The provost said he does not want to take a journalism minor away from students, but he did not know whether it was appropriate for any college to have a minimum GPA for minors.Nowell Donovan, the provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs, said the University Council rejected the College of Communication’s request to set a minimum GPA of 2.5 for journalism minors Feb. 6 – as a way to control enrollment – because the council wanted to have more discussion about the issue.

“There is a lot of uncertainty about restrictive GPAs,” Donovan said. “Basically, where do (students) go? Other programs that don’t have these restrictive GPAs are having to take these students.”

William Slater, the dean of the College of Communication, however, said a minimum GPA would have brought relief for journalism majors trying to get into required classes and would have still allowed qualified students to declare a journalism minor.

The Schieffer School of Journalism, according to Slater, is being overrun with students and Moudy Building South does not have enough laboratory space to accommodate the growing enrollment.

Donovan said the enrollment increase and insufficient laboratory space are problems that he cannot fix overnight.

Representatives for the College of Communication and the University Council have had ongoing conversations about the issue and the council will formally revisit the problem within the next two weeks, Donovan said. Neither Donovan nor Slater had any new methods for controlling enrollment.

The concern over enforcing a minimum GPA for journalism minors was that students who could not meet the requirements would be funneled into majors and minors that do not have a required GPA, such as those in the AddRan College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Slater said.

“If anything, the solution is to increase the requirements to the university,” Slater said, “so these programs won’t be getting these so-called ‘poor students.'”

Michael Butler, the associate dean of AddRan, said he does not like minimum GPAs for individual colleges because colleges without minimums are forced to take students that did not meet those requirements.

“Those students are forced somewhere and that somewhere is usually AddRan,” Butler said. “The college is somewhat of a last resort for students who have no intention of majoring in it.”

Butler said he believes the best option might be to define a minimum GPA inside field-specific courses rather than a minimum overall GPA.

“I think this kind of thing has the potential to delay graduation,” Butler said. “Having a field-specific GPA would allow students to make some progress toward their major without closing the door.”

Butler said AddRan suspended its minor for fashion merchandising before spring 2006 semester because of a lack of space.

“We never made an attempt to go through the University Council,” Butler said. “During fall registration for this spring, it became clear that we didn’t have enough space for our majors and minors.