Reply to Lundgren and Fawcett

L undgren and Fawcett deserve credit for considering the problem of limited resources. Because departments cannot get everything they want, their solution is inventive. But we grant them the superiority of their approach only if each department cannot teach its own statistics course. If a school is small, has few students, and has no immediate plans for expansion, it makes good sense to have one course in basic statistics taught by one department servicing all majors. And, certainly, the appropriate department is statistics/ mathematics. It is unlikely that many faculty (or students) would prefer that that service course be taught by business, psychology, education, or sociology. At the risk of retaining the noxious label of academic imperialists, however, we support our basic argument as it was stated in 1978 (Caine et al.), and we see in their arguments neither compelling pedagogical nor practical (p. 199) reasons for adopting their approach. First, let us look at Lundgren and Fawcett's claim of an extremely practical economic reason for having the basic statistics course taught by the statistics faculty. The correctness of this assertion escapes us. At many schools (e.g., Columbus College) there are not enough statistics faculty to offer a basic statistics course often enough to service several departments without either (1) reducing the number of courses offered to

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• Statistics from Whom

  Robert Caine, David Centa et al.•Teaching Sociology•1978

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