Beloit students have begun assembling their spring semester course schedules, completing the advising period this week and registering for classes starting Nov. 10. Offerings for spring 2027 were released on Oct. 23 via a StuAlert message from Registrar Yaffa Grossman. The new schedule prompts students to once again navigate requirements, and asks both faculty and students to consider the future of how students studying the Arts and Humanities will pursue their liberal arts education at Beloit.
Quinn Annis’29, a Media Studies and Literary Studies major and Spanish minor, said, “It’s been definitely challenging to navigate the overlapping requirements and figure out what courses I can take that fulfill multiple major requirements at the same time.” Annis added that, because there isn’t a convenient way to view which courses are overlapping, he has had to manually write out the overlaps in order to make a curriculum that fulfills all of his requirements.
Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Performing and Applied Arts Cullyn Murphy admitted that students stitching together requirements for their degrees and times for desired courses conflicting with one another “has always been kind of an issue.” “We want to support [students’] ability to get their degree in any way we can,” Murphy said. He added that, “There’s only so much we can do to coordinate across disciplines.” Because of the nature of Beloit College’s liberal arts model, the myriad of interests and experiences that students bring to a variety of departments and disciplines is both “a bug and a feature,” as Murphy put it.
Murphy added that he faces this challenge in scheduling courses for the Media Studies and PART departments because he is a member of each. This has driven him to work with students to reimagine how they design their Arts degrees and how they might function to be most representative of students’ post-graduate experiences
A tool that students can utilize to work around stringent major requirements is the Center for Integrative Learning’s “blocks” program, which allows students to design their own major through the combination of interdisciplinary modules. For students to access these resources and use them properly, Murphy emphasized a need for further visibility for both the Center for Integrative Learning and the School of Media and the Arts (of which Murphy is a director), and that “it’s hard to know what your bubble is,” in terms of access to information about the programs.
In an effort to increase the availability of information about the blocks program, the Critical Identity Studies department has placed a course offering listed under their department with the course code CRIS 000 on the spring 2027 schedule that asks students to “see CRIS Block list on web” for further information.
Regarding the School of Media and the Arts, Murphy stated that student attendance at Arts events is a significant part of creating visibility for the department. “For [the arts] to feel vibrant, we need people to be willing to take a risk and go to stuff they wouldn’t normally go to,” he said.
As students in the arts and humanities consider an interdisciplinary route for a degree that more effectively represents their skills, research, and interests, faculty continue to create a structure to think beyond the traditional silos and departments and adapt Beloit’s liberal arts curriculum into a new era. Murphy believes that this is well within the power of students to clear these hurdles. “I think we have some very courageous students here. And maybe what we need to do is remind them how courageous they are.”
Featured image: Cian McKeown’27
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