Biomedical ethics and Middle East studies may be very different fields, but they have much in common - both are interdisciplinary, both are growing fields of interest in the United States and both have languished at Brown in recent years.
The undergraduate concentration in biomedical ethics - the first of its kind in higher education and for years a vibrant program - was suspended last year due to a lack of dedicated faculty and insufficient departmental support. Middle East studies has battled a lack of coordination and faculty absences and at times has struggled to offer enough courses for its concentrators to fulfill their requirements.
Even large, popular programs can face challenges if they fall outside formal academic departments. The international relations concentration boasts approximately 400 concentrators but has only one concentration adviser whose job is officially part-time.
Interdisciplinary programs at the University depend on a variety of departments to hire faculty, provide support staff and offer courses. If departmental priorities lie elsewhere, an interdisciplinary program can suffer or disappear.
The success stories among interdisciplinary programs - such as Judaic studies and Commerce, Organizations and Entrepreneurship - are generally either treated as departments or have independent sources of financial support, such as COE's extensive fundraising.
The problems of other programs have not escaped the notice of University officials. Interdisciplinary programs will be one focus of an upcoming administrative review of undergraduate concentrations, officials say.
A bioethical crisis
Many interdisciplinary programs, especially smaller ones, become successful thanks to the efforts of a small group of dedicated faculty or key administrators, but if those central organizing figures leave, the program may be left high and dry.
This was the case with the University's biomedical ethics concentration. For years, a core group of faculty from the Medical School, Department of Philosophy and Department of Religious Studies organized the program and lent it clout. The group was led by Professor Emeritus of Philosophy John Ladd, who founded the program, and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy Dan Brock.
The combined efforts of these two men and the support of other key faculty members made bioethics a vibrant program for a regular contingent of roughly a dozen concentrators, according to professors who had been involved in the program.
But Ladd had long since retired when Brock left Brown in 2002 to become the director of Harvard University's Program in Ethics and Health, leaving the program without dedicated full-time faculty.
"You need to have someone who is at the center, having administrative responsibility to hold the thing together," said Jeffrey Poland, a visiting professor of molecular biology, cell biology and biochemistry who briefly served as the program's concentration adviser last year before it was suspended.
Once Brock left, Poland said, it was up to the departments that contributed courses to the concentration to hire someone with a specialization in bioethics to take his place. But none did, he said.
"Unless they are given any direct incentive to do that - and that means money from somewhere, or some kind of mission statement, something - then departments are going to make their decisions on the basis of how they see the priorities for them," he said.
Associate Dean of the Faculty Carolyn Dean agreed that extra-departmental programs like biomedical ethics are in a particularly tricky position.
"It'd be nice if the departments think about the needs of the program, but that's not their job," she said. "Their job is to maintain the excellence of the department."
When faculty from the departments did not emerge to fill the void left by Brock's departure, Rosalind Ladd and later Poland were brought in on a temporary basis to organize the program and offer classes to keep it afloat.
The University launched a special, extra-departmental search to find a replacement for Brock, but it failed to hire anyone.
Ladd agreed that the program's problems were because the departments had other priorities, not due to flagging interest in the subject.
"The interest (among) students remained very, very strong," she said.
Middle East struggles
Middle East studies - an interdisciplinary concentration drawing on courses from departments including history, religious studies and political science - has garnered increased interest from students since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. But last year it struggled to offer its concentrators classes during a rash of faculty absences.
During the 2005-2006 academic year, three faculty members involved in the concentration simultaneously went on leave to pursue research opportunities. The absences represented half of the faculty who form the core of the concentration, which graduates 10-12 students each year, according to Associate Professor of Comparative Literature Elliott Colla, who served as the program's director that year.
The program had already been facing difficulties at that point - it had gone through three directors in four years and had been without two key professors the preceding year - and Colla said last year's absences caused a crisis.
"That's when students really felt that there were not enough courses being offered," he said, adding that the situation would not have arisen if Middle East studies were a department. Because all three of the professors were housed in different departments, none of the departmental oversight mechanisms designed to prevent such a sudden crunch took effect.
"It's a normal thing for faculty to go on leave," Colla said. "It happens all the time." But, he noted, the departments each considered the absences in isolation and there was no structure in place to ensure all the professors' courses would be covered.
When University officials became aware of the problem, they tried to address it, as they did in the case of the biomedical ethics concentration. Funds were provided for replacement faculty for the spring semester. "Once they realized where the problem was, they reacted the best they could," Colla said. "There's no bad person in this story."
Mary Elston '07 and Nathan Karp '07, co-leaders of the Middle East studies Departmental Undergraduate Group, prepared a report on the struggles of Middle East studies at Brown as part of a seminar they took last spring. They found Middle East studies' status outside of the normal departmental structure led to many of the difficulties.
"The interdisciplinary nature of the concentration ... has led to a variety of structural problems, given that the University structure is geared toward departments rather than multi-disciplinary projects," they wrote in the report.
The program has also faced organizational challenges and has been without a director since Colla vacated the position last year. Involved faculty still advise students pursuing the concentration, but no one is overseeing the program as a whole.
That job lacks a clear description and must be undertaken on top of a full slate of departmental responsibilities, according to Colla. The budget that accompanied his directorship was $5,000, which he spent to bring in speakers, he said.
