FACULTY OF HUMANITIES AND EDUCATION
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We still have some blocks of courses that are not filling as much as they should, with Archaeology’s upper-level courses having thin enrollments. Jettisoning almost all the pre-requisites that used to trim the crowd of would-be archaeologists so they could be crammed into the former Archaeology Lab in the eighteenth-century Bookeepers’ Cottage should allow us to admit some more enrollees (we have had a new lab, with rather more space, for a decade). We are also aiming to develop a new Minor in Heritage (our existing Minor was developed when Archaeology had no spare seats, so no archaeology classes were included in the program; now we have empty seats in Archaeology’s upper-level courses, but trying to change the current program would allow the Bursary to switch it into a fee schedule that would effectively exclude our current students). The Department therefore plans to set up a freestanding Heritage Minor but, alas, could not get it into FAQAC in time to make the last BUS committee meeting of Semester 2. That revision will therefore have to be processed in Semester One of 2023-24 to offer to the 2025 entering class. A further task for Dr. Julian Cresser, who will be beginning his term as Chair in August 2023 will be to pitch a Tourism and Heritage program to Tourism to see if we can develop a further joint degree that may yet recruit Tourism’s current overplus of would-be students to bring their insights to our Heritage and Archaeology classes. The undergraduate Tourism students who we enrolled in several of our Heritage courses brought fresh insights to those tutorial discussions and assignments. A longer-term project – which the Department has talked about for at least twenty years – is to develop joint programs with Geography & Geology. As that Department is housed in Pure & Applied, their Faculty requires a pass in a science discipline for admission to their programs. There is a venerable Humanities Geography program for undergraduate Geography students who do not have the required science pass at matriculation. A few years back Dean Waibinte Wariboko transferred the oversight of these students from the Humanities Dean’s Office to History & Archaeology. I think that the Department offers them some informed advising (though there were some near stumbles over new pre-requisites in the recently re-formed Geog- raphy program – which were fortunately caught and resolved in Summer School so they will march at Graduation). The current Chair of Geography & Geology is considering a proposal to run an extra no-credit introduction to science methods class in Semester One of the Humanities Geography first years, whose successful completion will allow a switch to Geography. (History & Archaeology is not the only traditional discipline with shrinking numbers). I am not sure how far such an overload class will appeal. However, she is also considering new joint degrees, both in Archaeology & Geology (yes, she is a Geologist besides being a former Hon. Treasurer of the Jamaica Historical Society), besides both History & Geography and Archaeology & Geography. Trying to negotiate past her Faculty’s Science require- ment is a road block that was reaffirmed in that Faculty’s latest set of regulations for registration that retained the high school science class as a prerequisite, but there
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