Majors: Set them free and students will benefit

I'm the kind of student who compulsively over-prepares. Class registration for me isn't one morning - it's weeks of planning and strategizing. I do an audit on Testudo to see what requirements I have yet to meet, and then I go through every class in a few different departments to see what fits. Then there are the contingency plans.

Being a government and politics major, I had better prepare for registration day with a series of classes I want when the classes I really want fill up. They always do. I'm going into next semester with 72 credits, but by the time I registered, a 50-person 200-level class was full. Never mind classes such as GVPT 443: Contemporary Political Theory or a seminar called GVPT 459A:Ownership, Control, Democracy and Power - I'll be lucky to get into something as riveting as GVPT 422: Quantitative Political Analysis.

This would all be fine if every class I wanted to take were full, but they're not. As of press time, AASP 499T: Advanced Topics in Public Policy and the Black Community: Race, Poverty, Violence and the Juvenile Justice System: A Theoretical and Contextual Analysis of Social Capital still has 22 seats left. ENSP 399X: Special Topics in Environmental Science and Policy: Explorations in Sustainability has 16 open. SOCY 241: Inequality it American Society has only filled 19 of its 47 seats. Every one of these seems interesting and relevant to what I'm studying but unfortunately, none of them are government and politics classes.

Our major system requires us not only to choose a specific area to study but to adhere to the arbitrary divisions of classes into these categories. There's not a class that exists that isn't interdisciplinary in some way or another. Economics students need to know math but could also use a government or philosophy class about theories of economic distribution. A theory-oriented government student like me could use any number of African American studies or sociology classes. Yet too often, these classes are reserved for majors from their home departments.

To make sure students get enough exposure to other fields, some majors create the "supporting sequence," requiring majors to take a number of classes from another department. But why the division? The truth is not every government and politics or American studies or English major is studying the same things. Indeed, most focuses lead naturally into taking classes from other departments. For a student like me, a sociology class such as SOCY203: Sociological Theory and even my English class, ENGL437: "Contemporary American Literature," were more relevant to my field of interest than GVPT473: "Legislatures and Legislation" is. The answer isn't to create new interdisciplinary programs, because disciplines in the humanities are largely a thing of the past.

If we have advising, we might as well use it. Let advisers help students designate a course of study and pick out classes that could apply. Keeping undergraduates isolated in one department for their major requirements and reserving some classes for majors only doesn't reflect the complex web of academics.

Sure, it's less complicated the current way, and we do have a system for students to create their own majors, but a lot of good things take effort. We hear so much about the university moving toward becoming a top-tier school; why not jump ahead of the curve? Right now, interdisciplinary subjects are in (witness our environmental policy program). Soon enough, schools will recognize arbitrary major categories for what they are. Professional academics don't worry about what departments their scholarship will fall under. Why should undergraduates be constrained by contrived subject boundaries? It's about time we broke free.

Malcolm Harris is a sophomore English and government and politics major. He can be reached at harrisdbk@gmail.com.