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Publications: ASA Guide for Reviewing American Studies Programs

Appendix C - Writing the Self-Study Narrative Topics to Cover in Narrative Part of the Self-Study

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Writing the Self-Study Narrative

Ironically enough, this appendix to this Guide to Reviewing American Studies Programs and Departments is quite likely longer than the narrative portion of the self-study will itself need to be. Its goal is to suggest a rationale for the kinds of topics that the narrative should cover and to suggest possible strategies for dealing with some of those topics. For those looking for more economical advice, a “checklist” of possible narrative topics appears as Appendix B. A few general words of advice as you write the narrative portion of an American Studies program’s self-study:

1. Keep it crisp.
2. Keep it as upbeat as possible, while giving the impression of candor (e.g., by noting problems the program faces and what it is doing about them).
3. Except for context and clarity, don’t repeat the descriptive and statistical material in the appendices to the self-study; rather, use the narrative to interpret that material, to show why the data (enrollments, number of faculty participants, etc.) are as they are, and to offer a rationale for various features of the program described in the appendices. Use footnotes and parenthetical annotations to refer the reader to the relevant spots in the appendices. Don’t load up the narrative with so much data that the program’s major stakes, problems, and achieves are obscured.
4. Keep in mind the program’s own overall goal for the review, i.e., to convince the relevant campus powers that the program is so good for the campus (because of the quality of its faculty and students, its attractiveness to students, its off-campus reputation, etc.) and is working (in demonstrable ways) to be even better that it well deserves existing and even augmented support.

The format for a particular program’s narrative will likely be a product of local circumstances—e.g., the campus’ requirement that certain materials be presented and certain questions addressed, and even in what order. For programs with options, the following sample format prove useful.

I. Introductory Sections

History of the Program

Early in the report—near if not at the very beginning—there should be a brief summary of the history of the program (generally only a paragraph or two)—when and the circumstances under which it was founded, ways in which those circumstances have changed and ways in which the program has evolved in response to or anticipation of those changes. The goal of this section is not at this point to give readers a detailed institutional analysis but to give them a general understanding of the campus setting and of major trends (on and off campus) that have affected the program and to give them an overall context for understanding subsequent sections of the narrative. Perhaps focusing on “key moments in the program’s history” will be a useful organizing tactic.

This section might also usefully, if not quite logically, include three straight-forward sentences along the following lines: “The program presently offers the __ degree(s). It presently has __ undergraduate majors and __ graduate students [or __ M.A. and __ Ph.D. students]. __ core faculty and __ affiliated faculty are involved with the program.” These sentences might also fit more gracefully in the next section. Their function is to help set a context for readers of the narrative. Their implications can be spelled out later in the narrative.

Program Goals and Definition

This also should be a relatively brief section. Like the history section, this too can be seen as an “overview” section. Most of the program’s specific goals are appropriately discussed in greater detail in other sections of the narrative, in conjunction with the specific strategies the program has adopted to achieve these goals. Often this part of the narrative can be drawn directly, with only a few modifications and additions, from the description of your program in your campus’ general catalog or from material in your program’s advising manual.

This section will likely be the best place to give simple, quick answers to such questions as the following (answers that will be pursued in greater detail later in the narrative):

1. How central is an “interdisciplinary” focus to the program? What is its working definition of “interdisciplinary”? For example, to what extent is its primary concern “multi-disciplinary” or “multi-departmental”—that is, to what extent does it focus on encouraging students to consider American society and culture from the perspective of several “disciplines” or departments (operating, so to speak, on the principle that variety is the spice of life)? To what extent is its primary concern integrative, i.e., to bring a variety of disciplinary and trans-disciplinary approaches to bear on specific issues in American life not sufficiently understandable in terms of any specific approach; or even to engage in a systematic comparison of various approaches to determine the strengths and limitations of any particular approach when applied to any specific aspect of American life? Terms like “disciplinary,” “multidisciplinary,” and “interdisciplinary” can easily be buzz words. What the narrative will want to do is to suggest the extent to which the program has endowed them with concrete and functional meanings.
2. Does the program pay a particularly large amount of attention to any particular subject areas? For example, does it stress the study of the region or local community in which the program is located? Place special emphasis on the experiences of women or of specific ethnic minority groups? Focus on contemporary or earlier American life? Focus on cultural expression or institutional analysis? Stress the study of the United States in an international or comparative context? Give special attention to particular bodies of theory or to any particular methods of analysis? To off-campus learning experiences? To what extent does the program want all its students (and even all its faculty) to confront a common body of data, questions, approaches, etc., and to what extent is its stress latitudinarian, encouraging its faculty and students to pursue whatever interests them individually? (In later sections, the narrative will be able to show how such emphases actually manifest themselves in the program’s requirements, curriculum, and special activities.)
3. Does the program place special emphasis on serving particular constituencies, e.g., ethnic minority students, re-entry students, part-time students, community agencies?
4. Does the program have a research as well as a teaching agenda? An agenda if campus, community, or more general professional service?
5. To what extent are the program’s primary goals and features congruent with major national (and even international) trends in the American Studies movement, and to what extent are they unique to (or given more-than-typical attention to in) this program?
6. To what extent is the program in its goals and features a distinctive campus program? To what extent do any of the program’s goals or features overlap or duplicate goals and features of other programs on campus? What is the rationale for such overlap?
7. What are the most important contributions the program makes to the life and goals of its own campus? For example, does it contribute to student and faculty diversity on campus? To the campus’ external reputation for teaching and scholarship? To helping the campus meet its general educational goals?
8. If relevant, what are the most important contributions the program makes to its surrounding off-campus community? To the region’s or nation’s American Studies movement?

