Turf-related thinking is a barrier to improving the general education program.  Departments use general education to “mine” for students and this does not serve general education in the best way.  As to the core program, we expect or even demand that the Humanities do a lot and this is often a problem. 

There needs to be more incentives—at the departmental and at the university levels—for faculty to teach in the general education program.  There needs to be a better reward structure for faculty who do teach in general education; currently, it seems that there are more disincentives than incentives.

Faculty workloads and resources.

Departmental turf--- other departments don’t want to allow other courses to fulfill “their requirements.” Departments tend to be interested in protecting courses, rather than looking at the best program for students.

Staffing, faculty development.

It is getting harder and harder to staff.

How is budgeting plan going to affect people teaching outside discipline?  Humanities should not be staffed by adjuncts.

Not enough support for faculty development in tackling interdisciplinary courses and cross listing.

There will always be breadth/depth tradeoffs that have to be made.

There are too many students who have not taken our General Education courses.

There are serious faculty resource demands that make it extremely challenging to balance the service to General Education students and the education we owe our majors. Inequity of the distribution of the General Education service demands within the sciences puts a heavier burden on some departments.

Inertia.  Humanities is sacrosanct.

Guidelines are needed for the General Education courses and there needs to be a way to change those guidelines when change is needed. There is no one in charge of General Education, so there is often change without focus. A process that would critically evaluate the program on an ongoing basis would be important, but brutal. There has to be a way of retooling when it is needed. Do we need two sciences, four humanities, two writing courses, etc? Who is making those decisions? It isn't even clear how a department might go about introducing a new General Education course.

There is a real question of why anyone should buy in more to the General Education programs. It would be worthwhile to look at why more people don't volunteer for the Humanities. Our present structure doesn't really reward the department for their contribution. Better funding of General Education would make it more attractive.

Time constraints are unbelievable. It would be wonderful to have the time to grade the students on their writing but that is unrealistic under the present demands. We could do much more with smaller classes and better technology.

Better funding for General Education would make it more attractive to the departments. There is a limit to how much ingenuity can do. Relevance can be lost because of lack of funding for laboratories for General Education classes.

Because of the resources necessary for the required General Education, it is not feasible to create elective courses.

General Education may be too big. There is always a need for more free electives, but there is some question over whether that need should be met in by reducing the number of General Education courses or by reducing the number of courses required in the major.