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n a special faculty meeting in April, 215 faculty members across Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences and Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs voted on revisions to a new proposed Liberal Arts Core curriculum. Seventy percent of faculty in attendance voted to adopt the revised version, which included a foreign language requirement for students.
On Nov. 4, A&S Dean Behzad Mortazavi and Maxwell Dean David Van Slyke informed faculty via email that they would override the vote without further consultation with faculty.
Faculty have expressed significant concern about the deans’ decision and its lack of compliance with the A&S and Maxwell Bylaws. The deans cited financial and other university resources in their decision to override.
“After thoroughly analyzing the financial feasibility of such a requirement, including required hiring, classroom availability, workload for the faculty, sustainability and ensuring our students graduate on time — the decision has been made to proceed with the new LAC without a language requirement,” Mortazavi and Van Slyke’s email, obtained by The Daily Orange, states.
Eleven faculty members helped create a petition nearly two weeks ago urging Mortazavi and Van Slyke to work collaboratively with the CAS/MAX Curriculum Committee to revise and delay the implementation of the LAC by one year. The D.O. obtained the petition, which over 220 faculty members across the university have now signed. Currently, the new LAC is set to launch in the fall 2025 semester.
The petition warns of the “dangerous precedent” Mortazavi and Van Slyke’s actions set.
“It really is a disregard of faculty voice and a refusal to collaborate, at a time when it’s absolutely essential that we in higher education unify because we are under assault and that’s going to be getting worse over the next four years,” Harvey Teres, a humanities professor involved in the petition’s creation, said. “We have to work together, and it’s not a time for the administration to be defying the faculty.”
The current LAC, required for students enrolled in A&S and Maxwell, has students fulfill part of its Liberal Skills Requirement by taking either one to three “language skills” classes or two “quantitative skills” courses. One of the faculty’s major revisions would require all students to gain proficiency in a language up to a 201 level; this aspect was overridden.
In a statement sent to The D.O., a university spokesperson said the new LAC language requirements will remain similar to the current core, allowing students to choose between language or “Global and International Perspectives” courses.
The current curriculum allows students to demonstrate a “university-level competence” in a language other than English or problem-solving through quantitative methods, according to its website. Students must either take enough courses to reach the 201 level in a foreign language or take two quantitative skills courses.
Teres said it’s Mortazavi’s responsibility to convince the CAS/MAX Curriculum Committee that there should be constraints on foreign language requirements.
“He has not succeeded in doing that in the past, and so he just decided that he’s not going to return to the committee, because he’ll be on the losing end of these decisions, and that again is a violation of the bylaws of the university and these larger principles,” Teres said.
Faculty and leaders from A&S and Maxwell began an evaluation of the LAC in 2020. The evaluation was led by Karin Ruhlandt, dean emerita of A&S; Lois Agnew, SU’s interim vice chancellor and provost; and Carol Faulkner, Maxwell’s senior associate dean for academic affairs.
Students dually enrolled in A&S and the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications or the School of Education will be required to fulfill the new LAC requirements.
“If we compare Syracuse University with our so-called peer universities and aspiring peer universities and also all universities who have that R1 status, we would become an outlier by not requiring students to study a foreign language,” Albrecht Diem, a professor and director of undergraduate studies in SU’s history department, said. “So this would bring us into another and certainly into a lower category than we are.”
Teres said A&S canceled over 20 foreign language classes this semester after citing low enrollment, as all classes must have at least eight students enrolled. He said non-European languages including Arabic, Mandarin, Hebrew and Japanese were “disproportionately canceled.”
Classes without eight students enrolled one week before the first day of the semester will be canceled, the SU spokesperson said in the statement. The spokesperson also said 29 courses across A&S departments were canceled after failing to meet the requirement this semester. The cancellations are made to manage the university’s resources responsibly, the spokesperson said.
“For a university that supposedly stands for diversity, equity and inclusion and stands for global awareness, this is completely inconsistent with our fundamental values,” Teres said. “This is a value that is part of the university’s mission statement, which is not an especially long statement, but it focuses on global awareness.”
