As one of the last major pushes of their administration, ASUO President Emma Kallaway and Vice President Getachew Kassa are aiming to create a new minor in civic engagement for students.
Kassa and Getachew said the minor would encourage students to participate in their communities. The minor would incorporate classes from several different departments, as well as create several new classes.
If their effort succeeds, Kassa said, the minor will become available for the academic year 2011-12. Although Kallaway and Kassa will be in office for only one more week, it is a project their respective successors, Amelie Rousseau and Maneesh Arora, made as one of the major planks of their campaign platform.
“We’ll be working for this as long as we’re students,” Kallaway said.
Kallaway and Kassa said they have yet to define the specifics of the minor — how many credits it will take to attain, how many new classes it will require, how it will be administered. They said they will prepare those by June 1, when they present their plans for the minor to University administrators.
Currently, Kallaway projects the minor will involve the creation of “three or four” new courses. She and Kassa also identified seven departments whose classes they would like to count toward the major: family and human services, ethnic studies, sociology, political science, business, journalism and the department of planning, public policy and management.
Kassa said the idea for the minor came out of a dinner during winter term hosted by the University’s Office of Multicultural Academic Success. There, Kassa said, OMAS Director Audrey Cramer spoke about the University of California, Los Angeles’ civic engagement minor.
Kassa said there was a general feeling at the dinner that creating a similar minor at the University of Oregon would be a good idea, and a few weeks later he decided, along with Kallaway, to begin working toward it. Kallaway said Kassa is the major driving force behind the effort.
“The question is, how do we structure getting class credit for being civically engaged?” Kallaway said.
The minor still faces a long road ahead. The University has an eight-step approval process for the creation of new minors, starting with the presentation to the administration. Kassa, Kallaway and the student committee they have formed to advise them must then create a detailed proposal that will outline the costs and structure of the minor. Then, the Undergraduate Council, Provost’s Office, and University Senate must all approve the minor.
Some object to the creation of the minor. Andrew Crampton, ASUO Outreach Coordinator, spoke against the minor, even going so far as to publicly denounce it on the Facebook page supporting it.
“It’s too similar to (PPPM),” he said. “The big push for the civic engagement minor is that students would get credit for activism on campus and they can also get that through the PPPM department’s internship program.”
Kassa said Crampton and other critics who call the minor too similar to other programs miss the point.
“We all have a responsibility toward social justice,” he said. “This is something everybody can get involved in.”
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