“The UC systemwide Academic Senate has approved, in principle, the idea of a universitywide undergraduate minor. The proposal calls for campuses to jointly create a curriculum, which would be taught simultaneously throughout the UC system by faculty on several campuses. The plan calls for distance technology coupled with local staff resources as the primary means of delivering the courses.
“The main motivation for the Universitywide minor is to offer undergraduates an educational program that arguably would not be as feasible on a campus-by-campus basis,” says the writer of one minor proposal, David Messerschmitt, a professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley and member of the Academic Senate’s committee on Information Technology and Telecommunications Policy (ITTP). ‘To develop a minor like this on a single campus probably requires on the order of eight to ten faculty FTE. To do it systemwide, each campus could hire or reallocate one or two faculty FTE, which is probably more practical for many subject areas, especially those not identifiable as emerging research initiatives.’
Messerschmitt has proposed that the first of these minors be in ‘Information Technology Fluency and Impact’; however, a detailed curriculum proposal has not been developed and the Academic Senate and UC Educational Policy (UCEP) committee have not yet formally endorsed it.”