Author: Linni Kral
Women’s Studies/Gender Studies (WSGS) is no longer offered as a major at Occidental College. Beginning this fall, courses previously assigned to this program will be taken as part of a major in Critical Theory and Social Justice (CTSJ) with a topical emphasis in Feminist and Queer Studies. This change comes after multiple years of discussion around how to successfully construct an interdisciplinary major.
“There was never a WSGS department, it was a program,” Dean of the College, Eric Frank said. The program had its own introductory course and a junior seminar, but the rest of the courses were taken from other departments. These were subject to change depending on what was offered by other departments each semester. To date, courses that satisfy a WSGS major or CTSJ major with an emphasis on Queer & Feminist Theory are offered in the Mathematics, Diplomacy & World Affairs, American Studies, History, ECLS, Music, Philosophy, Economics, Education, Politics, Psychology, Religious Studies and Sociology departments.
“Virtually every area of study could potentially have a WSGS component because WSGS was created due to what had been left out of academic studies historically,” CTSJ department Chair Donna Maeda said. Maeda is currently teaching the CTSJ senior seminar, where the remaining WSGS majors must complete their comprehensive projects. Despite these justifications, the decision has been met with mixed review.
“It is true that an emphasis [in Queer & Feminist Theory] allows for a self-made exploration of topics central to the current WSGS major, but it feels more like a concession to political correctness than an actual interest in preserving the fight for women’s development,” WSGS major Ally Jurkovich (senior) said. Along with Liz Kramer (senior), Jurkovich will be one of the last two students to graduate from Occidental with a WSGS major.
Talk of change began in 2005, when students requested that the college create a new department that would be called CTSJ. The faculty considered this proposal and voted to create the department for the 2006-2007 school year.
“It [CTSJ] was formed with the academic and intellectual justification that it would have three emphases and that we would hire a faculty member to the department with a specialty in WSGS,” Frank said. That hire would be responsible for running the Queer & Feminist Theory emphasis, but the search was delayed for bureaucratic reasons. The CTSJ department has now restarted that search with the intention of filling the position for the 2009-2010 school year.
“I think it is healthy that the professors, students and administration continually rethink how to organize the pursuit of knowledge, and that sometimes results in shutting down a department or major, or in creating one,” current CTSJ professor and former WSGS department chair Jeffrey Tobin said. Tobin was among the professors on a WSGS Curricular Committee that signed a letter in support of moving the major into the new CTSJ department with the addition of a Queer & Feminist Theory scholar. One committee member, History professor Maryanne Horowitz, did not support this move.
“I tried my very best to keep WSGS an independent program because I felt that courses on traditional women would be left out [of CTSJ],” Horowitz said.
Horowitz intended to teach a course in the History department this year on Contemporary Feminist Thought, but it was removed from the catalog without her knowledge. “Women are constantly being asked to adapt to and dissolve into what is still very much a ‘man’s world,'” Jurkovich said, “and CTSJ’s swallowing of the WSGS major is likewise problematic.”
Despite an apparent lack of support from some members of the Occidental community, the shift was made based on student input and faculty desire. “The original impetus came from students,” Frank said.
Frank and other faculty members are attempting to make this transition a smooth one and hope to change the minds of those with misgivings. “Students who are interested in this area will be able to do this work and to prepare for WSGS graduate work or other post-graduate work with the CTSJ major,” Maeda said.
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