by
Robert N. Leamnson
A liberal education should prepare students to be autonomous life-long learners, and provide them with some marketable skills. Most colleges and departments can achieve these ends, so long as the students' interests coincide with those of the colleges or departments. Students, however, will now and then discover or create areas of interest for which there are no departments. For about twenty years, the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth (UMD) has provided students who do not fit well in any department with the option of creating their own major.
[THE PROGRAM]
The program called Multidisciplinary Studies (MDS) resides within the college of Arts and Sciences. (UMD has four other colleges: Business and Industry, Engineering, Nursing, and Visual and Performing Arts. The university is state assisted and has an undergraduate enrollment of about 5,000. The Dartmouth campus is one of five in the State University system.) While Arts and Sciences is the official "home" of the MDS major, the content matter that an MDS student chooses to study in depth can be taken from any of the colleges or any combination of colleges (seldom more than two, however). This is possible because of the way requirements for the degree are stipulated at UMD. There are three university requirements for the baccalaureate degree; the student must earn a minimum of 120 credits, six of which are in freshman English, and 30 of which must be junior or senior level (numbered 300 or higher). In addition to these, are the specific college requirements. For the bachelor of arts (BA) degree, the college of Arts and Sciences requires 6 credits in literature, 18 in humanities and social sciences, 9 in natural sciences, and proficiency in a foreign language at the fourth semester level. All remaining requirements for the degree are specified by the student's major department.
While MDS is not a department, it represents a valid program of study and the university offers both the BA and BS degrees in Multidisciplinary Studies. Policy is recommended by the director and a council of ten faculty members representing all five colleges. Their recommendations go to the Dean of Arts and Sciences who ultimately sets policy.
Currently the requirements for the BA degree in MDS are: (in addition to university and college requirements) 36 credits distributed over two or (rarely) three disciplines from any of the five colleges; thirty of these credits must be at the 300 level or higher; less formally, but equally important, the courses that make up the major must be programmatic in content and represent a coherent approach to an area of study not otherwise available to the student.
The official name of the major is Multidisciplinary Studies, and those words appear on both the diploma and transcripts. Unofficially, students and faculty have made up descriptive names for more popular programs of study. These have included Urban Studies, Environmental Science, Cognitive Science, Photojournalism, Advertising, Gerontology, Art Therapy, International Business, Scientific Illustration, Electronic Music, Women's Studies, Computerized Design, Sociobiology, Philosophy of Science, Criminal Justice, and others.
[CONTENT]
The course combinations that allow study in depth in these interdisciplinary areas are all selected from the standard curriculum of established departmental disciplines. MDS does not have a faculty of its own or offer any courses. This arrangement appeals strongly to MDS majors because it gives them access to upper division courses in a discipline, without having to commit themselves to all the requirements for a degree in that discipline. MDS students must, of course, satisfy all departmental prerequisites for any upper division courses taken in that department. They are, however, if they choose not to take them, exempt from cognate courses sometimes required of departmental majors . An MDS student taking certain upper division biology courses, for example, need not take the physics courses routinely required of biology majors unless they choose to do so. Because certain biology courses might in fact really depend on a knowledge of physics as a prerequisite, competent academic advising is particularly important in the MDS program. The important role of the advisor will be considered further on.
[SAMPLE PROGRAM]
An example of how programs of study develop can be drawn from a popular area the students call (again, unofficially) International Business. An MDS student following this program would take six credits in freshman English, nine in natural sciences, 18 in humanities and social sciences, and 12 in a foreign language, as would all BA candidates in the college. The 30 credits of upper division courses might be divided as follows: 12 in advanced foreign language (college of Arts and Sciences) 9 credits in marketing; 9 in management (college of Business and Industry). The remaining credits (toward the 120 total) are technically "free electives," but some would be devoted to prerequisites for the business courses, such as accounting or perhaps statistics. Even so, most MDS students find that they have 20 or so credits in free electives. Wisely used, these 20 credits can either intensify or broaden the MDS major's overall education.
