An Interdisciplinary Major

Although my college is small, it does have a major in medieval and Renaissance studies. As I'm getting settled in here in my second year, students are increasingly coming to ask me about the major, so I've had to get familiar with its requirements.

And its requirements are a little odd. That may have to do with the program's history--it seems to have been somebody's pet program, years and years ago, before being taken over by a committee. One of the oddities is that students have to jump a bunch of hurdles. They can't simply declare the major, but have to write a proposal explaining their course selections and outlining their capstone project, even though as sophomores they're 12 to 18 months away from doing that capstone project.

The major is also explicitly designed to be interdisciplinary. They have to take medieval-ish courses from at least four disciplines, and can't have too many from any one department. The problem is, we're so small that some of those courses aren't taught very often. It is easy for students to get courses in English and history; the courses in religion and music and art history and philosophy are harder to fit into their schedules.

On the one hand, because prospective majors have to go through some hassles and plan carefully, they tend to be good, organized, and highly motivated. Thumbs up! On the other hand, the difficulty of setting up the major certainly discourages some people, and places a burden on even highly motivated students. There's one student who's taken a slew of courses in history and English lit and a couple in art history. However, s/he still needs a course from a fourth discipline, and fitting it into his/her schedule is being harder than it ought to be. Just how interdisciplinary does this major have to be, anyway? Might it be time to think about revising the major requirements?

Not all of us were here then

I have started and abandoned several posts over the last couple of weeks. I would like to talk about some of my new responsibilities as a second-year faculty member, by way of continuing to chronicle my journey from contingent to tenure-track faculty. These things feel difficult to talk about, though. Even pseudonymous, I have a hard time figuring out what conversations with advisees / committees / whatnot should be best kept private, and I have been erring on the side of "private."

There is a discourse on campus, though, that I find vexing as a new faculty member. Our campus is the midst of discussing some large-scale curricular changes. There is a lot of anxiety about whether the current proposed changes will pass, and what the consequences of that will be, both from supporters and critics of the proposal. Although the current proposal was put together just last year, the original movement for curricular change started several years ago, in the days of Legendary Committee. The thing I find vexing is that many faculty who have been here longer speak about the changes as if all of us are familiar with the work of Legendary Committee, and as if the discussion held at that time about the college's curricular goals is now set in stone. "Well, the goals of this proposal came out of the Legendary Committee report," they will explain. "At the time of Legendary Committee, we all agreed on X, so surely we must still agree on X now?" There are a lot of assumptions that everyone remembers the long process that has led up to this moment.

Not so. I was one of several new faculty last year. There were several the year before that, and several more the year before that, and so forth. There are quite a few new faculty this year. All together, that represents a sizable minority of the entire faculty who were not involved in the Legendary Committee discussions, and who may bring different ideas and expectations to the table. The faculty does not actually exist in a fixed, unchanging state, where a consensus established at one moment can be expected to endure forever.