With budgetary constraints bearing down on universities throughout California, the five-member faculty of UCSC’s American Studies program has voted to suspend the major, at least while they explore alternatives to keeping the program open. Like Community Studies, which was suspended last year, the American Studies program will no longer be accepting new students, and its current focus will be on ensuring that the current classes of juniors and seniors graduate.
With budgetary constraints bearing down on universities throughout California, the five-member faculty of UCSC’s American Studies program has voted to suspend the major, at least while they explore alternatives to keeping the program open. Like Community Studies, which was suspended last year, the American Studies program will no longer be accepting new students, and its current focus will be on ensuring that the current classes of juniors and seniors graduate.
American Studies is an interdisciplinary program that focuses on the history, literature, economics and culture of the United States, as well as on societal shifts and inter-racial relations among Americans. Over the past few years, professors in the program who have moved on or retired have not been replaced. “It is absolutely true that several recent years of reduced state support to the University of California system are eroding the quality of the programs we offer to students,“ university spokesman Jim Burns told the Sentinel. Yet while Burns insists that programs across the board are being slashed, so far it appears mainly to be interdisciplinary programs in the social sciences and humanities that are on the verge of being eliminated. Read more at the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
