As an educational institution, Tufts strives to promote the importance of an interdisciplinary academic experience. In addition to requiring students to fulfill distribution requirements in the humanities, sciences, mathematics and arts, Tufts also offers a variety of majors and minors that cross academic boundaries.
Some of these interdisciplinary programs comprise the school's most popular majors, including international relations and community health. Popular program minors include communications and media studies and Latin American studies.
While some of these programs are growing stronger each year, others are beginning to falter due to lack of leadership and resources. This summer, Associate Professor of English Modhumita Roy stepped down from her position as the director of the women's studies program, leaving a gap that students say will have a profound influence on the coming year.
While it is one of the smaller academic programs on campus, according to Associate Professor of English and women's studies core faculty member Sonia Hofkosh, there are 11 students majoring in women's studies in total.
Women's studies has been offered as a major at Tufts for the past 30 years. The program offers both a major and a minor, seeking to give students a comprehensive study of women and gender across various disciplines. In addition to taking core courses on feminist and gender theory, students take electives from various departments and are required to engage in research and a capstone project during senior year.
Although the program boasts an extensive core faculty of more than 50 professors and lecturers, students say that the absence of a program director creates complications that jeopardize their academic experience.
"The problem with not having a director is that students have nowhere to turn," Sadie Lansdale, a senior pursuing a minor in women's studies, said. "Students who want advice about going abroad and independent study projects or students who want to be pointed in specific directions in the field have nowhere to turn."
"A director would be someone who has knowledge of all the different fields of women's studies, which is information that we can't get anywhere else."
In addition to this lack of information, the absence of a program director is particularly problematic for upperclassmen, according to senior Alyson Weiss, a women's studies major.
"Without a director, we can't declare the major. If you're not declared as a major, you can't start undertaking your senior project," Weiss said, noting that the capstone senior project is a crucial part of the program. "Right now we are working blind. We have no idea if at the end of the day our project will be approved."
The process of categorizing interdisciplinary programs at Tufts, which dictates the amount of funding and resources that individual programs receive, is a complicated one, according to Hofkosh. Under the leadership of then-Dean of Arts and Sciences Robert Sternberg, interdisciplinary programs were ranked on the basis of how many graduates had majored in each program within the past five years. Then the funds were allocated accordingly.
Women's studies graduates fewer than 10 majors per year and therefore receives the lowest level of resources in terms of research stipends, scholarship money and course releases, Hofkosh said.
Students argue that this dearth of institutional support is a disincentive for faculty members willing to be the program's director.
"Faculty that were offered the position would receive no compensation and only a $1,000 research grant," Weiss said, citing figures confirmed by Hofkosh. "The administration was basically asking professors to volunteer a lot of extra hours with no administrative support."
"The women's studies program," she said, "also doesn't have any full-time faculty members, so the director has to do a lot more work than a director of a program or department that has more administrative support."
Hofkosh shares many of the same worries and frustrations as her students.
"I and many of my faculty colleagues are very concerned about the gap in leadership for the program," she said. "We are very concerned about the students. We feel they are being shortchanged right now."
According to Hofkosh, the process of finding a new program director is complex. Sarah Pinto, an associate professor of anthropology and a core faculty member in the women's studies program, stood up to take the job, but her plans to take leave in the spring made her unable to fulfill the commitment, Hofkosh said.
"Other faculty members weren't willing to take the director position with the compensation package they were offering," Hofkosh said. "The package minimized the importance of the women's studies program and wasn't recognizing how important the work of director is."
"Women's studies is a program, we argue, that services the whole Tufts intellectual community by offering courses that many people take, sponsoring events, providing students opportunities to present research," she added. "The impasse was that there wasn't a faculty member to be director for this year because the compensation wasn't recognizing how much work is involved."
Despite these setbacks, Hofkosh emphasizes that the administration is attempting to rectify the issue at hand.
"I do feel like we have made progress helping Dean [of Academic Affairs for Arts and Sciences James] Glaser understand what's involved in the job," Hofkosh said. "Unfortunately his hands are tied by the system that Dean Sternberg created. They are trying to be flexible, but they don't want to change that chart. We are hopeful that it will be resolved soon in the conversations we are having with the administration."
Both Weiss and Lansdale stressed that the positivity of their experiences as Women's Studies majors outweighs the challenges they have faced.
"I took feminist philosophy fall of my freshman year, and that class changed my life," Weiss said. "Women's studies offers a lot of flexibility and works with individual students."
"Women's studies is one of the disciplines that you don't leave in a classroom," Lansdale said. "A lot of the clubs I'm involved in, there [are] always people from my women's studies classes in them. It's a community of people who are concerned about the state of the university and the world, and we are looking for ways to change it."
Hofkosh added that the program also benefits faculty members.
"What's important for me about the program is that it provides an intellectual community for faculty across disciplines," she said. "It allows me to have a conversation with faculty who I wouldn't have otherwise been able to meet."
Despite the current setbacks facing the program, Lansdale encourages any students interested in the field to pursue it wholeheartedly. "Women's studies doesn't end when the class is over," she said. "It's a discipline that extends into every field of your life, regardless of who you are."
