After receiving just four applications, administrators are saying the doctoral program in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature may not remain viable in future years without significant reform, including a surge in recruitment efforts. These discussions come just over a year after a favorable external review of the department.
Lewis Siegel, dean of the Graduate School, said the department has only taken two graduate students over the past two years. He said that because of the sparse applicants, the department is on a zero-admission basis--only Graduate School administrators can accept students to the program.
"I think its viability depends on its applicant pool and the success of the current graduate students," said William Chafe, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences. He said the applicant pool should be in double digits.
Although small programs such as art history and classical studies often draw small applicant pools, Siegel said only the German studies' pool was under 20 applicants. Overall, he added that humanities applications rose this year by 40 percent, and overall, graduate school applications rose by 10 to 15 percent.
Ingeborg Walther, acting chair of the department, said the graduate program is only nine years old and that the first crop of degrees have just recently been awarded.
"The national trend is that the applicant pools are going down and that is true for our program as well," she said. "We don't have high visibility yet."
Walther said last year a brochure was not finalized or sent out to potential applicants, which may explain the paucity of applications this year.
Nevertheless, she said the department hopes to raise its visibility, both nationally and overseas. She said that may include recruitment trips and talking about the program with colleagues at national conferences.
"We have a massive campaign planned, and it involves all kinds of things, including e-mailing everyone we know and devising a better brochure," said James Rolleston, the department's director of graduate studies. "We will consult with the office in the grad school as to where we can strategically visit places. It's not something professors are trained to do. It's a hard problem, and to some extent, it's a nationwide problem in German studies."
The external review, obtained by The Chronicle, praised the program's faculty for strong research, Walther's efforts in the undergraduate language program and the interdisciplinarity of the graduate program.
The external reviewers also said the six full-time faculty members are stretched too thinly, outlined what they perceived to be an intellectual divide between the undergraduate and graduate programs and called on the department to recruit more applicants--but did not advise dismantling the doctoral program.
"We feel that it is a little too early to judge the program's success and long-term viability," the review reads. "We strongly affirm the importance of maintaining the course that the department has begun and hope that the department will receive the resources necessary to do so."
One way to increase the program's viability, the review said, was to form more partnerships with the University of Chapel Hill at North Carolina, especially in light of the new Robertson Scholars bus system between Chapel Hill and Duke.
The UNC department is more traditional and, the review said, would likely complement the interdisciplinary work of Duke's department. The department has applied for a grant from the Robertson fund to set up a retreat between the two faculties to discuss further collaboration.
Although the reviewers said the doctoral program's comparative advantage was its emphatic interdisciplinarity, it also cautioned that the department not overextend itself.
"Its members need to keep squarely in sight the mission of the departmental unit as part of Duke's program in the humanities, both on the undergraduate and graduate level," the review said.
The document reserved the most glowing praise for the undergraduate program, which has seen the number of minors quadruple under Walther's revisions to the undergraduate course of study.
Still, the reviewers recommended that the department take a more active role on campus and that it not forget its humanistic mission and better integrate the interdisciplinarity of the graduate program. In addition, it called for more broad courses, such as courses on German canonical writers or German intellectual history.
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