Foreign language classes are key requirements for majors and minors in SU’s Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics. Without access to these classes, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, a history professor, said students won’t have the resources to explore their interests and future careers.
“Even if someone is not in favor of the language requirement, at this point the petition is really about who has the role in the university over such matters. Do votes by the faculty, clear majority votes like that, do they matter or can they just be disregarded?” Lasch-Quinn said.
As the former director of SU’s Jewish Studies program, Teres said the lack of Hebrew classes this semester will hinder students’ learning and make it more difficult to fulfill some major or minor requirements.
He also said there is a constant fear in the LLL department that it’ll be “gutted entirely.”
“We’re a small program, but this is not sending out a signal to our Jewish students here at Syracuse University that this place is particularly concerned about their interests or their needs or their traditions,” Teres said. “The same can be said for other languages and other constituencies of this university.”
Three days after the deans’ email, faculty members attended an Open Faculty Council Meeting, Diem said. These meetings are purely informative, Diem said, and faculty cannot make a motion to vote during them.
Diem said that in a regular A&S and Maxwell faculty meeting scheduled for Dec. 9, members planned to vote to delay the curriculum changes by a year, but were unable to do so after Mortazavi canceled the meeting as a result of “lack of agenda items.”
“Our administrators do not behave and do not think and do not act anymore as academics. They started out as our colleagues,” Diem said. “They all went through an academic career, but sometimes I think they have forgotten all about it, and they have priorities that are not guided anymore by our academic responsibilities.”
Lasch-Quinn echoed Teres and Diem, emphasizing that the petition has evolved beyond its initial curricular concerns and is now focused on the fundamentals of shared faculty governance and balancing power between faculty and administrators.
The university spokesperson said shared governance was “at the heart” of the process to update the LAC.
“When a group of faculty members who were charged with mapping courses to the new core model made a unilateral decision to create a new requirement — and further, to disregard the administration’s concerns about financial feasibility — they disregarded the prior full-faculty vote that approved the new LAC, as well as disregarding the shared responsibility that comes with shared governance,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement.
“The new core was approved by faculty in 2023, and Dean Mortazavi arrived later that year and assumed the responsibility to map out the implementation of the approved LAC.”
The spokesperson also said the CAS/MAX Curriculum Committee provided no alternatives or evidence that its curriculum proposal could be executed without “significant additional resources.” Mortazavi exercised his fiduciary responsibility to deem the proposal financially impossible, the spokesperson said.
Nick Piato, a signee of the petition and program coordinator for the Studying an Environment that Nurtures Self-Exploration in Students lab, pointed to an address given during a University Senate meeting by SU Chancellor Kent Syverud in September. The address called for stronger shared governance at SU and noted its decline at other universities.
In his speech, Syverud said he hadn’t “lost faith” in the shared governance model at SU, and that when “tough” decisions are made, they are done so with the necessary information and committees have had an opportunity to provide feedback.
“The fact that administration is now also trying to have a say over the curriculum committee shows, to me, kind of this slow slide of administration trying to take over all aspects of institutional decision making,” Piato said.
Alongside the initial petition, Teres and Diem decided to help lead a second procedural petition effort early last week to request a special faculty meeting. In accordance with the A&S and Maxwell Bylaws, the petition requests a meeting this month to address the larger petition and allow faculty to vote on delaying the LAC’s implementation. The request for such a meeting only requires 30 signatures; it has received 48 as of Tuesday.
Teres said the actions taken without faculty approval reflect a “larger attack” on the humanities across the country. Since returning to the Oval Office, President Donald Trump has begun targeting diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs and has called for the elimination of such initiatives nationwide.
Diem said in the current political climate, more people are becoming “narrow-minded” and hyper-focused on their own country and culture. Through the absence of a foreign language requirement, he said students may be less inclined to have a wider, more global perspective.
“We are the teachers, we are the researchers, we are the ones who know best about which courses should be taught and the content of those courses,” Teres said. “When you take that power out of the hands of faculty, you have a very dangerous situation that is subject to all kinds of manipulation.”
Illustration by Flynn Ledoux | Illustration Editor
Published on February 5, 2025 at 1:42 am
Contact Delia: dsrangel@syr.edu
