By MASUDUR RAHMAN

Senior Reporter

The addition of an actuarial science major is delayed a year due to minor discrepancies at an Oakland University senate meeting on Thursday, Dec. 3.

To be offered in the fall 2010 catalog, the proposal needed to pass at this senate meeting, because the deadline to be included in the catalog is Dec. 18.

Ron Sudol, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said this means there will be a one-year minimum delay.

The actuarial science major, a collaboration of CAS and the school of business administration eight years in the making at OU, essentially assesses risk in finance and insurance. It’s a very specialized field, which is why proposers only anticipated having three to five students in the first year.

If it passed, the proposal would have then gone to a meeting of OU’s board of trustees, which needs to approve all majors.

But the majority of senate members voted to postpone the approval discussion to the Jan. 14 senate meeting.

The issue was not validity of the major. It was passed by the university committee on undergraduate education and the planning review committee.

The issue was brought up by the budget review committee, who said two lines in the budget proposal didn’t add up, and that the proposal didn’t include a letter of support from the CAS dean.

Sudol said he thought it was redundant, as his own support should’ve been obvious because he was the sponsor of the proposal. He then offered his vocal support of the proposal.

David Garfinkle, professor of chemistry and a member of the budget review committee, said he didn’t know if the committee would think this was enough to resolve the issue.

Julie Voelck, dean of the Kresge Library, said the budget seemed “strange,” but didn’t push the issue because of the low number of students.

Frances Jackson, nursing associate professor, said the senate should give the budget committee time to work on the issue.

“I don’t think the question should be blown off,” Jackson said.

Sudol said after the meeting that “the fuss being made over this program is — as is typical in universities — in inverse proportion to its size and scope. It is so tiny that it will not register in any statistics whatsoever.”

“It should have been possible for the senate to act,” Sudol said.

Some at the meeting suggested ways of approving the proposal in time and still addressing the issues.

One was passing the major and putting it in the catalog, with the understanding that the issues would be addressed, and if they weren’t, it would be pulled from the catalog. But this, and other suggestions, were shot down.

“We think we should be offering it because it would attract to OU the kind of high-achieving math students we would like to have more of,” Sudol said of the importance of the major.

“With an aging population and new concepts in health care, actuarial science professionals will be in demand. We are always on the look out for opportunities to offer such programs for our students, especially, as in this case, when we can do so with our existing faculty, who are fully qualified. We have also made contacts so that the students will have internship opportunities.”