Every semester, our department offers a few "general education" classes, courses that students beyond the theatre major can take to fulfill one of their gen ed credits, in this case fine/performing arts. We offer these classes, on the on hand, we want students from every major to have some exposure to and perhaps participation in the fine and performing arts. It's part of the ideal of a liberal arts education, where you broaden yourself by partaking of studies in subjects you likely won't pursue a career in.
I taught our main course in that vein--Intro to Theatre--many times, mostly in my early career days. It's the class we hand to graduate teaching assistants and junior/adjunct faculty. That's too bad, really. I heard the a speaker from (oh, what was it) the National Science Foundation once reflect that gen-ed "intro" classes were misnamed. "We call it 'Intro to Biology' or 'Intro to Geology,'" he said (I paraphrase), "But in fact we should realize that these are probably the last courses in the sciences that students will ever take." The same applies to every gen-ed course: English, History, Sociology, Economics--and of course Theatre. This is our one chance to catch them.
It's odd, then, that large state universities like mine seem to do their best to make gen-ed credits as awful as possible. Each section is huge--a hundred or more people in a large auditorium. See, historically, the coin of the realm in the interdepartmental (and intercollegiate) scramble for resources is SCHs (Student Contact Hours). The more butts in seats per class, the better. Most arts courses for majors are necessarily small: a studio for clarinet or cello, a small acting class, an intimate study in advanced ceramics techniques. We'd be hopelessly underfunded, then, but for our super-big gen ed courses. These we have relied on to make up for our small numbers. Thus Intro to Theatre has often been in the top-ten highest enrollment classes at the university. We've had as many as 1,000 students in the fall semester across 5-6 sections of Intro. That's many times as many majors as we have.
Not that I'm exactly pleased about this. We often stock these classes with our least experienced teachers. (That's not to say they're bad teachers, our grad TAs and adjunct/junior faculty, just that--on average--they're less experienced, less supported, and less paid than other faculty.) Oh, there are exceptions. One of our best professors heads up our fall super-section of Intro; she's assisted by a bevy of grad TAs. Other departments have professors who specialize in these large-scale courses. But I do have to tell prospective PhD students that they'll likely find themselves the instructor of record for a class of 100 non-majors as one of their first TA assignments. That's not an ideal pedagogical scenario, but that's been the way of things for a while.
This semester, though, we've had a lot of trouble getting even to 100 students per Intro section. We're not exactly sure what's going on; nothing about the class has changed recently. But one big factor appears to be another arts gen-ed class: Intro to Fine Arts. That class has one instructor and over 1,500 students. It's 100% web-based. Rumor is that there's only one TA assisting the professor (I don't know if that's true).
An undergrad who's taken the course had nothing but praise. It's apparently famous as "best course at LSU"--not because it's a quality course but because it's so easy. Cheating is rampant, that the class is ridiculously simple. Thus it's beloved. Thus it's sucking up all the students who might otherwise be taking Intro to Music or Theatre or some other arts course.
More tomorrow.
And then there
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