These issues need not, of course, be touched upon in above order. Like a good newspaper article, this section should touch first on those aspects of the program’s aspirations and self-definition that are most important for evaluators of the program to understand, and then let other aspects of the program flow from there.

Program Structure: First Pass

Very early in the narrative, there should be a brief statement (no more than one paragraph—even one or two sentences will do) about the governance structure of the program—conceivably blended into the “Program Goals and Self-Definition” section, the “Program History” section, or a brief section of its own. Is the program basically an arrangement for coordinating the relevant offerings of other departments, administered by an appointed/elected coordinator and/or a small faculty committee drawn from these other departments? Does it, in addition, administer a few courses of its own, taught by faculty from these other departments and/or by a few “temporary” instructors? At the other extreme, is it a fully (or relatively) independent department, whose personnel, curricular, and/or budgetary powers are vested in a faculty whose appointments are fully (or jointly) controlled by the department? Or is it administered by a committee that mixes faculty with all-American Studies or joint American Studies appointments with faculty whose full appointments are in other departments?

This section is not the place to go into the implications of the program’s structural arrangement. But it will provide a useful context for helping the narrative’s readers understand what follows, since program structure typically affects the program’s health and options in profound ways.

II. Strategy Sections

Many of the remaining sections of the narrative can be considered as focusing on the various specific strategies (curricular, structural, deployment of resources, etc.) that the program has adopted to achieve its goals, highlighting their role as strategies—that is, explaining why they have been adopted, evaluating the extent to which they have worked well, and outlining plans (and rationale) for changing any of the strategies.

American Studies programs that have both undergraduate and graduate components will likely wish to discuss each of these components separately. This guide will therefore follow a similar format.

The Undergraduate Program

Overview

This is probably the best spot for briefly interpreting some of the key quantitative data about the undergraduate program (contained in the appendices) and saying something about its overall quality and value. E.g.: “Since its founding in 1975, nearly 300 students have received BAs from our program (see Appendix *, p. *). With only two minor downward blips, the annual graduation rate has steadily increased to the present __ graduates a year, a growth undoubtedly in part the product of the major increasing reputation on campus as a demanding, high-quality program and in part the product of the increasing number of courses in media studies [or whatever] that the program has been able to offer.” Or: “The number of students majoring in American Studies has declined rather sharply in the past eight years, from a high of __ in 1988 to a low of __ in 1996 (see Appendix *). We attribute much of this decline to the growth of several related majors, including Women’s Studies and African American Studies, and to the retirement without replacement of two of our key faculty. Nevertheless, the quality of our major remains high, as reflected in our seniors’ placement rate into major graduate and law schools (see Appendix *) and in the recent receipt by two of our core faculty of campus Teaching Excellence awards. Student satisfaction with the major remains high (see the results of the student survey in Appendix *), and our introductory general education courses continue to attract strong enrollments.”

Students

Some drafters may prefer to place this section later in the discussion of the undergraduate program. But there is something to be said for placing it close to the front of this discussion, especially if student enrollments and numbers of majors are healthy, student quality is good, and student satisfaction with the program is high.

In this section, the program can interpret the quantitative data about lower-division and upper-division enrollments, numbers of majors, and numbers of BAs, particularly in comparison to other programs on campus (and perhaps in comparison to American Studies programs at other campuses of similar size and kind), can discuss whatever evidence exists about the quality of its majors (grade point averages, scores on standardized tests, prizes won, acceptance to good graduate and professional programs, etc.), and evaluate whatever evidence exists about degree of students’ satisfaction with the program. In terms of this last issue, it is probably a good idea, as a part of the program’s preparation for the external review, for it to send a questionnaire to its majors. Exit interviews with graduate seniors are also very useful as a source of information, as are students’ end-of-term evaluations of specific courses. Another important—and sometimes neglected—source of information about student satisfaction can be a pre-review meeting with majors in which they are invited to talk about their experiences in the major.

