THE FACULTY

ASFEC said the proposed skills standards seemed too basic for college-level work and too vague for their effects to be measured. Lampe said he could not support the GECC recommendation because it did not address what the core should be.

What concerned them most is that all core courses will have to address at least one of those standards.

The members of the ASFEC unanimously found that they were not willing to agree in principle to the skills standards, but decided to step aside and put the issue to vote by the entire Colleges of Arts and Sciences Faculty Senate.

The results of the vote will be available in early November, but some fear the decision will be moot because all of the school senates, including the Manoa Faculty Senate, have already voted to support the recommendations.

Hoffmann said they had asked the Manoa Faculty Senate, which represents the entire Manoa campus, to wait until the Arts and Sciences Faculty Senate could vote. The Manoa senate ignored the request.

In their statement to the Arts and Sciences Faculty Senate, which consists of all faculty within the Colleges of Arts and Sciences, the ASFEC said the success of these standards would be a "triumph of fairness and uniform mediocrity" for the state's educational system.

"The Core might then be altered to privilege only a small selection of skills and the system will transmit the message to students that word processing is to be valued over the arts, that `concise' writing is better than brilliant and complex writing, or that quantitative reasoning is intrinsically more useful to society than the understanding of the physical world or of the development of human society.

"The system might then begin to graduate scientists who can calculate but have no curiosity, artists who can wield a brush but can't think of anything to paint, and writers who are computer-literate but have nothing to say."

The statement also said the strength and character of a university reside in its faculty and thus it is the faculty who should decide what skills students need and how they are to be taught.

"The opposite point of view is that faculty don't know what they are doing and must be told. In particular, since faculty are incapable of setting standards and prioritizing skills, even in their own disciplines, management (disguised as other faculty) will now do this for them," it said. "And to insure uniformity and fairness, standards and skills will of course be imposed system-wide."

The statement alleged that the GECC -- a faculty body which Kay said is backed by UH President Kenneth Mortimer -- spent thousands of hours and more than $100,000 on their skills standards proposal and that the faculty is now being pressured to support -- and thereby justify the cost of -- the standards.

"With or without content, adoption of the proposal can be used, not only to assure students, parents, taxpayers, the Board or Regents, the Governor, and the Legislature that the University has high standards, but also that the administration is doing its job and is making sure that faculty do theirs," it said.

The Arts and Sciences Faculty Senate, one of many collegiate senates on campus, is the only one which has decided to address the GECC's recommendations.

But as Hoffmann pointed out, "There's only, and there's only." Arts and sciences faculty make up 65 percent of faculty on campus, and teach 90 percent of all core classes.

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