Faculty approves ending 2 courses at meeting

About 25 faculty members attended the meeting, during which the faculty also approved a report by Registrar Polly Griffin detailing the University’s fall semester opening enrollment and delivered a memorial resolution commemorating Robert Tucker, emeritus professor of politics, who died at the age of 92 in July.

The registrar’s report summarized the demographic makeup of the undergraduate and graduate student bodies. Griffin noted that the undergraduate population has grown by 633 students since Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel assumed her post in 1987.

The report also shows that nearly twice as many females as males concentrate in humanities and that every female engineering concentrator has two male counterparts. The gender balance was roughly equal for concentrators in the social sciences and math and natural sciences.

At the beginning of the meeting, emeritus politics professor Fred Greenstein presented the resolution commemorating Tucker’s achievements. Tucker worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, and served as an interpreter at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow before joining the faculty. He was well known for his work on Soviet affairs and political psychology, and he wrote biographies of Karl Marx and Josef Stalin, Greenstein said.

Following a moment of silence for Tucker, Malkiel asked the faculty to approve the removal of two courses — CBE 199: Great Inventions That Changed the World and CBE 410: Molecular Structure and Property: Product Engineering — from the curriculum owing to the retirement of James Wei, former dean of the Engineering School, who taught the courses.

“They, like their faculty members, have now left the University,” Malkiel said of the courses.

President Shirley Tilghman, who chaired the meeting, partly ascribed the low turnout to bad weather. “It is a good thing that I don’t see anything on the agenda that requires a quorum, because we would be in trouble if that were the case,” she said to the faculty.

The meeting lasted about 20 minutes. All motions were approved unanimously.