Tufts' Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Boston College (BC) have teamed up to offer a new dual degree program through the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning (UEP) and BC Law School, filling in gaps in the curriculum at both schools.
The program, approved in June, will allow graduates to receive a Master of Arts in UEP from Tufts and a Juris Doctor degree from Boston College in four years instead of the five years it would normally take to obtain the degrees separately.
"The fields of Law and Planning are inexorably linked," Professor and Chair of the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning Julian Agyeman said. "[Tufts] doesn't have a law school, and BC doesn't have a planning department, so the synergies were obvious."
Jon Witten, a UEP lecturer and an adjunct professor at BC Law School, approached faculty at both institutions about the possibility of creating a joint degree program after the certification of UEP by the Planning Accreditation Board, according to BC Law School Professor Zygmunt Plater.
Agyeman said the faculties of both schools unanimously approved the program.
The program's coordinators originally planned to start the program in the 2011−12 academic year. But two law students at BC, Lum Fobi and Julia Bramley, heard about the nascent program and requested to start taking classes for their UEP degree this year. After clearing some administrative hurdles, both students started taking Tufts UEP classes in September, they said.
Although there are only two dual degree students this year, administrators expect the program to grow rapidly, according to Plater.
"A number of kids who were applying to [UEP] were interested in the program," Plater said. "Next year I think we will have a very interesting market response," Plater said.
For next year, students will apply to each school independently and undergo separate evaluation processes. Once in the program, students study their first year exclusively at either UEP or BC Law School and then split their time between the two campuses in subsequent years, according BC Law School Professor Zygmunt Plater.
The program is ideal for students who want to pursue careers in planning and land use in government or in the private sector. It focuses on both the policy and legal structures behind land use and planning, preparing students as optimal candidates for a growing number of potentially high−profile positions, according to Plater, who specializes in environmental and land use law.
"It's the instrumentalists in our dual degree graduates that I think will be significantly at an advantage over some schools where they produce people who will just know policy or who will just know existing structures and don't have any sense of the dynamism of modern governance," Plater said. "You put law together with planning, and you've got a really nice package."
Fobi, one of the program's students, plans to use her degree in the private sector, acting as an advisor to corporations on land use issues. "I would be able to add a consulting aspect, in addition to my legal knowledge, so [corporations] could prepare better for environmental and social impact, instead of just reacting [to] them," Fobi said.
"The Tufts program offers a lot more hands−on experience working in the field with clients than you would get in a law school setting," Bramley said. "In my urban planning and design class, we get to design actual plots of land in the city of Somerville that have a real impact on the community, which is not something you get in law school, where the focus is on theory rather than practice."
