For English majors who feel locked in by their required courses, help is at hand.
In an e-mail sent to all majors just before winter break, Thomas Pfau, director of undergraduate studies for the Department of English, announced the end of the "cluster requirement."
Abolishing the cluster requirement, which dictated that English majors take two classes from a group designated as thematically or critically linked, is just one of several planned changes to the major. Since starting as director in the summer of 2005, Pfau has also been redesigning the distinction program and working to attract more undergraduates.
With the elimination of the cluster, Pfau said, the English major has "returned to a medium level of requirements" from what he described as a higher-than-average number of prescribed courses. All but one member of the English faculty approved of the change, he noted.
While some of the clusters grew out of individual professors' specific research interests, most stemmed from administrators' efforts to group together classes that were already being offered.
Students also had the option to design their own clusters and petition for departmental approval.
Problems arose when professors who had planned to teach a year-long cluster sequence received a fellowship for the spring or when students failed to win their professors' approval to enroll in the second semester of a creative writing cluster. As a result, some students struggled to complete a pre-established cluster.
"A lot of people found themselves in a corner and had to retrospectively constitute a cluster," said Laurie Shannon, E. Blake Byrne associate professor of English and associate chair of the department.
She explained that there was a growing sentiment in the department that the requirement was losing its intended meaning.
Clusters have only been around since the English major received a vast overhaul-the first in 20 years-during the fall of 2002. The freshman FOCUS program served as a model for the sets of related English courses. At the time, faculty were enthusiastic, but the system proved difficult to manage.
"I was at the retreat when we sat and thought the clusters were a wonderful idea," said John Clum, professor of theater studies and English.
Still, he explained that although specialization is important, forcing it upon more than 200 majors is an "administrative nightmare."
The clusters were so new that only students who matriculated after 2003 had to complete them. Jonathan Fisher, a senior subject to earlier major requirements, said he never took any courses that might have constituted a cluster.
"Most of it was just a reorganization of the existing English courses," Fisher said.
But he noted, "I was a little surprised to see it end so early."
In Pfau's eyes, the elimination of the cluster is just one step toward increasing the vitality of the undergraduate program in English. One of his goals is to increase the total number of majors, he said. To this end, he has already begun meeting individually with freshmen who expressed interest in English, literature or theater studies on their applications to Duke.
"We don't want to risk losing any [students] as a result of offering too few clusters," he explained.
Another change on the agenda is a revamping of the honors program. Plans to replace the thesis seminar with an approach based on independent studies have already received unanimous approval from the department's faculty. Now the changes need to be confirmed by a University-wide committee, which Pfau said should happen later this month.
Since the new system will allow students to begin work on their theses as early as spring of junior year, students will be better situated in applying for summer research funding and graduate schools, Pfau said. He also said he hopes the changes will help the department meet Trinity College goals for increasing the percentage of students doing independent research.
"We've had somewhat dwindling numbers of applicants to the honors program," Pfau said.
For the immediate future, however, English majors-unless they are pursuing distinction-may not notice many differences to their courses of study. Faculty members noted that the abolition of clusters was unlikely to alter which courses the department chooses to offer.
"You can find faculty who have different views on this," Shannon said. "My own view is that the cluster was controversial even when it was enacted.... The elimination of the cluster substantively makes very little difference to your experience as a major."
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