What's in a name? Given current trends, not very much more divides a department and a program.
Traditionally, academic programs were designed to allow professors from various departments to cooperate and teach a wide range of courses on an interdisciplinary subject. But three times in the past few years the University has taken the unusual step of allowing certain programs to hire their own tenure-track faculty, effectively blurring the distinction between programs and their more-established departmental counterparts.
For the majority of programs, which retain the usual organizational model, opinion seems divided about whether the structure is flexible and liberating or limiting and marginalized.
Women's studies, dance and African and African-American studies all have tenure lines, which allow the programs to recruit and hire full-time faculty.
"[The ability to hire tenure-track faculty] makes these programs virtually indistinguishable as administrative units from departments...," said Lewis Siegel, dean of the Graduate School. "The exception [is] that the number of tenure lines in these programs is relatively small."
William Chafe, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, agreed that tenure lines cloud the traditional distinction between a program and a department. "[The distinction] is not exactly crystal clear," he said.
The Program in Women's studies-which, unlike most departments, does not offer a doctoral degree-is in the process of filling three recently awarded tenure-track positions. "Duke has broken the model with Women's studies by allowing tenure lines without Ph.D. programs," said Jean O'Barr, director of the program.
And, while O'Barr welcomes the addition of tenure lines, she is not willing to give up program status.
"Disciplines are always emerging and changing... and women's studies is an emerging discipline," she said. "As a program, we can be flexible."
Women's studies uses faculty from other departments, but tenure lines allow the program to focus some attention on women's studies as a whole, while still having "cooperation with existing disciplines so that studies in women are fostered there," O'Barr said.
Although most programs are small and interdisciplinary, some interdisciplinary fields spawn departments. "It's on a case-by-case basis," Chafe said.
Siegel said programs offer flexibility that departments often cannot. "[The program] permits faculty to be added or to drop away, irrespective of issues concerning hiring, depending on their suitability for, and interest in, the interdisciplinary interests of the program," he said.
Some program directors, however, envy the advantages that come with the name "department."
Jane Gaines, director of the film and video program at Duke and an associate professor in the literature program, also believes that being a program at Duke is difficult. "There are only disadvantages," she said. "No faculty and no funding."
These problems, however, do not stem from being named a program, but rather from being denied the right to hire tenured faculty.
"It is difficult for programs to recruit faculty to teach all of the offerings that would be appropriate for the program," Siegel said. "The ability of programs to hire faculty on their own is one way to directly solve this problem."
The drama program, which can currently only hire faculty in non-tenured positions, has submitted a written request to become a department, said Richard Riddell, the program's director and a Semans professor of the practice of drama. The provost has forwarded the drama program's request to the academic priorities committee, which will then aid the Academic Council and provost in deciding whether the request is valid. The board of trustees will have the final decision.
"I suspect that the basic issue with drama is, in fact, not so much whether it is called a department or a program, but whether it has the right to have tenure-track appointments," Siegel said.
Unlike drama, which has about 30 students that major in the discipline, the Program in Comparative Area Studies has 100 majors, but it is still unable to hire faculty of its own. "We just ask people here if they would be willing to help," said Martin Lewis, director of the program and an associate research professor in CAS. "[The benefit is that there are] no struggles among the faculty... [the disadvantage] is most everything else."
The issue of program versus department becomes even more convoluted when examining the Program in Literature-which is headed by a chair, not a director, and has a large number of tenure-track positions.
"There is, in fact, no difference between the literature 'program' and a department," Siegel said. "The name is something of an anachronism.... [It] is meant to reflect the interdisciplinary nature of its educational and research mission, in that a large number of faculty who do not have primary appointment in literature are active in the activities of the program."
Jeffrey Wachtel, associate provost of Stanford University, agreed that the intent behind a program of study was to reflect an interdisciplinary area.
"The purpose of the interdisciplinary programs is to create bridges between academic disciplines where there are major issues that affect two or more traditional disciplines."
At Stanford, however, programs are generally not able to hire faculty.
"Faculty are appointed to regular academic departments," Wachtel said. "There are a very small number of cases where appointments are made to an interdisciplinary program... only because of endowment funds that were given for the specific purpose of endowing a faculty position in those programs."
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