While many students joke that the School of Foreign Service is “safe from science,” administrators think they may have found the remedy.

With the SFS’ decision to make last fall’s experimental addition of a new statistical analysis class to the international politics major a permanent change, the school has been moving toward shedding its reputation for offering a non-quantitative curriculum.

The class, Quantitative Methods for International Politics, was designed to teach students the calculating procedures and techniques of statistical analysis and research. Mandatory only for sophomores declaring the IPOL major this year, the course was introduced as an experiment that would be evaluated at the end of the academic year.

Now, with the close of the spring semester, the experiment has been deemed a success, and the course will remain as an IPOL requirement.

University Provost James O’Donnell said that Georgetown would like to see its graduates well-versed in all areas that might be pertinent to future leaders.

“We’ve had some people who are very high up . who’ve come to us and said, `Here’s what we’d like to see more of. We see it from students who graduate from Penn and Duke, and Georgetown students are at a bit of a disadvantage,'” O’Donnell said.

Most recently, the SFS has focused on incorporating numeracy classes into some of its majors instead of adding it as a core requirement, said Bryan Kasper, the curricular dean for the IPOL major. Three other SFS majors – international political economy, international economics, and science, technology and international affairs – already had quantitative class requirements before this year.

George Shambaugh, field committee chair for the IPOL major, said that with IPOL students now taking Quantitative Methods, roughly 85 percent of SFS undergraduates will take quantitative classes before graduation. He said that SFS administrators have considered the curricula changes for several years.

“They don’t want SFS to stand for `safe from science,'” Shambaugh said. “They want to make sure that SFS students have not only an outstanding training in the social sciences but a full liberal arts training.”

He added that the SFS is still looking for the way to best tailor a numeracy class to the three remaining SFS majors – culture and politics, international history and regional and comparative studies.

Betty Andretta, associate dean and director of SFS, said the school has no immediate plans to add a numeracy requirement to the remaining majors. And Kasper said that it is unlikely that the SFS will make a quantitative course a core requirement for its undergraduate program.

“Right now, my sense has been, `Can we integrate quantitative courses into the majors?'” he said. “There might not be as much of a need for a math requirement.”

Caitlin Ryan (SFS ’10), an SFS Academic Council representative, said that in November, the council considered adding a math or science core requirement, but that the topic has not come up since. She added that the addition of a core math course would probably be more likely than a science class.

Many students who declared their IPOL major this year said that, although they found the class to be ultimately useful, they were less than thrilled to hear about the new quantitative requirement, which they thought they would avoid by matriculating in the SFS.

“Honestly, I hate math and science – one of the reasons I’m in SFS. I wasn’t looking forward to it going in,” Jennifer Keuler (SFS ’09) said.

But Keuler said that she understood the decision after taking Quantitative Methods because it contributed to her understanding of international politics.

Matthew Loveless, who taught Quantitative Methods for both the fall and spring semesters, attributes this attitude to a “mass phobia” of statistics. He said that the level of math in the class does not go above high school algebra.

“A fear of numbers is understandable – it can be overwhelming, but in fact the ideas are very straightforward,” Loveless said. “You make it relevant.”