The Council on Academic Affairs approved two new courses during its meeting Thursday.

CRM 3760, Crime and Media: A Criminological Analysis, was approved for the 2019 summer semester.

The course has been taught twice as a Special Topics course and was proposed due to student interest, according to the proposal.

Jennifer Stevens, assistant professor of sociology and criminology, said adding the course will help build up the criminology major.

“This (course) has been popular,” Stevens said. “Media and crime is something that the students are very interested in, so I developed this course as a response to some of the feedback that I got from the students.”

The course will count as an upper-division elective for students. Currently the criminology major requires nine hours of upper-division criminology electives.

The elective course will be worth three credits.

ANT 3258, The Anthropology of Violence & Warfare, was approved to begin in the 2020 spring semester.

The prerequisites for the elective course will be ANT 2200G or ANT 2290G, and the class will be worth three credits.

The rational for proposing the class listed in the proposal was, “This course aims to fill this critical gap in the anthropology curriculum at Eastern.”

Anthropology professor Don Holly said the topic is broad, and that is the approach he plans to take in the class.

“It is going to mostly grow on the classic anthropological record,” Holly said.

The course catalog description says, “The course explores the anthropological record of violence in human evolution, history and society.”

Revisions to the Criminology and Criminal Justice majors were approved.

Sociology chair Darren Hendrickson spoke to the council and asked for two required classes—CRM 1520, Criminal Investigation, and CRM 1600, Criminal Evidence and Procedure.

“As we’ve developed, we’ve realized those two courses don’t really align with some of the underlying objectives of the major,” Hendrickson said. “They would really be better served as electives instead of core requirements.”

The class SOC 1838, Introductory Sociology, will now be added as a required course.

The WGS 3309 course revisions were approved, changing the course name to WGS 4409.

CAA members discussed their bylaws, changing the part of the bylaws regarding voting.

Barry Kronenfeld, CAA member and associate geography professor, suggested revising the bylaws to accommodate the “show of hands” method they have been using to vote as opposed to the current language suggesting a roll call or electronic ballot vote.

CAA chair Marita Gronnvoll said she thought they should keep using the original way of voting.

“Pretty much every council on campus records the votes, either with roll call or a clicker,” Gronnvoll said. “I just think really think we need to own our votes. So, I think show of hands is not a good idea.”

Items added to the agenda for the Jan. 17, 2019 CAA meeting include a new minor, a revised program, two revised minors and two revised courses.

Corryn Brock can be reached at 581-2812 or at [email protected].