Tuesday was a sad day for Central Michigan University students when the Academic Senate voted to drop the word “global” in University Program Group IV, originally titled: Studies in Global Cultures and Diversity, and in Subgroup B, originally titled: Studies in Global Cultures Outside of the Anglo-American Tradition.

The vote effectively eliminated a possible home for a group of proposed global studies courses in business, art, communication and journalism. Despite the fact that no one in the Senate denied the importance of global studies during the Senate debate, about 67 percent of the senators voted to delete the word.

In its guideline document, the General Education Committee inserted the wording, “Courses that do not indicate a specific region or tradition of study (i.e. are global in scope, or are surveys of most or all regions in the world) are not appropriate for inclusion in this subgroup."

I’m baffled by why the committee is so entrenched in opposing the inclusion of courses that are global in nature in this group. Why does this UP subgroup have to be reserved specifically for courses on regional studies outside of the United States, and why do area studies courses merit an exclusive UP subgroup while global studies courses cannot find a home?

The main defense for the changes focused on logistics and history, and the best argument was: "My course is just better than yours." It was still hard for me to believe that such defense and argument held sway at the Academic Senate.

Some senators might see this debate as a fight over SCH or tuition dollars among academic departments. But the course I taught over the years, International and Cross-cultural Communication, was in the UP until the overhaul. I had thought the overhaul was intended to update the UP, not to go backward or against the trend of history, which is toward globalization. I felt great satisfaction every time I read in a student paper that “this assignment had opened my eyes to how news is covered around the world and why." Now I had to trim this course down to “Asian media and communication” to fit into the UP subgroup.

Do our students have to take one course for each continent of the world in order to study the global media or international communication? I believe the vote is a major loss for students at CMU. I believe our students need more—not less—international education in order to be competitive on a global basis. I believe our students deserve a choice in selecting either a course that is global in nature or a course that focuses on one region of the world.

An alumnus of the journalism department, who took my international communication class a few years ago and now works for the Toledo Blade newspaper, sent me an email after he read the story on the Senate debate in Central Michigan Life. He wrote: “I am one of your former students from a few years ago. … I took the Global Cultures class and it was very beneficial to me and I just wanted to let you know I really appreciate you caring and fighting for the class….”

I hope we keep students’ needs in mind when we make curricular decisions, which should focus on what students need rather than what we want to teach them.

It’s a cliché to say that the world is becoming smaller and that we live in a “global village." I hope we do not limit the worldview of our students to only one house in that village. Many college students today see themselves as global citizens. As educators, I hope we help expand that vision rather than narrow it down. CMU listed “global understanding” as one of the core values in its mission statement. I hope we’re not paying lip service to those values. I hope that university administrators will take a stand and that students will join in the discussions.

JIAFEI YIN

Interim Chair, Journalism Department

Central Michigan University