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Publications: ASA Guide for Reviewing American Studies Programs
The Decision to Conduct the Review
Many colleges and universities now have regular calendars for the review of all degree-granting programs on their campuses. If so, the local American Studies program will be able to anticipate the review, often by several years, and can begin making orderly preparations. Other campuses still proceed with reviews on an ad hoc basis. Such ad hoc reviews can be triggered by several circumstances, of which the most typical are budgetary concerns (either a desire of the administration to cut costs or shift funds or a request by the American Studies program for additional funds), a petition by the program for a change in status (e.g., to move from offering a minor to offering a major, to begin a graduate program, to restructure itself from an inter-departmental committee to a faculty-holding unit), or a belief (held by a key administrator or campus faculty body, or both) that the program is weak or in crisis and needs to be “straightened out” or eliminated.
The campus’ full array of reasons for conducting the review are generally but not always made explicit, and such lack of explicitness can add to the anxiety that a program will normally feel in any case about a review. It is therefore in the interest of the program for its faculty to make certain that they fully understand what is at stake for those administering the review and for those who will be making decisions based on the outcome of the review. The program faculty will want to negotiate as vigorously and creatively as possible with the review administrators over such matters as what topics the review will cover, who the external reviewers will be (see below), what materials will be provided those reviewers, what the actual logistics of the external review process will look like (who will be interviewed and under what circumstances, what kinds of on-site observation will be facilitated, whether program leadership will be able to participate in an exit interview), what opportunities the program will have to respond to the external review report(s), etc. To have any chance of conducting these negotiations successfully, the program’s faculty must itself have reached some agreement on what results they would like from the review. Such agreement may well require a series of searching conversations. The program’s leadership should arrange for those conversations at the earliest possible moment.
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