Craig Arceneaux opened his inbox one morning to a message from his chair: The global politics minor he oversees would no longer exist under Cal Poly’s new semester catalog.
“Sometime last quarter, our chair and assistant chair just had contacted me to let me know that that had happened,” Arceneaux said. “It took me by surprise.”
The minor disappeared through an administrative oversight, and by the time his chair caught the omission, the registrar’s office said a deadline had passed.
“Sometimes I just have the feeling that they’re just trying to grasp the big picture and aren’t recognizing all of these other changes,” Arceneaux said of the administrators managing the semester conversion.
When Cal Poly moves to the semester system this fall, some students will return to campus to find programs they once relied on gone. Across departments, minors and curriculum tracks are being discontinued as part of a sweeping university-wide review tied to the conversion. Faculty and staff are now working to ensure students don’t lose out on the opportunities those programs once provided.
Arceneaux hopes to reestablish the global politics minor in the next catalog while scrambling to keep the roughly 30 students enrolled in it from being penalized for a mistake they didn’t make. On the university’s published program-status list, it’s marked not as deactivated, like the others, but as suspended.
In the meantime, the fix is imperfect. Students who move to the semester catalog will be dropped from the minor because it no longer exists there, so Arceneaux is steering them temporarily toward a new minor instead.
“I advise them to re-enroll into the political science minor, and we’ll just substitute in all of the courses,” he said. “We’ll do whatever it takes to allow the students to take a global focus. But unfortunately, we don’t control the name of the minor.”
For now, Arceneaux is just one example of the adjustments being made to majors and minors across Cal Poly as it transitions.
For students who built their academic plans around certain minors or concentrations, what happens now?
A minor with a complicated history
In the Philosophy Department, the Western Intellectual Tradition minor is being discontinued after years of near-invisible enrollment.
“There was a whole enterprise around the campus to do tremendous updates to our catalogs,” department chair Ken Brown said. “It just came to the point of putting it alongside every other piece of curriculum in the department, in the college, in the university, up for a level of scrutiny to ask what really was the function of this minor?”
The minor had a troubled history from the start. Brown said it was originally created outside the Philosophy Department by a faculty member in math and was built on requirements he described as unworkable. He said the requirements for the Western Intellectual Tradition minor did not contribute any units to the major, but students had to have completed some calculus classes before they could take it.
Brown restructured the minor around 2013, making it more accessible by overlapping it with GE requirements. Enrollment climbed but only into the single digits. Currently, four students have it declared.
The name of the minor itself also became a problem as the university standardized geographic terminology across its catalog.
“The word Western is a challenging word to describe and define,” Brown said. “In its existing configuration, it’s very hard to name the thing without seeing its legacy as something that was politicized from the outset.”
Renaming it, Brown said, would have required extensive restructuring that it would have amounted to an entirely new minor — one the Philosophy Department didn’t see as its to create.
For the four students currently declared, Brown said the department will honor their path to completion through a teach-out process — an individualized plan to help them finish using courses continuing into the semester system. Students still on the quarter catalog can declare the minor now and finish it out.
An unstable catalog, a steady stable
Across campus at the Oppenheimer Family Equine Center, the Equine Science minor is being discontinued.
Jacqueline Huebner, a staff member at the Equine Center and 2023 Animal Science alumna, said the equine science minor certificate was never open to animal science majors because so many of their required classes already overlapped with their curriculum.
The minor had exclusively served students from outside the major such as an environmental management student who will be one of the last to graduate with it. While equine classes remain open to all majors with no prerequisites at the introductory level, Jacqueline acknowledged that losing the formal credential could decrease the pool of students who feel compelled to enroll.
“Financially and educationally, you can’t really justify, ‘I’m going to take an extra quarter because I want to take equine classes’ if you’re doing your mathematics degree,” she said.
She expects riding and horse handling courses to stay popular, as past enrollment has shown the unit has long drawn students from engineering, music, liberal arts and beyond. More academic offerings like equine physiology, biomechanics and reproduction, however, may see a drop in outside-major students without the minor as a draw.
“Still for us, the equine unit will not change. We would welcome anyone interested,” Jacqueline said.
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She added that the longer semester schedule may ultimately create new openings — more time with young horses, deeper learning and better training.
“Although it’s kind of scary right now, I think in the long run it could be a really positive thing,” she said.
More math, more tracks
In the Math Department, the changes made for the semester transition are structural.
“We still have an applied track and we still have a teaching track in the new updated catalog,” mathematics Professor Anthony Mendes said. “It’s just the formal name concentration that we went away with to provide more flexibility for students going through our program.”
Formal concentrations required approval through the Academic Senate and curriculum committees. Once students began progressing down a concentration path, switching to another became difficult.
“Now we just don’t have that,” he said. “We still have all the classes, all the faculty, all the programs. It’s just a formalism that went away to provide more flexibility.”
For students already in the program, Mendes emphasized that no one will be left behind by the catalog change. Any student on the quarter system can continue following the quarter catalog through graduation.
“Nobody is stuck,” he said. “We expect it to even be better than before.”
General engineering stays general
In the College of Engineering, the General Engineering major raised alarm when it showed up on lists of curriculum changes.
“It’s frustrating, mostly because information changes really quickly,” program director Nicole Johnson-Glauch said. “Students will be like, ‘but you told me this.’ And I’m like, I know, and now I’m telling you this.”
What’s being discontinued is the optional curriculum track from the quarter system — a suggested course list for students who wanted a broad, generalized engineering education.
To fill the gap, Johnson-Glauch is piloting unofficial concentration guides, with course lists and flowcharts, to see where student interest lands. It’s one way she’s giving students more direction through the semester transition, with select options possibly becoming official down the road.
What happens now
“Every faculty member who has been teaching for several years has to rethink how that same course can be converted into a semester course,” Arceneaux said. “I think that’s going to be very difficult to do within the first year.”
For now, the minor that disappeared from Arceneaux’s inbox remains in limbo, its future uncertain, while other programs have already met their fate. How these changes will ultimately affect students and faculty may not become clear until Cal Poly transitions to semesters this fall.
“Semesters work at other universities, so we can certainly make it work,” Arceneaux said. “It’s largely a matter of curriculum adjustment, but that is a process.”
Program changes are tracked by The Office of Academic Programs and Planning which get reported to the California State University Chancellor’s Office.
Students unsure about the status of their major, minor, or concentration can consult the university’s program status list, which outlines changes for the new catalog.