In the Blackburn College announcements, towards the end of last semester, President Comerford addressed college faculty and staff members about the new classes and programs that will be offered in the fall.The new majors will span across four departments. Comerford said, “The faculty and board haven’t approved anything yet but you could say we are strongly considering adding these classes” and reported that “the announcement also mentions nursing and athletic training but at this time those are longer term. I can tell you that in the next few weeks we are likely to approve some of the classes I talked about. This means we will be offering these programs in the fall.”
The performing arts department is coordinating a major in arts administration. This will essentially be a reconfiguration of a currently offered major in organizational leadership with an arts and management track. Provost Dr. John McClusky commented that the arts administration major will be “focused on giving people the background they need to run and be involved in a nonprofit arts organization.”
The business department will offer a major in agricultural business which will call for hiring another professor with a background in agriculture. The performing arts will be offering four new tracks: two in music, with specialties in either piano or voice, along with two majors in musical theater and theater.
The announcement also mentions that faculty are discussing a human resources minor in business and a program in social work. McClusky reported that “The new majors within music and theater are going to be much more focused on the disciplines,” and in regard to the agricultural business major, “If it goes forward, we’d expect to hire an expert in ag business … we expect, next year, to be searching for someone.”
Blackburn computer science professor Dr. Kevin Coogan commented that the new computer science tracks, security and game design, “are two areas of computer science that are very popular … people come in and say, ‘I’m specifically interested in security, I’m specifically interested in game design.’ What we’ve tried to do is give those potential students something worth coming here for.” He also added that “they are, in both cases, slightly more stringent, more demanding tracks.”
Professor of computer science Dr. Joshua Gross was able to give some insight into the game programming and design courses. “Students going into these classes will already have to know how to program games. These classes are for those who are pretty far along the computer science major track… We’ll be exploring ideas about how to incorporate challenge and different definitions of entertainment,” he said. “The software that we need is all free… and keeping computer hardware up-to-date is something we have to do anyway… but at this point we don’t have any room in the computer science calendar so we will have to bring on somebody new to help teach these classes.” Gross believes that these classes will be added to the course catalogs but professors won’t be able to teach the courses until the department gets more resources. McClusky said, “We’re excited about the opportunity it will bring to our students and what they will be able to do with those degrees once they graduate.” Senior computer science and business management major Josh Muepu noted , “Nowadays, the world is moving a little more towards gaming, especially in the computer science field. I think it’s really adding more opportunity to the students.”