A proposal for the Communications, Media and Society major was withdrawn from a vote at last Thursday's faculty meeting because further revisions were deemed necessary, Dean of Arts and Sciences Adam Jaffe said at the meeting. Seven faculty from the Anthropology, American Studies and Sociology departments had made the proposal to the Curriculum and Academic Restructuring Steering Committee over February break. The major would include two core courses, one media theory and one media history class and three separate tracks for Journalism, Technology and Communication and Culture and Communication. The program had been approved by the University Curriculum Committee Feb. 26 along with the Business major, which the faculty did approve at Thursday's meeting.

Jaffe said in an interview that members of the humanities and social sciences school councils had expressed concerns about the curricular and pedagogical aspects of the program. He said the faculty who had proposed the program had revised their proposal but had not yet had time to resubmit it before the meeting.

The chairs of the humanities and social sciences school councils could not be reached for comment by press time.

"When we first presented it to the UCC [Feb 26] there were some concerns about the third [Culture and Communication] track. . The feeling was that that track was a little amorphous and that it maybe needed to be tightened up a little bit just so that it would be a more productive educational experience,"

Prof. Maura Jane Farrelly (AMST), director of the Journalism program, told the Justice. "I think there was also a little bit of concern expressed . by some of the people in the humanities about trying to tighten up the relationship between the major [and] the humanities."

Farrelly noted that the first track had a solid orientation towards journalism while the second track was oriented toward technology. "The third track, .. we had it oriented toward culture ... we had some courses in there that were about museums and museum culture; . we had other courses that were about politics and political culture and other courses that were about advertising, so the thought was, can we construct something that will give students a little bit more guidance in terms of what they should be picking?"

Farrelly said that the faculty's new idea envisioned merging the second and the third tracks and then having subcategories within those two.

She said that those proposals were also subject to further change,and that the authors of the proposal were still waiting for new input from other faculty and the administration.

"I think the administration was hoping to get this together in time that it could go before the faculty and be voted upon . so that the admissions people could start touting it in their admissions literature for the incoming class," Farrelly said. "Now that it has not happened, I think we're not feeling as much under the gun, so we're going to take our time."

However, Farrelly added, "I did find out from [the administration] that they're still very interested in getting a major like this designed and passed."

Farrelly explained that the faculty proposing the major initially thought that since the proposal was approved by the UCC, any revisions made would be mild enough that it could still go before the faculty.

"But we ended up making some pretty significant changes to it, so it will have to go through the whole process again," she explained.

Jaffe informed the faculty proposing the major Wednesday that the changes were probably too extensive, Farrelly said.

Farrelly added that she was told by Senior Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences Elaine Wong on Friday that "the hope is that we could get something passed this semester."

Wong noted that CARS had actually commissioned the other new major, Business, with an official subcommittee, which therefore had double or triple the amount of time to work out their proposals compared to the CMS major.

"I think they're basically working on the curriculum structure and coming up with a syllabus for the core course and more [information] just about how this program compares with other programs," Wong said. "The journalism proposal was quite structured, but then the other two [tracks] were less structured" she said.



-Nashrah Rahman contributed reporting.