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School of Global Studies: We Want Your Input!

From the CAS blog here – which now allows comments!

School of Global Studies: We Want Your Input!

The College of Arts and Sciences is considering the creation of a School of Global Studies to be located within CAS and we want your input!

We believe that such a school could offer a new and exciting structure for organizing our many globally focused departments and programs. Organized around our linguistic and regional strengths, the School will bring together units and faculty across the Humanities and Social Sciences divisions to encourage pedagogical innovation, collaborative research and teaching, and publicly engaged learning.

To give some context, Philip Scher, Divisional Dean of Social Sciences, led a series of conversations with other divisional deans and a variety of potential stakeholders across campus starting in 2017 to discuss the idea of forming a School of Global Studies within the College of Arts and Sciences. Karen Ford and I also joined these conversations and were encouraged by the general support and enthusiasm we heard. We were eager to pursue the idea further. However, a number of events led us to put the initiative on hiatus, including the leadership transitions in our office and the Provost’s Office, as well as CAS Taskforce review of the structure of CAS.

This fall, with these events behind us, we presented a preliminary proposal to the Provost based on those prior conversations with faculty. In addition to the scholarly and pedagogical advantages of the school, we also cited the need for a dedicated space that would form an interdisciplinary home and campus focal point in order to build critical mass of the School. In these discussions, we proposed Friendly Hall as a location for the School’s modern world languages, the Department of Global Studies, and an administrative shared services support unit for the School. With the Provost’s encouragement, we are now eager to talk with faculty and staff more widely and refine our ideas.

Our preliminary proposal for a School of Global Studies would combine the Department of Global Studies (formerly the International Studies department) with contemporary languages and existing, regionally-focused programs (e.g., Latin American Studies) in both the Humanities and Social Sciences.

We think that a CAS School of Global Studies has the potential to achieve a number of exciting outcomes to make the University of Oregon even more recognized for its strength in global studies. These include opening ways for faculty to have rich collaborations around innovative pedagogy that trains future generations of students and path-breaking, publicly engaged research. Done right, the school can highlight our existing strengths in a much more unified fashion and help us build new ones.

We have now formed a Steering Committee to help craft a more detailed proposal that is responsive to and informed by faculty and staff. We are very grateful to the Steering Committee members for their willingness to devote their time and expertise to these important discussions:

Mokaya Bosire, African Studies
Robert Davis, Romance Languages
Rachel DiNitto, East Asian Languages and Literatures
Ian McNeely, German and Scandinavian
Jennifer O’Neal, Indigenous, Race and Ethnic Studies
Eileen Otis, Sociology
Craig Parsons, Political Science
Lisa Redford, Linguistics
Lynn Stephen, Anthropology
David Wacks, Romance Languages
Kristin Yarris, Global Studies

The Steering Committee will facilitate two upcoming town hall discussions:

Monday, February 24th from 3:30 – 5:00 in EMU 146 – Crater Lake North Room

Tuesday, March 17th from 3:30 – 5:00 in EMU 146 – Crater Lake North Room

We encourage all interested faculty and staff to attend and look forward to the next phases of this discussion as we prepare a final proposal for the Provost in Spring 2020.

Bruce Blonigen
Tykeson Dean of Arts and Sciences

3 Comments

  1. Dog 02/17/2020

    Yes, surely Global Studies belongs squarely in the domain of CAS.
    All other disciplines outside CAS are clearly irrelevant …

  2. Townie 02/17/2020

    Aren’t the schools for the professional programs (Law, Accounting, Architecture, Music)

  3. cherpumple 02/18/2020

    Stuffing departments inside a school inside a college. Sounds like the turducken of higher ed organization.

    Seriously though, what are the programmatic goals that cannot currently be accomplished but will be facilitated by another layer of organization between the department and the associate dean’s office? I’d like to believe there is one, but the announcement doesn’t explain – it’s just vague buzzwords like “encourage pedagogical innovation, collaborative research and teaching, and publicly engaged learning.” Leaving the impression that this is a jobs creation program for academic middle managers.

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