Dear Colleagues,

For some of you this will be a follow-up letter to one I sent out a few months ago. For others of you, it will serve as an introduction to an important project that the CSU, UC and CC campuses are spearheading to assist our students as they move between our institutions. I’m writing to request your participation in the following initiative.

The Intersegmental Major Preparation Articulated Curriculum (IMPAC) project is a faculty-designed and faculty-run project which focuses on ensuring that students transferring from California community colleges to UC and CSU institutions will be properly prepared for progressing in their chosen major immediately upon transfer, (i.e., that they will not have to repeat any course work; and to allow them hopefully to bring with them from the community colleges a limited number of units that might count as prerequisites for or actual credit in the major). The project, funded by a grant, enables faculty from the state’s three higher education systems to meet regionally at intervals throughout the year in order to address potential problems of established curriculum requirements and procedures that may impede the smooth progress of a transferring student. These meetings provide a forum where faculty may review and reconcile the prerequisites of course work both within their particular disciplines and between disciplines.

Some of your colleagues may have attended the meetings held this past year in San Francisco and Los Angeles. At these gatherings in 2004-2005, the IMPAC project brought together faculty from 33 different disciplines, and this term six more are being incorporated into the discussions.

I'm pleased to notify you that, after a year of partnership with humanities and philosophy programs across the state, religious studies is now autonomously represented in IMPAC. This is an important development. It means that we can begin to explore as a group both what we want new or budding RS majors to be studying; and its gives us a wonderful chance to recruit students into our programs while they are still in the early years of their college experience. As more and more of the CSU and UC campuses accept transfer students from the community colleges, their presence becomes a greater factor in the flourishing of RS majors. And as this partnership develops and takes substantive form in courses accepted to the UC and CSU programs, it will clearly inform the substance of what community colleges need to provide their students. Please visit the project’s website at www.cal-impac.org for a listing of all 39 of the specific disciplines, as well as the subject clusters into which they are grouped.

The IMPAC staff and I ask you to help this process in the following ways:
(1) Please urge representatives of your department or program to attend the IMPAC regional and statewide meetings now scheduled for 2005-2006. (See the attached announcement.) South and Metro regions attend the regional meeting scheduled on November 19th at LAX Sheraton Gateway, and North, Central, and Bay regions on January 21st at San Francisco Westin. Representatives can be anyone designated by the Department, but we hope that you'll consider the Department Chair, undergraduate advisor, or another faculty member who works with transfer students. There is no cost for attending these sessions. IMPAC will reimburse for transportation, meals, lodging, and incidentals within the stipulations of their budget (further information will be provided).
(2) Ask your representatives to share their IMPAC experiences with those colleagues who are responsible for the baccalaureate education of transfer students in their major, as well as the articulation officers on your campus.
(3) Encourage your department’s faculty to keep abreast of the IMPAC project by regularly visiting our website at www.cal-impac.org.

I can't stress enough that your department's participation is critical to IMPAC's work, and ultimately to the ability of California faculty to enhance the successful transfer of community college students.

I expect our work this year among Religious Studies faculty to focus on the following three tasks.

1. See if we can move toward consensus on 9 units of lower division work provided by the community colleges that, as a group, UC and CSU programs in religious studies would be willing to accept. Presently over 100 community colleges teach over 250 religious studies courses in their curricula. Our task ought to be to help these programs flourish. But at the same time, we need to help students scattered across the state by exploring whether every UC and CSU program in religious studies could agree on some credits that all of us would be willing to accept as early major work done by our future students at the community college level.

2. Establish a listserve among faculty in the 18 religious studies programs in the CSU and UC systems and our counterparts in the community colleges. Literally for decades faculty in the UC and CSU religious studies programs have been teaching and developing our programs with little knowledge of what else is being offered in religious studies off of our own campuses. A listserve might provide us with the first chance to keep tabs on developments at other campuses; expand our knowledge of other programs in our system and sister systems; and explore ways that we might help strengthen identified programs.

3. Provide a venue in which we can begin to get to know our colleagues in other departments and programs across the state; and explore ways of strengthening our programs in the face of future budget cuts and other forces that might undercut our programs.

There will be other tasks to take on in the future. But this will be a good start. Please consider joining us at a future meeting, or selecting a colleague who might be the point person to IMPAC from your department. I’ll be glad to put them on the listserve and mailing list that is now under development.

Cordially,

Joel Zimbelman, Ph.D.
Impac lead faculty for Religious Studies
Professor and Chair, Department of Religious Studies
Coordinator, Humanities Program, and
Fellow, Center for Applied and Professional Ethics (CAPE)
California State University, Chico
Chico, California 95929-0740
530.898.4741 (phone)
530.898.5468 (fax)
jzimbelman@csuchico.edu
Department Web: http://www.csuchico.edu/rs
IMPAC Lead Faculty and Coordinator