Thursday, April 03, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Saved by the bell

UNLV's remedial English rescued by profs-turned-bureaucrats

By Andrew Kiraly

Stephen Brown is an assistant professor and director of the composition department at UNLV, but these days he's as likely to talk about programs as paragraphs, synergy as syntax. Over the past few months, he's taken something of a crash course in networking, proposal-drafting and resource-shuffling, as the English instructor has helped save UNLV's remedial English course, which had started looking quite superfluous in light of the state's budget woes.

After a round of rhetoric that made it seem like the Board of Regents was taking the program to the chopping block, English A was saved--thanks to some teachers who learned how to act like bureaucrats.

"After the rhetoric in the meetings from January, I was pleasantly surprised the regents approved the measure," Brown says. "This means students won't have to go across town to take a course at the community college. It means we won't break the implicit promise we make to students to provide the education they need in one place, and we won't be compounding the retention issue by alienating students when we tell them, 'We know you enrolled with the understanding that all your courses would be here, but, sorry, you've got to take a class across town, too.'"

On March 19, the Board of Regents voted not to phase out UNLV English A, but rather reformat the course's funding structure so it wouldn't suck up state money. The course will likely thin out as the university takes on higher admission standards in coming years, but for now the course--which many instructors say is crucial to serving students--remains afloat among a number of different programs that see teachers breaking the mold of what constitutes a typical college course.

Among the solutions: moving English A classes under UNLV's self-funded Educational Outreach Department (formerly Continuing Education); doing pre-emptive programs in high schools such as Get Ready, an intensive, eight-week summer English course for fresh high school grads, as well as Gear Up, a national program that readies high school students for college. Also in the works is a virtual English A course that students "attend" online.

"It's no undue strain on us," says Dawn Neuman, interim vice provost for Educational Outreach. "We think Educational Outreach is the best-kept secret in town. We have a long history of supporting ourselves by doing classes like this."

Under the arrangement, students will pay the same per-credit price, get the same teachers and go to the same classrooms, but tuition money will cycle back into Educational Outreach instead of going to the general university pot, the destination for most tuition money.

Things didn't look this promising a few months ago, as some regents clamored to cut, wholesale, UNLV's remedial English classes, which can host up to 1,200 students during a fall semester.

"The university is in the higher education business," says Regent Mark Alden. "[Remedial English] is a waste of resources, and holding on to it is a very bad way to conduct an institution of higher learning."

That argument buoyed Alden and Regent Doug Hill's original proposal to move remedial English to the Community College of Southern Nevada and Nevada State College at Henderson, which they say would save the state $2 million annually.

But critics say that would cause more problems than it would solve. Elaine Bunker, coordinator for English A, says that proposal would ignore different remedial English teaching styles; UNLV's, she says, focuses on essay-writing, while the community college is concerned with sentences and paragraphs.

"If we're going to admit these students, we need to provide the courses to help them be successful," she says. "To me, a major part of the issue is basic fairness to students."

For now, it looks like the English department will continue to provide English A--until the higher admission standards take effect as early as 2006. Little wonder that Brown breaks into a cliche more fitting a businessman than a prof.

"It's a win-win situation," he says. "This saves the state money, allows students to continue taking courses here, and lets us keep control over the quality of the course."