The Council of Academic Affairs unanimously approved a new sociology and criminology course, SOC/CRM-3871 Gender and Crime, on Thursday during their weekly meeting.

The new course for Gender and Crime: A Feminist Analysis of Criminal Behavior is a three credit hour lecture course available to all majors.

This course is an elective which caters to students in the sociology, criminology, gender studies or political science programs.

The course has a prerequisite for one of the following: Introductory Sociology, Introduction to Criminology, Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies or Introduction to Sexuality and Gender Diversity.

Gender and Crime is planned to be offered in the fall 2023 semester.

This course is an equivalent to the course SOC-3960H Special Topics: Gender and Crime.

Gender and Crime was created as a course after the last two years of offering the special topics once per year has been met with student interest.

Students who have taken this course will not receive credit hours for the new Gender and Crime course.

Currently, there are no community college courses transfers may have that can be judged as an equivalent.

CAA unanimously approved a revision to the clinical laboratory science major to adjust the credit hours for the required credit hours taken at an affiliated hospital after some hospitals made changes.

Modify the range of credit hours associated with clinical coursework taken at affiliate hospitals to accommodate recent curricular changes at one of the affiliate hospitals, according to the proposal for the revision.

The required hours for the clinical laboratory science total is still 32 credit hours. It is only an adjustment of what each required clinical course is worth for credit hours.

CAA has met a full council by now having a College Health and Human Services and student representative leading to a total of 10 voting CAA members. 

The new CHHS representative is Laurel Teller, an assistant professor for the communication disorders and sciences.

The student representative is Nidhi Patel, a finance major and a part of Student Government.

CAA continued their discussion of adjusting their bylaws from last week where they considered creating a bylaw which allowed CAA to not add action items from unrepresented colleges.

This means for colleges who do not send anyone to represent their college, will not have proposals approved by CAA which is a required part of the process.

The reasoning behind this idea is so CAA can maintain at least 10 voting members with representatives from every college to maintain a shared governance.

At this time CAA has decided to draft a potential bylaw, however the vote on approving this bylaw is many weeks ahead, possibly next semester.

Right now the idea is only a rough draft, which CAA could decide they do not want to include in the bylaws.

Madelyn Kidd can be reached at 581-2812 or at dennewsdesk@gmail.com.