This section can also be useful as a place to highlight the program’s commitment to diversifying its student body—to attracting women, ethnic minority students, re-entry students, part-time students, and other specific student constituencies—, its strategies for doing so, its degree of success, and its plans to achieve further diversity.

Requirements

The narrative is not the place to describe in much detail the program’s degree (or certificate) requirements. That more detailed description should be included in one of the appendices—perhaps most efficiently by simply appending the relevant section of the campus catalog or program’s advising brochure. At most what will be needed here is a brief overview of those requirements—e.g.: “A BA in American Studies requires all students to complete a one-semester introductory course offered by the program, two one-semester advanced methods course offered by the program, a semester-long program-sponsored senior seminar whose topics vary from year to year, and two other introductory and four advanced courses from the departments of __. Students must also write a brief senior thesis/pass a written comprehensive exam/pass an oral examination.” (Where relevant, a list of titles of senior theses, a sample comprehensive exam, or a list of typical questions or topics on an oral exam can be included in the appendices.)

What this section in the narrative should primarily do is:

1. To briefly highlight the rationale for these requirements, showing how they are intended to reinforce the goals and self-definition of the program. (E.g., “We believe that American Studies majors need extensive grounding in the subject matter and methods of at least one traditional discipline.” “We believe that no student can understand American society without close attention to the dynamics of race, ethnicity, class, and gender.” “We require an historically oriented sequence because we believe that students cannot understand contemporary U.S. life without seeing its relationship to the past.” “We believe it important that students look beyond the boundaries of the nation.”) Some of this rationale may well have been covered in the previous section on program goals and self-definition and need not be repeated here. Or this section may be the place to make explicit the way in which those goals translate into concrete requirements.
2. To evaluate the effectiveness of these requirements, and to point to evidence supporting this evaluation. (“We believe our requirement of a pan-national comparative analysis course has been particularly successful.” “We believe our students graduate from this program with an unusually rich understanding of multicultural theory.” “We have come to believe that the program’s breadth requirements may scatter a student’s attention unduly and that a more integrative approach may be in order.” “Our requirements may not allow a student to explore a particular topic in sufficient depth.” “Requiring students to take Course X before they take Course Y seems to have been effective in systematically building their skills in Z.” “In their exit interviews, our recent BA students told us they valued the chance to write a senior thesis.” “Many students don’t like being required to take the English Department’s introduction to literary interpretation, but we continue to believe that such a course gives them important critical skills that are of value in our own courses.”) Additional comments on the effectiveness of specific courses can come in the next section of the narrative at the appropriate points.
3. To point to any changes planned in the degree requirements and to explain the rationale for those changes.

Curriculum

This section will be in effect an extension of the requirements section. Some narratives will in fact want to make them a part of a single section. There is no magic way of organizing this section, which may well be divided into a series of sub-sections. That will depend on such factors as the range and complexity of the program’s degree requirements, the number and variety of the courses offered by the program itself, the number and range of other departments’ courses on which it depends, and the variety of constituents it is trying to use its own courses to serve. The narrative should stop at various points to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of specific courses, course sequences, course clusters, etc. and, as appropriate, to suggest any plans afoot to revise any aspects of the curriculum.

Throughout this section, the narrative should show its awareness that readers will be interested in the following question: Why is it that the program has chosen to devote its resources to these particular courses rather than to other courses? Does it have a strategy for “subsidizing” its small courses with larger courses? What does it do to insure that its large courses are of high quality? How has it determined the appropriate proportion of its resources that are to go to lower-division, upper-division, and graduate courses? That has determined the proportion of its attention devoted to serving its own majors and the proportion devoted to other students? By what processes (and by what criteria) does it evaluate the quality and effectiveness of its courses? That is, this section should show readers the rationale that lies behind the choices (if they are indeed that) that have been made that have resulted in this particular curriculum. In this regard, this section may also be the place to discuss the extent to which the curriculum is the product of the participating faculty member’s individual interests and the extent to which the faculty have “disciplined” and integrated their own interests on behalf of a coherent curriculum.

Typically the section will deal (as briefly as necessary) with the following kinds of courses.

