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Publications: ASA Guide for Reviewing American Studies Programs
Preliminary Preparation for the Review
The review administrators will undoubtedly prepare for the review--and particularly for the external portions of the program--in a more or less systematic manner, directing staff to gather data, identifying external reviewers from on and/or off campus, setting external review dates, etc. Meanwhile, the program’s leadership should not be passive. It has its own work cut out for it.
One wag in the American Studies Association has remarked: “The best way to prepare for a program review is to constantly prepare for it.” What she seems to mean is that the key to preparation for a review lies in the lived daily experience of the program’s members--faculty, students, and staff--and in the on-going “culture” or “structure of feeling” of the program. This document is not the place to discuss in detail what makes for a healthy program culture. That discussion is best left to other Association documents, and to the personal testimonies of faculty in successful programs. But two relevant elements of that culture are worth mentioning briefly.
First, a program whose members are in regular conversation with each other about the goals and strategies of the program--whose faculty are talking regularly to each other about their research, their reading, their teaching, their service, and their other professional activities; whose staff and students have extensive opportunities to be involved in a discussion of the program’s aspirations and problems; whose members regularly focus some systematic thought on how the curriculum and other aspects of the program can be improved--is a program that will know what its stakes in the review are, will be able to write a self-study without undue effort, and will present itself effectively during the external review. Needless to say, such regular conversation is likely to be much less effective if it begins only a month before a self-study must be produced or only three months before external reviewers descend.
Second, a healthy program culture will keep its bridges in repair and will in fact be constantly looking out for opportunities to build new bridges--with its affiliated faculty, with chairs of related departments, with unaffiliated faculty whose interests overlap with those of American Studies, with key administrators, with program alumni, with community leaders, with scholars on other campuses, with other local American Studies programs, with activities of the American Studies Association and its regional chapters. During a review, an American Studies program needs all the understanding and sympathy it can get, especially on its own campus. A program that allows itself to drift into isolation from--or into disdain for--key faculty, departments, interdisciplinary programs, and administrators on its campus is heading for a rocky review. Such bridge-building requires constant effort, but it’s well worth the trouble.
Drawing on such regular conversation and linking efforts, the program’s faculty can move expeditiously toward preparing more concretely for the review. The program’s chair should schedule one or more meetings to discuss the review, what the program’s stake in it is, what the process will be, and what the program must produce in preparation for it. Although the program’s core faculty and staff will undoubtedly take responsibility for much of that formal preparatory work, it makes excellent sense to involve affiliated faculty and students in at least some of the discussions. Faculty and chairs from other campus programs, for example, can offer observations about their own recent reviews that the American Studies leadership can use to the program’s advantage.
Out of these discussions may conceivably come disagreement over present goals and strategies of the program or over desirable plans for the program’s future. Allowing sufficient time, over the course of several meetings, for a frank discussion of such disagreements will increase the chances of enlarging the area of consensus. Encouraging participants to put their positions in writing, for general circulation, may stimulate productive exchanges.
Copyright © ASA 1997-8. All Rights Reserved.
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