Another belt tightening of sorts was bound to happen. This time Loyola’s “financial situation” will be finding its way into campus classrooms.

Next semester, the provost’s office will be evaluating some classes to see if some can have the number of seats increased while the number of sections is reduced.

While it may be necessary to cut the number of classes to increase capacity in others for financial reasons, this begins to cut away at the heart of this particular institution: small, student-centered classes with high faculty interaction.

According to the Office of Admissions, a typical class size at Loyola is 22 students, with classes tending not to be “larger than 30-35 students.” Sometimes, they go on to say, classes can be “as small as 10 to 15 students.”

Without the proper input and evaluation, the latter could be on the university’s list of endangered academic classes and practices.

In order to bury any more problems before they come to life, the provost’s office would be wise to be completely transparent on this particular topic. Not only does increasing the size of classes affect prospective students – the small class sizes are a major selling point of this campus – it affects faculty and staff, who might lose classes when certain sections of a class are cut, as well as students working toward their degrees.

The biggest problem with the “Pathways” plan, many faculty say, was that there was no input from those around campus until it was too late and the information used to make decisions was flawed. While they have their advanced degrees and are no longer behind university desks to learn, those in the provost’s office should have learned from the previous months that the best way to go about making any changes is to be crystal clear about the goal, leave the process open to criticism and let faculty, staff and students know about every step that is being taken.

In the College of Social Sciences, Larry Lorenz, interim dean, has begun taking recommendations from faculty into consideration and soliciting new ideas about how to handle the evaluation of class sizes, knowing that whatever decisions are made in regard to class size will affect everyone on the Loyola campus on the academic side.

While it’s expected to be implemented by the time the spring semester rolls around, the best thing that can be done at this point in time is to take the process as slowly as possible. Now that we’ve begun to walk a new walk, this part of Loyola’s new path can, and should, be less bumpy than the first few miles.