Elston and Karp's report found the position an ineffectual one. "Because of the departmental structure of the University," the report said, "the MES director ... exercises no influence over the appointments process. Therefore, the director has no authority within the MES faculty group, nor does he/she exercise any authority at the level of the University administration."
"Even the professors don't have a real incentive to coordinate. ... Their real loyalty is to their department," Elston said. She said while in writing the report she found the program "lacked any real cohesion."
"There's no funding, no central organization and at some points no classes being offered," she said.
Like biomedical ethics, Middle East studies originally blossomed because a strong, central figure laid the groundwork for the program. Former President Vartan Gregorian created three positions specifically related to building a Middle East studies program, Colla said, adding that the program has since relied on isolated departmental hiring decisions to grow.
"It's sort of a hodge-podge," Colla said. "Middle East studies at Brown has not been the result of a deliberate, long-term planning strategy."
Colla said things have improved somewhat this year with the return of the absent faculty, an increase in the number of Arabic courses offered and the hiring of an Islam specialist in religious studies, despite the lack of a director for the concentration.
International conflict
The international relations program, probably the most prominent interdisciplinary program on campus, has also faced challenges. It has a relatively small budget of its own - not "anywhere near what a department gets," according to Assistant Professor of Political Science Melani Cammett '91, who became director of the program this year.
As a result, the program - with about 400 concentrators, one of the largest on campus - has only one concentration adviser, Adjunct Lecturer in International Relations Claudia Elliott MA'91 Ph.D.'99, who is considered a part-time employee.
"Technically she only works part time - that's what she's compensated for," Cammett said. "She does put in a lot of hours."
Cammett says she is working to get funding for a full-time position in next year's budget.
The logistics of coordinating the program can be difficult because of the multiple departments involved, Cammett said. Knowing what courses students can expect to be offered in order to fulfill concentration requirements can also be difficult, she said. "That's hard enough to coordinate within one single department ... so it's all the more challenging when you're dealing with multiple departments," Cammett said.
Because of the program's size, Cammett said concentrators don't need to worry about core classes not being taught in the way that other interdisciplinary concentrators might.
"It's not in our control to say, 'We need PS 40 ("Conflict and Cooperation in International Politics") taught,'" Cammett said. "But it's a core course in the political science department, too."
But because the program has no faculty of its own - though Watson professors and researchers often teach courses and seminars - and only "a handful" of teaching assistants, it relies on other departments to take international relations concentrators into their courses and share their teaching assistant allotment, she said.
"We depend on the goodwill of departments," Cammett said.
Entrepreneurial success
But when interdisciplinary programs do boast effective coordination, sufficient administrative resources and dependable support from departments, they can be quite strong. The current poster child for this model is the nascent COE program.
Since the COE program was established in 2005, it and the roughly 75 students who declared a concentration in the program last year have avoided logistical problems that have plagued some other interdisciplinary programs, according to Maria Carkovic, COE's administrative director.
Unlike many interdisciplinary programs, COE enjoys significant financial resources dedicated for its own use. It receives funding directly from the Provost's Office, Carkovic said, and also has been a focus of fundraising efforts during the ongoing capital campaign.
Carkovic said many donors have given money especially for the COE program, most notably $15 million from the Starr Foundation and $2 million from the Kauffman Foundation.
Since most of the money given for the program goes through its three parent departments - economics, engineering and sociology - those departments look to hire junior and senior faculty with an eye to COE's needs.
"COE is really an integral part of each of those departments," Carkovic said. "There's strong commitment from the three department divisions involved to making this work."
COE did not have the same lack of centralized organization that has been problematic for some programs, Carkovic said, noting that two faculty members from each department currently serve on a committee designed to provide the program with coordination among departments.
"COE is very fortunate in that this concentration was formed with time for some planning," Carkovic said. "Because it is an interdisciplinary concentration, all of the teaching activities are carried out by each of the departments, but we also have an office in Feinstein House for the administration of COE."
Judaic studies is another example of a well-established interdisciplinary program. The only non-departmental entity with its own tenure track, the Program in Judaic Studies has been effectively treated as a department by the administration for years, said David Jacobson, professor of Judaic studies.
Its quasi-departmental status enables the program to maintain a body of Judaic studies-focused professors and consistently offer a range of courses both to concentrators and other interested students, Jacobson said.
University Hall takes notice
University officials say they are aware of the problems interdisciplinary programs have faced and are in the process of gathering information for a review of all of Brown's undergraduate concentration offerings next year.
Associate Dean of the College Karen Krahulik is currently working on compiling a database of information on all of the University's roughly 104 undergraduate concentrations, about two dozen of which she said are not affiliated with any department. Among her objectives are determining how many programs lie outside of departments and how many faculty and students are attached to each one.
The objective of the fact-finding project is "to have a clearer sense of our offerings overall," wrote Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron in an e-mail to The Herald. She added that, without that analysis, the problems of interdepartmental concentrations cannot be addressed.
"My office has been concerned for a few years about the problem of faculty oversight of interdisciplinary concentrations. It seemed like a good time to get a bigger picture, rather than simply attacking individual problems as they came up," she added.
The presence of so many undergraduate concentrations, Krahulik said, is a special challenge for the University.
"Brown fosters a culture of intellectual entrepreneurship, much more so than some other institutions," Krahulik said. "Which is ultimately a good thing, but we've got to the point where we need to get a handle on this proliferation. That's why we've embarked on this project."
The formal details of next year's review and the mechanism through which it will take place have not yet been determined, administrators say.
