In response to the recent letter from University of Illinois Chancellor Morton Weir, two of the examples he used to demonstrate that Illinois hasn`t neglected its undergraduate students are presented in contexts that are rather misleading and tend to favor his positions.
His statement that the ”course catalog lists more than 4,000 undergraduate courses” sounds impressive, especially when taken in conjunction with his previous sentence talking about Illinois having more than 150 fields of study in 10 undergraduate divisions. But what he neglects to mention is the fact that a listing in the course catalog does not necessarily mean the course will be available when the student enrolls. What would be interesting and far more appropriate in this context are the number of courses actually listed in a semester`s timetable.
Second, to support his claim that life is ”not as difficult (for the undergraduate) as the Tribune series suggests,” he states that ”most students receive the schedule they request.” What the chancellor fails to point out is that incoming freshmen receive priority over every other class of undergraduate students. So the statistics are not exactly relevant when considering the difficulty of undergraduate life as a whole.
