Despite a projected increase in enrollment for next fall, Eastern is offering fewer sections of required general education courses like U.S. Constitution and Composition and Language.

To fulfill Eastern’s general education requirements, students are required to take a U.S. Constitution core class, either as U.S. Constitution and the Nation (HIS 3600) or American Government and the Constitution (PLS 1153). The history department is cutting two sections of HIS 3600 and the political science department is cutting one section of PLS 1153.

While pledging to boost enrollment by 250 next year, interim President Lou Hencken has repeatedly promised to accommodate all those students.

“I want everyone to know we will have seats for those students,” Hencken said Tuesday, adding that failure to provide that would cause “a one-year blip in enrollment.

“We have to think in the long run,” he said.

Richard Wandling, chair of the political science department, said cuts to Eastern’s budget have left the department short-staffed and unable to provide as many sections.

“At this point, we are dropping from 13 positions to 12,” Wandling said. “It’s not that anyone is going to get dismissed, we had a couple faculty retirements this year.”

The department has had 13 positions for the last three years, Wandling said. During 1997, the year of Eastern’s record enrollment of 11,777, they still only had 12, and offered 16 sections of American Government and the Constitution.

Losing faculty members impacts the department on all levels, Wandling said.

“Most of the faculty are involved in assuming responsibility for teaching American Government,” he said. “A drop from 13 to 12 has ripple effects.”

Wandling stressed that the department is “committed to general education” and the American Government course, but must consider political science majors and graduate students. Wandling also cited the need to provide faculty adequate time for research.

Generally, PLS 1153 courses have about 40 students, except one class that has about 90 in the Coleman Lecture Hall. Wandling is apprehensive about increasing class size, particularly since many of the classrooms used for the cannot physically hold much more than what they currently contain.

The history department provided eight sections of HIS 3600 in 1997 and 2001. In 2002, there will be six. Anita Shelton, chair of the history department, could not be reached for comment.

The English department supplied 63 sections of ENG 1001 for the fall 2001 semester. In 1997, it offered 69 sections. But this fall, it has 61 available.

Since three unfilled sections were closed last fall, 61 sections is an increase over last year, Dana Ringuette, chair of the English department, said.

As far as accommodating the increase in enrollment, Ringuette said the department will “just have to play it by ear.”

How the English department would handle the jump in enrollment depends on “how many students there are, whether we have staff available, and whether we have staff.”

Ringuette said applications being up 40 percent doesn’t say much about how many students will actually enroll.

“We won’t know until summer exactly what we’re looking at,” he said.

Failure to fill all sections last year is what prompted the department to scale back, Ringuette said.

The maximum number of students allowed in an ENG 1001 class is 23, Ringuette said, and that won’t change.

The number of sections offered “is not intended to be hit or miss,” Ringuette said, but predicting enrollment is difficult.

Fraun Lewis, acting assistant director of the Academic Advising Center, said the drop in some sections caused concerns for the center.

“The bottom line is we need to provide a reasonable offering for new freshmen. If were going to admit new freshmen, we need to service them,” Lewis said.

Lewis said she thinks the advising center could have filled all 63 sections of ENG 1001, but the department elected to save some sections for spring semester.

Deciding how many sections to offer is a guessing game, Lewis said.

“It’s a tough game to guess if you ask me,” she said.

Hencken has said he expects to increase next semester’s enrollment by 250 students. In addition, last month administrators said a higher than normal amount of applications had been received, further raising expectations that enrollment would increase next semester.

But administrators maintain that next fall’s actual enrollment can’t yet be determined.

“We haven’t yet matriculated the number of students for next year,” Blair Lord, vice president for academic affairs, said Tuesday.

He also said class size has likely fluctuated through the years; however, there is no move as of now to increase the class sizes at Eastern.

The expected increase in enrollment comes during a time of decreases in state funding. For this current budget, Gov. George Ryan has recalled about $600,000 and asked the university to pay for its employee insurance, a tab of $1.7 million.

Furthermore, local representatives have said it looks like the current callback in funds will end up also being a base budget cut for next fiscal year.

University administrators have said they were able to locate the call back funds in non-academic areas such as deferred maintenance accounts and by lowering the heat in campus buildings by two degrees. They have also said Eastern will be saving money by not filling some open positions in the university.

Hencken has said that the university will do what it takes to make enough classes and housing available for the expected increase in students. He also emphasized Tuesday that sections of classes can still be added if needed, even during summer months.

Despite the decrease in some general education sections, other departments with general education courses have increased the section offerings because of the expected increase in enrollment.

Most of the increases in general education section offerings occur in the biological and physical sciences areas.

“As we were considering the schedule for the fall semester, we recognized there may be more freshmen than we had in years previous, so one of the things we did was shift resources in terms of scheduling from upper to lower division courses,” Mary Anne Hanner, acting dean of the College of Sciences, said.