Author: Lauren Barker
After over a year of administrative reorganization, an unsuccessful professor search and complaints from students about limited course offerings, the Diplomacy and World Affairs Department is looking to expand with the help of a roughly $12 million endowment from the family of John Parke and Marie S. Young.
The gift, given late last spring, will be used in part to create an endowed chair in the department that will focus on international political economy. “[It] will be somebody who specifically looks at international relations and DWA issues from an economic perspective,” DWA Administrative Head Michael McDonald said.
The position is also being proposed as a first step towards possible departmental restructuring and expansion. “The idea is to hire a senior person who would come in initially to serve as department chair of DWA and sort of help plan the future course of this really important interdisciplinary department,” McDonald said.
The endowment is a welcome development for DWA majors, who have had an especially difficult time fitting in department classes this semester. The major offered six different classes this fall, some with multiple sections, compared to the 17 different courses offered in Economics, a department which also has approximately 100 student majors (roughly the same amount as DWA). The course options, normally narrower than most departments because of the interdisciplinary structure of the major, were limited by a series of administrative events.
DWA major Kera Bartlett (junior) was particularly unhappy with the status of the department. “[I], along with other members of the Student Advisory Committee, wrote an email to Professor Epstein saying that it was absolutely ridiculous that there were only [about] four classes offered for the fall,” she said.
Bartlett said “part of it was because the professor search in the spring failed, and they were going to have that prospect teach two courses, and they had to take those off. And then Professor [Movindri] Reddy was elected to be the chair of the Faculty Council . . . so she had to take off her elective class.”
Claire Anderson (sophomore), a DWA major who-along with Bartlett-is on the Student Advisory Committee (SAC) for the department, commented on the reactions students have received from faculty members. “I think [the faculty is] pretty frustrated because we’re pretty frustrated and DWA students are pretty opinionated and we will voice our concerns,” Anderson said. “Usually that means starting with the professors and working from there, and so they hear a lot of complaints.”
Anderson also talked about the difficulty of resolving the problems mid-semester. “They can propose class ideas for next semester, but at the same time, one professor can’t be teaching half a dozen classes at a time because that’s a ridiculous amount of work for them,” she said. “They’re doing the best they can, but we just hope that . . . the structure changes.
The small number of faculty available to teach in the department (four tenured and tenure-track full-time professors and one part-time professor) has restricted the scope of the major. The option to choose an emphasis within the major was dropped in 2005. As a result, students had difficulty taking all the classes required to fulfill an emphasis.
Barlett expressed her concerns in fulfilling an emphasis in her area of interest. “I came in wanting to study African [diplomacy] and we have two professors who have a lot of expertise in it but haven’t taught the courses on it,” she said. “There is . . . a South African politics class on the course catalog; there’s an African politics class on the course catalog. South African [politics] hasn’t been offered since I got here and isn’t going to be offered this year, so maybe it’ll be offered next year, but I might not get an opportunity [to] ever take that.”
Last year, a search was conducted to try and alleviate some of the scheduling issues within the department by hiring a tenure-track professor. The search found three potential professors who came to campus and were reviewed by faculty and student committees. Despite the presence of qualified candidates, the search ended without any new hires, in part because of the Young family gift.
McDonald said the endowment came to fruition near the end of the search process. “The decision was made by the Dean and the President at the time to basically cut off that search and wait until this new endowed chair, who would be . . . coming in as the chair for the department, could really work with the department and shape the future of [it],” McDonald said.
Currently, plans for the rest of the gift are being worked out in talks between College President Susan Prager and the donors, trustee Catherine Young-Selleck and her family. The bulk of the endowment will not be spent until a new chair is selected, Anderson said. “They want to save that money for the new chair to direct and mold the department,” Anderson said. “That’s another long-term thing [so] that kids in the future will have a great DWA department, but it’s frustrating now.”
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