Mischief is afoot in the chemical engineering department. A phantom elective, Bio 152: Biochemistry and Cellular Metabolism, somehow became a requirement for current seniors, who took it without first having completed its prerequisite, Organic Chemistry. The situation, as reported in the pages of this newspaper, is so convoluted, complex and incomplete as to preclude judgment in favor of either the students or the department. There are only questions to be answered.
Did any professors actually tell students they had to take Bio 152 in order to receive a degree in chemical engineering? Were the degree requirements printed clearly on a Web site or an information sheet widely available to students? If so, did Graham Good, Anura Patil, and James Turco access these requirements? Why did these three students wait two years before making their complaint public? What on earth is Cellular Metabolism? Does anybody have a Tylenol?
The question of what exactly happened in the Chemical Engineering department to cause these three students to complain may never be adequately answered, though it clearly should be. Short of an independent commission made up of foreign dignitaries, efforts to unravel the twisted tale will almost certainly fall victim to confusion, apathy, or smoke screen operations by the administration. The Chemical Engineering department and the Tufts administration should focus an investigation not on this particular incident but on the department requirement system as a whole, to make sure that similar problems do not arise in the future.
One thing is absolutely certain. Degree requirements must be clear, accessible, and universal. Many departments do an excellent job. The International Relations major, for example, has a fully operational website with well articulated requirements and Web links to lists of approved courses, supplemented by exceptionally helpful and knowledgeable advisors. Other departments are less organized. The Romance Languages department has very general requirements listed on its Web site without links to historically approved courses or contact information for advisors, who, some language majors claim, can be less than helpful.
To ensure students comply with degree requirements and departments meet a base level of competence regarding requirement communications, Tufts should centralize information about departments' degree programs. Instead of having information organized and released by each department, the administration should collect requirements from the department heads and then publish it in one place, along with information about historically and currently approved courses and advisor contact information. This would save students, professors, journalists, and Daily editors from the pain of avoidable migraine headaches.
