORC and the Course Prospectus last year to reduce their sizes, but was "less diligent" this summer because of "other problems," Bickel said.
Bickel said the College was sidetracked by the need to include information about culminating experiences in the ORC. A required "culminating experience" in the major is a key component of the new core curriculum that was implemented last year.
"We do plan to continue" efforts to reduce the size of the ORC, Bickel said. "It's sort of an on-going project."
Bickel said his office may indicate when each course will next be available as well as the last term it was taught in the online course catalogue the College is currently working on. This information is not included in the current version of the ORC.
Why not offered?
Penner, whose religion department has seven courses out of 53 listed in the ORC that will not be available until after Spring 1997, attributed the large number of "extra" courses to the lack of available faculty.
A class might not be offered because the only professor qualified to teach it has retired, is teaching courses in another department or is on sabbatical, Penner said.
"Courses often remain on the books because we have no one to teach them at present but are hoping to be able to reinstate these courses at a later date," said Mary Lou Guerinot, biological sciences department chair.
History Department Chair Gene Garthwaite said sometimes professors resist pulling favorite courses from the ORC.
"Even though it is relatively easy to remove a course from the ORC ... sometimes faculty members don't like to remove" courses that are not presently offered "because they become attached to the courses they teach," he said.
Another reason for leaving a course in the ORC is to generate interest in the course and to alert students that it may be taught in the future, Penner said.
Citing the difficulty of projecting when a course will be offered two or three years down the road, Penner said he only delists a course when there is no one to teach it and there are no plans to appoint someone to teach.