Kevin Buchwald, a senior in history, is circulating a petition encouraging the history department to hire six to 12 more tenure-track professors in addition to replacing the four that are leaving.

“The purpose of this is to enable Iowa State to be more competitive with the other two Iowa universities, UNI and Iowa,” Buchwald said.

He said that Iowa State is the largest of three regent schools but currently has the lowest number of tenure-track professors in the history department and the most unequal professor-to-student ratio.

Currently, Iowa State has 17 tenure-track professors. Iowa State currently has around 350 undergrad history majors. 

Robert Martin, chairman of the history department at Northern Iowa said in an email that the UNI department has 24 faculty and 221 undergrad history majors. Stephen Vlastos, from the University of Iowa, said in an email that they have 26 tenure track professors for roughly 320 undergrad history majors.

Buchwald said that in the past, there have been more history professors at Iowa State, but they have not been replaced as they left the school or retired. He said that this year, there are four professors leaving but only two being hired.

“It’s part of the university’s initiative to improve the general quality of education at Iowa State. So it’s not even to replace these history professors; it’s just to make things better, but it falls short of even maintaining the status quo,” Buchwald said.

Beate Schmittmann, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences said she was only aware of two professors leaving. She said the numbers of professors leaving may be accurate, but it depends on how somebody would define leaving.

“When do we say they are leaving when they are partially still employed, and partially still on the college payroll? So, there’s always a little bit of a gray area there,” Schmittmann said.

Currently, the history department has 380 history majors, including graduate students, and 23 faculty. The English has around 417 majors and 121 faculty. The anthropology department has 87 majors and 8 faculty. The chemistry department has 299 majors and 31 faculty, while the political science department has 273 majors and 19 faculty.

English Department Chair Barbara Ching said that english is currently serving over 10,000 students since many students need english to meet general education requirements.  

Buchwald said in the past he has been unable to get into classes in his major, including Greek history and Roman history.

“If I had not added a minor, I would not be in Greek history this semester. So I actually finally made it. But if I hadn’t added my speech minor I never would’ve been able to take it,” Buchwald said.

Buchwald said Greek and Roman history meet a required time frame not easy for history majors to meet.

Schmittmann said each department has responded in a different way on how to deal with growth at Iowa State. The history department has made the decision to keep class sizes small.

“If you continue to keep class sizes small, if you continue to keep teaching loads for faculty members at … normal levels that they have had for a number of years then you cannot accommodate additional students,” Schmittmann said. “That’s a choice the department has made.”

Schmittmann said she is very aware of concerns from students and professors in the history department.

“We have a lot of growth all over the university in many different areas of the college,” Schmittmann said. “We try to respond as strategically and as quickly as we can.”