1. Lower-division courses offered by the program. Do any meet campus general-education requirements? Serve many students other than American Studies majors? Effectively prepare American Studies majors for advanced work? Serve as a training ground or employment opportunity for graduate students? What is the rationale for their size? Do they overlap with or duplicate the offerings of any other programs? If so, what is the rationale for such duplication? Are the courses popular? Of high quality? Are they sufficiently stable? Do they justify the resources put in them? Is there sufficient ladder faculty participation in them? Are there any concrete plans to improve them? Are there any gaps in these course offerings that the program would like to fill? If so, how does it plan to do so? (E.g. what does it plan to give up to do so, or can it fill such a gap only if it receives new resources?)
2. Lower-divisions offered by other programs. Do they effectively serve the interests of American Studies majors? From the perspective of American Studies, are there any significant gaps in these other programs’ offerings? Does American Studies wish to recommend ways in such gaps can be filled?
3. Upper-division courses offered by the program. In addition to addressing here many of the issues raised in 1 above, the narrative here may want to give particular attention to the extent to which the program has self-consciously sequenced its courses (and the extent to which such sequencing has worked well) and given systematic attention to certain perspectives, themes, theories, methods, and materials.
4. Upper-division courses offered by other programs. See 2 above.
5. Independent-study courses, fieldwork and internship opportunities, etc.
 
6. “Exit” experiences: senior projects, comprehensive exams, etc.

 

Other Aspects of the Undergraduate Program

The narrative should make certain that it highlights any other aspects of the undergraduate program that make it a good program or that, if implemented or improved, would make it a better program. Does the program sponsor a regular colloquium series for its majors or for undergraduates in general? (If so, what kinds of topics have been covered?) Does it have a student association? (And, if so, what does it do?) Does the program facilitate social events for its majors? Do undergraduates sit on the governing body of the program? Advise the program in any specific ways? What have these activities “cost” the program (in terms of faculty and staff time, funds, etc.), and has the cost been worth it?

Advising

Evaluative comments on the undergraduate program’s advising structure may well fit as appropriate into the “Other Aspects” section as into a separate section. But, wherever located, advising should be discussed explicitly. The narrative should offer a rationale for its particular advising structure, point to whatever evidence it has that the structure is working or not working well (e.g., the student survey discussed above), and mention any steps being taken to improve the structure. In addition to discussion program-focused advising (curricular planning, thesis planning help, etc.), this section can usefully discuss the program’s and campus’ efforts at career advising.

Resources

This section is likely to be most usefully placed here only if the American Studies program has both undergraduate and graduate components. Otherwise it may be a better strategy to place the discussion of resources later in the narrative.

If any aspects of resources are discussed here, that discussion should focus among other things on the total amount of resources devoted to the undergraduate program. How many ladder faculty teach annually in the undergraduate program? (That might be worth expressing both in terms of the number of individual faculty and in terms of FTEs.) Do they represent a sufficient range of expertise, given the goals of the program? How stable and predictable are their contributions? How much of the teaching of the undergraduate curriculum is in the hands of temporary faculty? Of graduate students? How stable and satisfactory are those arrangements? Is the total amount of faculty teaching contributions adequate to the undergraduate program’s needs? How about faculty advising for the program? Other resources (staff, speakers’ funds, etc.) devoted to the program? What is the proportion of resources devoted to the undergraduate program in comparison to the graduate program (and the rationale for that proportion)? Also discussible: if a small amount of additional resources were to be made available to the undergraduate program, what would the program do with those resources, and why? (This section may also be required to address a similar, darker question—one that campus administrators generally ask: if resources were to be taken away from the undergraduate program, what would the program give up, and why?)

The Graduate Program

Whether the program offers an M.A. and/or a Ph.D. in addition to or instead of a B.A., many of the questions it will need to address with regard to its graduate program are similar to those applicable to an undergraduate program. In developing a narrative evaluating their graduate program, therefore, the faculty will want to draw upon relevant questions discussed above.

At the same time, the stakes are typically higher for programs offering graduate degrees—probably in the eyes of the faculty themselves, and almost certainly in the eyes of campus administrators and faculty outside the program. Graduate programs are typically more expensive than undergraduate programs. They compete with other graduate programs for scarce resources such as teaching assistantships and fellowship aid. The number of students per se in the graduate program is therefore likely to be of less concern to campus officials than the quality and off-campus reputation of the program, and its relative cost to the campus. Relatively unselective programs, for example, can be a minus unless a large proportion of the students enrolled “pay their own way. A very small and highly selective program whose students bring external fellowships with them, get terrific jobs after graduation, and go on to write lots of well-received books may be an administrator’s idea of heaven. The graduate program narrative should keep these stakes constantly in mind.

