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Publications: ASA Guide for Reviewing American Studies Programs
Introduction
The nearly 300 American Studies programs in the United States take many shapes. They range from very small enterprises involving only a few faculty and students to programs with large enrollments and several dozen faculty participants. Most programs focus almost entirely on undergraduates, a few almost entirely on graduate students, and several dozen on a mixture. Some undergraduate programs are minors or tracks within other majors; some are full-scale majors that depend to varying degrees on their own and other departments’ courses. In terms of structure, many programs are administered voluntarily by committees of faculty who hold their appointments in other departments. A relatively few are controlled by faculty whose appointments are entirely in American Studies. Others--perhaps the most typical arrangement--involve a mixture of faculty with full or partial appointments in American Studies and faculty from other departments. Some programs are well-established, well-funded, and highly valued by their campuses. Some are considered more marginal by their campus administration and eke out an unstable existence on budgetary crumbs. Most fall somewhere in between--seen as useful to their campus but perhaps not as central as “real” disciplines such as English and History, regularly having to justify their mission to administrators and other faculty, typically a bit on the defensive when seeking additional resources (or seeking to preserve their existing resources).
Because of such considerable variety, no review guide for American Studies programs can possibly speak to all local contingencies. What this guide attempts to do, therefore, is to raise questions and offer suggestions in forms that local programs can adapt to their own situations.
Reviews are typically imposed on an American Studies program from the “outside,” generally by administrators or a combination of administrators and campus faculty committees. For this reason, among others, they can be irritating and even traumatic experiences for faculty, staff, and students involved in the program. At the same time, even traumas can yield some pleasures. Approached strategically and creatively, a program review can prove intellectually stimulating to the program’s members, improve the curriculum, build morale, solve difficult problems, and help the program gain increased respect (both on and off campus) and even new resources. We hope this guide will help the program’s members improve the odds that a review will generate such benefits.
What’s At Stake
Even if nothing else is at stake, and even if no “outsiders” are looking in on the process, a program review offers an excellent opportunity for the program’s members to assess the program’s present strengths and weaknesses and to develop concrete strategies for preserving the strengths and overcoming the weaknesses. Ideally, of course, an American Studies program’s members would be engaged in regular conversations with each other about the program’s goals and the strategies it has developed to achieve those goals. They would be talking to each other about their teaching and their research, and would be constantly alert to possibilities for fine-tuning. In the face of other demands on faculty time, however, such conversations sometimes have to be relegated to less frequent intervals and a more formal occasion. A formal program review provides such an occasion.
But usually more is at stake in a formal review, and outsiders are in fact looking in. Administrators--and often campuswide faculty bodies--want to know how attractive and how good the program is so that they can decide whether to give the program more resources or take away resources, whether to actively help the program better realize its aspirations or to tell it that such aspirations are inappropriate, whether to support continuance of the program or to reduce or--in extreme cases--eliminate it. Reviewers from outside the campuses may also be brought into the process, and their assessments of the program may well, among other things, affect the reputation of the program among the national American Studies community. But the primary function of the external reviewers is to advise the various campus constituencies--American Studies participants, administrators, other faculty groups--on matters of program status and resources, based on their assessment of the program’s quality and of its value both to the campus and to national or regional American Studies community. Half of the work of the review takes place after the external reviewers have completed their part, as the various campus constituents settle down to negotiate about curricular changes, resource allocations, administrative structure, and the like, using the external review as a weapon (sometimes a double-edged weapon) in those negotiations.
This program guide will assume that the program review will involve all these on- and off-campus constituents, and that resources and power are involved as well as quality and prestige. It is absolutely critical that the American Studies program’s own members decide, from the outset, what they believe are the most critical stakes in the review; that they prepare themselves to negotiate the definition of those stakes with other players in the review (most notably key campus administrators); and that, at all stages of the review, they keep their sense of those stakes clearly in mind.
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