Courses to Turn You On

In many universities and colleges, the formerly "kept" departments --those in which courses were once full because they were required of all students--have never recovered from the curriculum reforms of recent years. Modern languages and history have been especially hard hit. For example, chiefly because the University of Wisconsin reduced its language requirement in 1971, enrollment in French at the Madison campus tumbled from 4,800 to 2,100. It has stayed down ever since, despite the blandishments of new courses like one on French cinema. In other lagging disciplines, some professors have even tried Madison Avenue techniques to fill classes: plugging their courses in student-newspaper ads, in flyers on bulletin boards and simply by buttonholing likely prospects. The University of Pennsylvania's geology department, for instance, sought majors by mailing freshmen leaflets asking, "Give us a chance to turn you on."

At many other campuses, however, there has been something of a shift back to the traditional departments, even without advertisements. "Students don't seem as negative about hard-core academic subjects as they used to be," says Administrator Robin Clouser of the University of Kansas. "There is no longer a big demand here for courses in Eastern philosophy or arts and crafts." At Case Western Reserve, modern-language enrollments dropped 70% when the courses were made optional in 1969 but had rebounded about 25% by this year. By popular demand, Princeton this fall launched a new interdisciplinary major in medieval studies. "Students today find the mystical and spiritual values of the Middle Ages very attractive," explains Professor John V. Fleming. A similar program did so well at Barnard that the college has added a major in ancient studies, At the University of Massachusetts, enrollment in the classics has quadrupled "in two years. Says Wayne Schlepp, chairman of Wisconsin's popular East Asian languages and literature department: "Relevance is where you find it."

Jobs. Enrollments in some subjects have changed for very pragmatic reasons. Almost everywhere, engineering and teaching courses are still depressed because of the poor job market for graduates. At the same time, chemistry and biology courses are overflowing because increasing numbers of students want to go to medical school for a combination of reasons, including both altruism and the desire to make a good living. Generally speaking, student interest in sociology and psychology is continuing high. At Princeton, the number of juniors majoring in psychology has jumped from about a dozen to 76 in two years, though there has been a drop in the number of sociology majors.

Still flourishing are courses known by the nicknames given them by students. Among them: "sluts and nuts," a Princeton course on deviant behavior; "rocks for jocks," an elementary geology course popular among athletes at Pennsylvania; and "physics for freaks," a course designed for humanities majors at Wisconsin. Professors willing to bend imaginatively to shifts in student tastes can always fill their classes. At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the English department got students interested in reading the classics--Aeschylus' Agamemnon and Shakespeare's Macbeth--by adding movies like The Godfather to the assignment list and calling the course "The Gangster in Film and Literature."

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