Overview

This is the place for the program to make a general assertion about the relative overall quality, reputation, and ranking of its program in comparison to similar programs in the region or nation. Some tactfulness is required here (an external reviewer may well be from one of the programs that the local program ranks itself as superior to). But the program needs to show that it knows what regional or national ballpark it’s playing in, or wants to play in, and that it’s playing well.

Students

Evaluating (and, to the extent that one can honestly do so, bragging about) the quality of one’s graduate students is critical, as is care in providing evidence to support this assessment. What are the application-to-admissions and application-to-acceptance rates, and how to they compare to the rates of other campus programs and to the rates of similar American Studies programs elsewhere? How do entering students’ Graduate Record scores compare to those in other campus programs and similar American Studies programs? Do any students bring prestigious fellowships with them or compete successfully for campuswide fellowships? Even more important, how well do students do after graduating from the program? Where have alumni gotten jobs? Have they achieved distinguished publication records or other forms of visibility? All American Studies graduate programs should work systematically to keep in touch with their graduate alumni, via regular newsletters and questionnaires—and should not wait until three months before the external review to do so. Alumni views and achievements can exercise a powerful influence over external reviewers’ perception of the program.

As with the undergraduate program section , the graduate program section should highlight the extent of the program’s commitment to attracting and retaining ethnic minority students and other specific constituents, its strategies for doing so (perhaps it may wish to include a separate section on “Outreach and Retention Strategies”), its degree of success, and its plans for improvement.

The narrative should also evaluate the overall dropout rate in the program and discuss whether that rate reflects well on the program (e.g., whether it successfully identifies at an early stage students who shouldn’t continue in the program, or whether it loses students it would like to keep). This may also be the point (although it could also fit into other sections) to discuss and evaluate any processes and criteria that the program uses to determine whether a student is to continue in the program—an end-of-the-first year examination, faculty review of the student’s record, etc.

Requirements

The program’s requirements will have been spelled out in an appendix. Here, the program should explain their rationale, giving particular attention to such topics as required core courses, language proficiency requirements, required proficiency in any bodies of theory, methods, or subject fields, and special fieldwork or internship requirements. Among the questions the reviewers likely will be very interested in is the extent to which the program requires courses from other departments’ or program’s offerings, and why. One thing that can be predicted is that a typical graduate program will be regularly fiddling with its requirements and curriculum, under the pressure of both student and faculty dissatisfaction. External reviewers will therefore likely to expect to see signs of such fiddling (since they’ve been doing the same thing on their own campuses). A program that can show its continuing efforts to “get it right” is likely to receive higher marks from an external review than a program that has been content to stand pat.

One thing this section can usefully do is to compare the program’s requirements to requirements at similar American Studies programs. Particularly important is for the program to demonstrate that its requirements and curriculum are keeping up with national trends in the field.

Curriculum

The narrative’s drafters will want to show the extent to which the curriculum the program offers is a thoughtful curriculum—one designed, whatever else it does, to prepare the student for a productive career and succeed in that job. Specific courses will come and go, and the titles and content of courses will change, but the desired overall direction and impact of those courses should be articulable in the narrative. The section will want to note significant gaps in the curriculum controlled by the program as well as in the course offerings of other campus programs and to discuss any steps being taken to fill those gaps. One question of likely interest: to what extent are faculty allowed (or even encouraged) to teach courses on topics of their own choice, regardless of the impact of those choices on the “coherence” of the curriculum, and to what extent do they discipline their offerings to serve some overall curricular scheme or program goals? Is that disciplining or self-disciplining process a result of individual faculty negotiations with the program head or a result of collective discussions among all (or most) of the faculty who teach in the program? Does the program make any effort to influence the offerings of other campus programs? To use its courses to serve students in other graduate programs? How successful are these efforts?

Advising

Many graduate program advising structures involve using some combination of an overall adviser (e.g., the director of the graduate program), a staff adviser (often operating in an informal capacity), and individual faculty advisers. Students will often move from adviser to adviser as their interests evolve and, particularly, as they move into research on their dissertation. Many programs give students considerable latitude to choose their own advisers—and sometimes give students relatively little help in making such choices. Many programs rely on advisers, particularly at the dissertation-supervision level, who are only peripherally affiliated with the program. Many programs leave it up to the individual advisers to offer appropriate and useful advice; some bring the advisers together periodically in an attempt to achieve some consistency in and improve the quality of the advising. Career-planning and job-seeking advising is sometimes handled self-consciously and energetically, sometimes quite casually. In drafting this section of the narrative, the drafters may usefully be led to considering ways in which their program might make its own advising structure more coherent and effective.

