A University committee's plans, which recommend significant changes to University life, drew strong comment from faculty members Thursday.
The Academic Council's intellectual climate task force may propose that the University change its residential system by reorganizing it into a series of residential quandrangles. The task force's recommendations will be presented in a report due in May.
Students would enter into one of the quadrangles as freshmen and typically live in the same quad throughout their undergraduate career, said task force chair Peter Burian, associate professor of classical studies.
Burian announced the committee's plans at a meeting of the Academic Council.
Other suggestions that the committee plans to make include increasing the academic portion of freshman orientation and requiring all undergraduates to complete an independent research project before they graduate, Burian said.
"By and large, however, what we're trying to do is not to say that Duke should be a completely different kind of place, but rather to build upon its strengths," he said.
Some faculty criticized the committee for focusing entirely on the undergraduate experience and not addressing some of the problems graduate students face.
Burian said that the committee, which includes several graduate students, does not distinguish between undergraduate and graduate student issues. Many of the issues the committee has addressed, such as dining and residential life, concern undergraduates more directly.
Faculty also challenged Burian's claims that the committee's proposals were "incremental" and "relatively inexpensive." They said the committee had vastly underestimated the total costs of implementing the committee's proposals.
"[Your plans] don't represent small types of changes but a major reorganization of time and resources," said Kalman Bland, associate professor of religion.
Though the committee's proposal requiring undergraduates to complete an independent study might cost faculty time, none of the others would be expensive, Burian said.
One small idea considered by the committee is removing television sets from dining halls.
Professors also suggested improving faculty-student relations and making better used of retired professors.
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