As Bicentennial celebrations approach, we must not lose sight of where the university has been over its 200-year life and where we want to be headed. In my last column (Jan. 16, "Miami must figure out what type of Miami we want to be"), I proposed that we first examine what type of Miami the university is, and lastly look into the value added of each component of the university. In this middle installment, we must consider the main resource we have as a university: the classes and the faculty.

Feb. 5's university eReport listed a December 2008 Ohio Magazine article highlighting Miami's excellence in dining services. While this recognition seems to fit perfectly with ASG President Mike Scott's heroic action to convince the Hamilton Sonic to provide students with a discount (News Brief, Feb. 6), a closer examination of the article reveals that while we are applauded in food services, we were not named things such as the state university with the most outstanding scholarship initiative (University of Toledo) or outstanding innovative coursework (Hocking College). In the article, Associate Director of Dining Services Mike Mitroi is quoted as saying, "We like to stay on the cutting edge of providing what students want." Can the same be said about the rest of the university?

If we look back almost four years, to the spring semester of 2005, we can see that similar questions were raised by students in the March 25 issue of The Student ("Expanding class sizes"), which was accompanied by an editorial ("Miami falsely promotes small average class size"). Both article and editorial cited the Ohio Board of Regents' 2004 Performance Report for Ohio's Colleges and Universities, which had concluded that 94 percent of Miami students, as quoted from the editorial, "would not be in any class of fewer than 20 people." These arguments, however, seem to stop short of tying the question of class sizes to the number of faculty present at the university, and most importantly, their teaching loads.

In 2005, the largest question may have been misleading statistics, but in 2009 the question needs to be re-defined: how do we remain competitive and true to our roots as one of the oldest universities in the nation without succumbing to middle-of-the-road approaches that maximize and favor student enrollment over widespread student access to a quality undergraduate experience? By now, everyone should automatically know that student-to-faculty ratios aren't completely accurate portrayals of the educational environment, since the process for calculating the ratio is simply to take the total number of undergraduates and divide by the total amount of faculty regardless of academic division or class distribution. Instead, it seems clear that a more accurate idea of how class sizes are broken down comes in the form of the yearly Common Data Set from the Office of Institutional Research (http://www.units.muohio.edu/oir/). These reports present not only the yearly student-to-faculty ratios, but the number of sections taught in varying sizes. When year-to-year averages are taken between the 1999-2000 and 2008-09 academic years, what we see is somewhat optimistic and yet ultimately disheartening. While the number of classes between the size of two and 29 students have increased, it's matched by growth in the number of class sections that include from 50 to more than 100 students. The real losers in the whole situation seem to be classes sized between 30 and 49 students, which face the only consistent percentage decreases across the nine year distribution, and have been in constant decline as a percentage of class sections taught in each year.

One might think that this is not such an alarming development, especially if it's been a trend for at least a decade-after all, we might rationalize, if the larger classes are growing, then at least there are smaller classes to provide a counterweight. It is at this point, however, that we must bring faculty into the equation. Between the 2004-05 and 2008-09 academic years, the number of faculty has increased in total by 4.7 percent, compared to only a 1.1 percent increase in the number of enrolled students; this trend of relative faculty growth versus student growth is also supported when year-to-year percent changes are calculated in both categories. Regardless of the method of the analysis, it is clear that despite this growth in faculty numbers during times of relative student population consistency, class sizes have not effectively shrunk. Not only are medium-sized classes continuing to disappear while enormous class sizes grow, but the sheer amount of students who are enrolled in 50-100-plus person classes inherently outnumbers the amount of students enrolled in smaller classes-by the thousands.

I think it's a safe assumption that these large class sizes-the ones that everyone hates, in the large auditoriums and with an increasing use of the clickers as a substitute for real interaction-occur in the first-year of a student's arrival to Miami, the time when developing good intellectual habits is most important. Of course, things such as the Top 25 Initiative attempt to counteract the problems of larger class sizes, but what about those that teach the classes? In the fall, The Student reported that "the percentage of full-time, non-tenured professors at Miami University (is) on the decline" ("Visiting profs fill vacancies, teach first-year sections," Sept. 12). What happens when budget constraints prevent the re-hiring of these faculty but incoming class sizes slowly grow? If there is a growth of faculty over that of the student population, then there should be no reason why more faculty are not in the classroom teaching more classes in order to decrease the size (while increasing the engagement) of classes.

This is certainly not a new problem or unique to the last three years, but is one that students should become more vocal about unless they are truly satisfied with classes in auditorium-sized rooms. Moreover, some argue that faculty cannot teach more because they have to be focused on balancing a teaching load while finding time to research and publish. While it's an honest concern, what are students going to remember more when they leave Miami-their experiences in the classroom or the name of the 17th paper their professor published in a journal? We have somehow survived as an institution for 200 years, but it seems that over the last decade the university has lost the self-confidence to not have to follow the models of others. We are first and foremost an institution for undergraduate education and we should continually strive to ensure Miami's true educational tradition.