Qualifying Examination

Whether using a written or oral format or both, graduate programs constantly wrestle with the degree to which their qualifying examinations are intended to prompt a graduate student to summarize and integrate her/his graduate work to that point, demonstrate her/his grasp (to the faculty’s satisfaction) of certain bodies of knowledge, or demonstrate her/his potential to write a successful dissertation. They must regularly consider the extent to which the exam is a gate-keeping operation, designed to prevent unqualified students from moving on to dissertation research, and the extent to which it is designed to give the student a boost in defining and pursuing that research—acting, so to speak, as a supportive editorial board. Qualifying examinations are one topic where American Studies graduate programs can profit considerably from sharing their experiences with each other. Using the self-study narrative to articulate clearly the goals of the local program’s own exam policies and procedures will likely yield useful advice from external reviewers. But the program’s faculty will be well advised to use national ASA meetings and other occasions to pick the brains of colleagues elsewhere about these exams. Like the program’s requirements and curriculum, QEs seem—appropriately—in a perpetual state of evolution.

Master’s Theses; Dissertations

Students’ work on M.A. theses and Ph.D. dissertations have a number of important things in common. First, they often take longer to complete than the students expect (or hope) they will. Second, they are often more isolated and lonely efforts than is desirable. Third, the program’s faculty may not think enough about these products, after they are written in terms of what the products can tell the faculty about the quality and direction of the program itself and about what they might imply for improving the program.

The three are not unrelated. For example, if many students in the program take an overly long time to complete their dissertations, that may reflect their insufficient preparation in research methods, learning to define workable topics, organizing a work schedule, etc.; and the curriculum and advising structure may need to be revised to provide such preparation. And too many uncompleted—or weak—theses or dissertations may reflect an inadequate support structure—lack of financial support, lack of thesis workshops, etc.

Whatever else this section does, it should try to characterize the kinds of thesis or dissertation topics, discuss the extent to which these topics grow out of the emphases, requirements, and curriculum of the program, and discuss the (range of) quality of these productions. In addition to listing the titles of completed theses and dissertations for the past five or ten years in an appendix, the program might wish to compile a small pamphlet of abstracts of these works for inspection by the external reviewers.

Time to Degree

If not covered in another section, the narrative should explain and evaluate its students’ average time to degree and perhaps also the range of times.

Teaching Experience and Training

Self-evidently, service as teaching assistants or as independent course instructors provides important financial support for graduate students. But it is also, to varying degrees, an important part of their professional training. The narrative should highlight the various kinds of teaching opportunities available to its students. It should discuss the extent to which the program considers such opportunities central to the student’s experience and the steps it has taken to maximize the educational value of those opportunities (TA training workshops, forums on teaching, mentoring by master teachers on the faculty, etc.).

Typically, a considerable amount of the teaching experience of graduate students in American Studies programs comes from work in other departments’ courses—English composition courses and the like—, and some (even many) of these experiences may not be directly related to the students’ own interests. In addition, a fair number of American Studies programs, because they pay less attention to their undergraduate than their graduate curriculum, do not offer a sufficient number of large undergraduate courses in which their graduate students might gain some teaching assistant experience. The narrative should discuss any problems that have resulted from the kind and number of teaching opportunities available for American Studies graduate students and show a serious attempt to think about ways of improving the situation.

Financial Support

Financial support is invariably one of the most critical issues on graduate students’ minds—and on faculty minds, the extent and kind of support available affects the program’s ability to attract good graduate students. Very rarely to program reviews—even highly favorable ones—yield significant increases in such support. Nevertheless, a favorable report may well help a program make modest gains here. This section of the report should address at least three questions: 1) Does the program have an aggressive and creative strategy for accumulating as much financial support as possible (e.g., through negotiation over TAships with other departments, search for endowments?) 2) Given the funds it has, does it use them strategically on behalf of program goals (e.g., to attract first-rate students, to diversify its student body, to provide critical fellowship support at a point in a student’s work when such support will have maximum benefit?) 3) Does it deploy these funds equitably, and according to public criteria that can be generally appreciated? (One typical source of poor graduate student morale is the view that fellowships, plum teaching assignments, and the like are distributed out of a system of patronage and favoritism.) 4) Does it control the number of students admitted annually to the program—and the number of years it will provide support to students—according to the total funds it has for student support?

Other Program Features

Speaker’s series, social events, and the like are all relevant here.