[THE CONTRACT]
The requirements for traditional departmental majors are carefully spelled out in the university catalogue. Because 300 level requirements for the MDS degree are student-selected and vary widely from student to student, they cannot be specified in a catalogue. Instead, the MDS major and an advisor design the 300 level curriculum and list the courses to be taken on a "contract." Upon approval, this contract binds the university which is thereby committed to awarding a diploma on successful completion of the program specified. The contract also provides a checklist for the student when registering for courses, and for the program director when certifying the student for graduation. Prospective MDS majors are also required to submit a formal proposal that describes their academic goals and justifies their choice of courses.
[ADVISING]
A great deal of the practical success of the MDS program can be traced to the quality of academic advising. Students choose their own academic advisors, and any willing faculty member may serve as an advisor. Over the years, however, a cohort of cooperative and even enthusiastic advisors has emerged from the faculty. Students who do not yet know the faculty well, but who have interest in one of the unofficial groupings, say "cognitive science," would be sent to a faculty member, in perhaps psychology, philosophy, computer information science, or biology, who is also interested in the topic and knows the curriculum well enough to help the student prepare a proposal and a curriculum of courses from the relevant disciplines. This group of cooperative and generous teachers constitute the backbone of the MDS program.
[STAFFING]
The program runs at no direct cost to the system, in the sense that it has no budget. "Overhead" is exactly the same as it would be were the students in a traditional department. Clerks in the registrar's office handle routine paper and computer files. A secretary in the Dean's office keeps an MDS file (contract, transcripts, etc.) on each student. The program director is a full time professor of biology and performs his duties as a service to the academic community. These duties include the design, preparation, and distribution of contracts, instruction sheets, informational materials, and catalogue text. He chairs the council of advisors and prepares policy proposals for the Dean. He also conducts the first interview with all candidates and helps with advisor selection if that is needed, evaluates transfer transcripts, and certifies students for graduation at the end of their academic careers. The number of students requesting initial interviews each year is in the vicinity of 30. Roughly two thirds of these eventually enter the program and one half to three quarters of these persist and receive the MDS degree.
[ACADEMIC RIGOR]
Whereas all courses taken by MDS students come from the curriculum of approved courses from the five colleges, the rigor of an individual student's program is equivalent to that of the departments offering the courses. Several policy rules protect the system from abuse. Seniors, for example, who find that they are not going to meet all the requirements for their chosen major, will sometimes request a change of major to MDS with the intent of bypassing the requirements they have failed to satisfy. The policy statement in the university catalogue makes it clear that seniors are rarely acceptable MDS candidates and such requests are almost routinely denied.
[PROGRAM SUCCESS]
How well students are being educated in the MDS program, and how well it meets their expectations are questions of obvious interest to anyone running or thinking of starting such a program. Answers to these questions would, in fact, be of interest no matter what the major. Getting the data represents the crux of the more general problem called "assessment." A workable and reliable assessment instrument remains an elusive goal. Anecdotally, the evidence suggests that most students are quite satisfied. Unsolicited letters and graduation day conversations are all positive and in some cases students declare that they would have transferred to another school had MDS not been available.
[THE FUTURE]
MDS students tend to affiliate with students and faculty in the departments where they take their 300 level courses. But as a group, MDS majors lack a sense of identity. When two of them meet, usually by accident, they show the same delight as two strangers who discover they are both members of the same secret society. A somewhat expanded status for MDS would likely include some mechanism for bringing majors together periodically, to interact, compare notes, and socialize. Academically, a culminating experience in the senior year would appear to have merit. A senior seminar that included a "senior thesis and defense" has been suggested.
Because MDS is a service program for students and no one in the faculty or administration has any vested interest in its size, there has been no attempt to recruit into the program. Most applicants learn of the program from other students or during academic advising. Perhaps this is as it should be for a program designed specifically for students who could not find just what they wanted in any of the many departments within the university. It is likely to continue as a modest but useful device for enhancing the college experience for students who happen to need just what it offers.
Robert N. Leamnson is professor
of biology at UMass Dartmouth and
director of Multidisciplinary Studies.
rleamnson@umassd.edu
