Republican National Convention
Course Required For University of Tampa's First-Year Students
Posted:
06/19/2012 10:18 am Updated: 06/19/2012 2:02 pm
Just in case the traffic jams and
press swarms don't alert students at the University of Tampa to the arrival of
the Republican National Convention, their first professor will.
In late August when nearly 50,000
people descend upon Tampa for the convention, the University of Tampa will require its nearly 1,600 first-year students to take
RNC 101, an introductory course designed to teach students the history of
political conventions and keep them updated on the daily happenings at the
event.
The class will branch out
covering the Republican convention to focusing on basic civics and the
political process, as well as current events. Course planners intend to not
favor the Republican Party over another political party.
"We've tried to go out of
our way to be bipartisan," said Joe Sclafani,
the University of Tampa's interim dean of the college of social sciences,
mathematics and education. "We're not plugging anyone; this is not a 'Vote
for Mitt Romney' class."
"This is really about just
getting students to understand why it is we're having this disruption, what the
importance of a presidential convention is," Sclafani
added.
The course arose more out of
concern for RNC-related traffic than for anything else, according to Sclafani. Since the first week of classes corresponds with
the convention's first day, college administrators worried that faculty might
not be able to get to campus, a mile and a half away from the convention
center. So they decided to use the opportunity to teach students how to use
their online course management system, Blackboard, in case instructors couldn't
make it to class.
"Then we asked the question,
What kind of content to teach them? We decided, Why don't we use the actual
content of what's going on?" Sclafani said,
adding that "college students are often apathetic in the political
process. We just thought we'd take this opportunity to get them to engage that
way."
Though the university does not
have any formal arrangement with the convention, it has volunteered to supply
students as interns for the event. They have also planned a host of political events
to coincide with the gathering.
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