Faculty

Reviewers will be interested in the quality of the faculty on campus, whatever their departmental affiliation, with whom American Studies graduate students typically work or with whom they might potentially be working. They will of course be specifically interested in the quality of the “core” faculty, using various measures of quality (research, teaching, involvement in the larger profession, campus leadership, etc.). They will be interested in whether a sufficient number and range of campus faculty are involved in and available to the program. And they will be interested in whether the program is working systematically to keep good working relations with faculty from other departments who are actively affiliated with the program, and whether the program is working systematically to involve relevant uninvolved or only marginally involved faculty in the program. The narrative should address all these issues. A program engaged in a constant “retention and outreach” effort among the faculty is likely to be a healthy program.

This section might also usefully address such issues as equity of faculty workload (both compared to the workload of other programs and in terms of distribution of workload among the faculty in the program) and faculty morale. What has the program done and what does it plan to do to make certain that faculty morale remains high (or improves?)

Although the participating faculty’s vitae are generally included in an appendix—certainly those of the most active participants in the program—it would be useful for the appendix also to include a master list of these faculty, with areas of interest and expertise and perhaps by degree of affiliation (“core” faculty, “associated faculty,” “distant friends of the program,” etc.).

Relations with Other Departments and Programs

Even if they control a considerable degree of institutional independence, the vast majority of American Studies programs depend on other campus departments and programs for courses, individual faculty contributions, teaching assistant opportunities, and general goodwill. Those contributions are often reciprocal, as core American Studies faculty teach courses for and in other ways serve these other departments. An American Studies program that has become too isolated from both traditional departments such as English, History, and Political Science and from newer interdisciplinary enterprises such as Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Media Studies is likely to be heading for trouble—or be there already.

If the narrative has not done so elsewhere, it should describe here the extent, nature, and quality of these relations and note what the program has done and plans to do to preserve and strengthen these relations. If it has not yet done so, the program may wish to establish formal protocols with these other units rather than simply leave the ties to informal channels. If the American Studies program is experiencing particular difficulties with some key department or departments on which it depends or with which it would like to establish cooperative ties, it should try to specify the causes of the difficulties, either in the narrative or (if the issues are sensitive ones) in interviews with the reviewers. Reviewers are often able to give constructive advice about ways in which to deal effectively with such problems.

Governance Structre

The narrative and perhaps an appendix will already have described briefly the governance structure of the program. The present section, however, will be able to take advantage of prior discussions of curriculum, faculty, relations with other units, and the like to spell out more fully the rationale for this governance structure and evaluate its effectiveness. How did it come about? How has it evolved over the years, and why? How might it be strengthened. Typically, the formal governance structure of an American Studies program and the actual daily operating structure of the program are not entirely congruent. For example, the program may be officially governed by a large advisory committee whose members are drawn from several departments, but the key decisions over requirements, admissions, and even hiring and promotions may de facto by a small core of these members. The larger committee may serve primarily to help the core faculty keep the program’s bridges with other campus units in good repair and to give it someone greater political muscle in its negotiations with the administration for resources and the like. But that larger committee must not be taken merely for granted. The core faculty in the program should be alert for ways in which they can make such advisory committee service useful to and interesting for that larger group of faculty.

Ideally an American Studies program’s governance structure will sensitively balance two needs. On the one hand, it is important that the core faculty, however defined (e.g., those with their formal appointments entirely or partly in American Studies, those who teach regularly the program’s core curriculum) be given primary authority for setting program policy, planning curriculum, managing personnel cases, and carrying out the normal work of the program. After all, it is they who must bear the major consequences of the program’s successes and failures. That core group should be large enough (and “large enough” will be a function in part of the size and complexity of the program) to insure the program’s administrative stability, including stability of its leadership. If the program does not now have such a structure, it should use the narrative to argue for its creation.

On the other hand, it is important that the program offer the larger adjunct faculty appropriate recognition for their valuable contributions to the program and provide them appropriate opportunities to express their views as to the program’s intellectual direction and overall policies. The building and maintenance of intellectual bridges, as any program’s chair well knows, requires constant and creative attention. The governance structure is an important element of that maintenance strategy, but should not be a substitute for other, often more informal, efforts at linkage—efforts for which the core faculty themselves should take primary responsibility.

This section, if it can do so tactfully, may also wish to address questions related to the quality and stability of the leadership of the program—particularly questions of stability. Is there presently a leadership vacuum in the program, or does the upcoming retirement of the long-time director of the program signal a potential vacuum? Are able faculty reluctant to assume the position of head of the program? If so why, and what might be done to improve the situation? Of course, if the leadership is stable, strong, and effective, that’s worth bragging about a bit.

