The explosion in the amount of data available to society today has not led
to a corresponding growth in undergraduate statistics programs to produce s
tatisticians to deal with such data. Instead, the profession is faced with
the specter of "statistics departments under siege." It is time to reexamin
e the undergraduate discipline in light of society's needs. The traditional
emphasis on the mathematics of the discipline may have resulted in insuffi
cient attention being paid to its nonmathematical aspects. These things are
very much a part of what a practicing statistician does and what customers
of statistics need. They include things like designing scientific studies
in a team-oriented environment, ensuring protocol compliance, ensuring data
quality, managing the storage/transmission/retrieval of data, and providin
g descriptive and graphical analyses of data. To bring greater purpose and
practicality to programs for the undergraduate statistics major, it will be
necessary to give greater prominence to nonmathematical statistics. Course
s are suggested that would meet important needs of the undergraduate statis
tics major and set the discipline of statistics apart from mathematics.