Staff

An able and dedicated staff is, as all program directors well know, one of the major keys to the success of a program. Typically paid less than they deserve, the staff hold students’ (and often faculty) hands, provide program continuity and institutional memory, and foster program morale. Their contacts with staff in other programs and central campus units can also be a valuable source of information. A program’s leadership that finds regular ways of showing its appreciation of its staff’s efforts is doing the program a good turn. Staff can be particularly valuable if they not only understand the mechanics of the program—its requirements, courses, faculty leave plans, budget, etc.—but the rationale for each of these aspects, so the program’s leadership needs to makes sure they are informed about these issues. The leadership should also actively support staff members’ professional growth in computer skills (e.g., working with spread sheets, desktop publishing, use of the internet), budgetary analysis and planning, etc. And it should also work to help the staff better understand the workings of the campus as a whole and the relationship of the program to the American Studies movement as a whole. This part of the self-study should not only be a place to evaluate the adequacy of staff assistance—the message, typically, will be “great staff, but overworked”—but a place to discuss opportunities that have been or will be made available for their professional growth.

Funding

An appendix of the self-study will typically contain a program budget. What this section of the narrative should do is explain the implications of that budget, the rationale for the program’s decisions as to its use of funds, and the effectiveness of is budgetary strategies.

Funds are of course never enough. The key questions the program should answer in this section are: Given the funding limitations, is the program making the most efficient and effective use of those funds on behalf of the program’s goals? Has it clearly sorted out its funding priorities? What hard choices has it made, and why does it believe it has made the right choices in the use of funds? If the program has received funding augmentations in the recent past, what use has it made of those funding augmentations, and why? What would be the concrete impact on the program if its funding were cut by, say, ten percent? If funding were augmented by, say, ten percent, what would the program do with the funds, and why? (Additions to the ladder or temporary faculty, graduate support augmentations, additional staff funds, additional funds for visiting speakers or research seminars, etc., are all potentially relevant here.) If current levels of funding were to continue, would the program alter in any respect the use of those funds, and why?

Increasingly, campus programs at both private and public schools are being called upon to undertake fundraising efforts from external sources. To the extent relevant, the narrative should discuss in this section any fundraising efforts it has made or that it is planning and evaluate the success of those efforts.

A fairly obvious footnote: administrators (for the most part) hate to give away money unless there’s a very big and clearly demonstrable payoff for them. The task of the narrative is to highlight that payoff. Arguments about the program’s high quality are not enough (virtually every other program on campus will be making the same argument). The narrative needs also to be shrewd about bringing quantitative evidence to bear on its case for more resources. One of the best sources of quantitative evidence is data in terms of which the program compares favorably to other campus programs in the humanities and social sciences—for example total program enrollments (or number of majors, or number of BAs) per faculty FTE or per total program budget; external fellowships per graduate student; the graduate application/acceptance ratio. Of course, if many of these key figures are not in the program’s favor, the program will need to peddle as hard as it can in its narrative on its quality and value to the campus while at the same time taking steps (e.g., through curricular revision) that will generate more favorable data.

Space, Equipment, Library Resources, and Other Resources

The contents of this section are pretty self-evident. In addition to quantitative issues (amount of space, size of equipment and computing budgets, etc.), a few more qualitatively oriented questions may be worth highlighting. For example, the program’s space configured so that the core faculty have easy access to each other? Is the program located where the faculty and staff have convenient access to faculty and staff in related programs? Are the faculty tied together by a computer network? Do they all (and their students) have ready access to the internet? (The latter is rapidly becoming an important research and teaching resource for Americanists.)

To the extent that the program draws extensively on off-campus resources—libraries, museums, archives, community agencies, fieldwork sites, etc.—, this might be a good spot to discuss these resources, although they conceivably could be equally or more effectively dealt with in discussions of program requirements or curriculum.

Other Local Issues

If relevant, there needs to be a section in the narrative that highlights other issues of interest to the program that can’t conveniently be fitted into one of the narrative’s other sections.

III. Concluding Section

Summary of Planned Changes in the Program

This section will parallel in format a section that typically can be found in an external review report. It will draw together in a single conveniently readable spot a list of the specific planned changes that have been discussed at various points in the narrative. It will also leave the readers of the narrative with the impression of a program capable of controlling its own destiny.

Concluding Flourish

This section may not be necessary to all narratives. If included, it must be brief. A memorable, upbeat rhetorical flourish at the end can’t—usually—hurt. (“Building on our terrific achievements, we march confidently into the next decade.” “Our program is at a point of crisis. We see that crisis as a golden opportunity for our program and the campus. With the active help of the campus administration, we on the core faculty are committed to renewing the program in a way of which the campus can be justly proud.”)

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