TDR Interview: Professor Donald Pease on MALS

By A.S. Erickson | Monday, August 11, 2008

The Dartmouth Review: First off, I think most undergraduates have a somewhat vague idea of what the MALS program is. Could you talk about the program a little bit?

Professor Donald Pease: The letters in M.A.L.S. stand for the Master of Arts and Liberal Studies. The MALS Program emerged in the early 1970’s because some professors here and at Wesleyan University and at Georgetown felt that the ethos of the liberal arts—that is, the attitudes and beliefs associated with the liberal arts—could be moved into a graduate environment. This meant that instead of requiring graduate students to focus restrictively on a single subject, that a graduate program should have an interdisciplinary focus. Students who pursued, say, the question of the cultural context of Moby Dick—just to cite what we’ve just been discussing—could see how the history and political theory, as well as the literary culture of the time, all informed the construction of that book, as well as the understanding of it—or lack thereof—in 1851.

So the program emerged at Dartmouth in the early 1970s because faculty at the time thought that Dartmouth should add a pedagogical dimension to the institution that permitted adult learners in the community, Dartmouth College staff and administrators, and Dartmouth graduates who went on to teach in prep schools and in community colleges, to engage in graduate school courses organized around interdisciplinary approaches to subjects and areas of research.

TDR: That’s fascinating. Have you read Anthony Kronman’s new book, Education’s End?

Pease: No, I haven’t read that. Is it good?

TDR: Yes, it’s pretty good. It talks a lot about how the humanities went wrong in overspecialization, and it sounds like this is a way to get a higher degree in the humanities without overspecializing.

Pease: Yes, the MALS Program does that, but it also enabled undergraduates—at that time, Dartmouth students did not have the option of undertaking honors theses—to work with Master’s students around topics and joint concerns. The undergraduates who took classes with MALS students participated in discussions that were especially beneficial to the MALS students who were learning how to teach high school and prep school students, as well as to the Dartmouth undergraduates who were learning how to think about problems from interdisciplinary perspectives.

So from the time of its beginning here at Dartmouth, MALS worked quite well for undergraduates and Master’s students alike. As you know, since Dartmouth does not have Ph.D. programs in the social sciences and the humanities, MALS supplied members of the social science and humanities faculty who wanted to pursue interdisciplinary research projects to create courses and develop interdisciplinary research projects that enriched the undergraduate curriculum and also facilitated the development of the Master’s program.

TDR: Are undergraduates still able to take classes within the MALS program?

Pease: Since MALS is primarily interdisciplinary in its orientation, the MALS program cooperates with the [undergraduate] College Courses (COCO) Program in developing interdisciplinary courses that are open to undergraduates and MALS students alike. The College Courses at present constitute the primary institutional location for the interaction between MALS students and undergraduates. College Courses, as you know, vary wildly in subject matter. I’ve taught in the COCO course “The Culture of Addiction” for a number of years, and MALS students have worked together with undergraduates in that course with what I consider very good outcomes for both undergraduates and MALS students. The financial basis for this cooperation has assumed different forms. MALS has either provided compensation for one of the instructors or enhanced the research funds of one or both instructors of the College Course to facilitate MALS students work together with undergraduates in those College Courses.

TDR: Beyond the COCO courses, can you give me some examples of the specific MALS courses that graduates take?

Pease: Yes, and let me reiterate that from its beginning in 1973, MALS has introduced scholarly initiatives that helped the students and faculty at the undergraduate level, as well MALS students. You know from the research that’s coming out of the humanities and social sciences in particular that many professors in these divisions have undertaken areas of research that are intrinsically interdisciplinary. But except for the programs that embrace an explicitly interdisciplinary orientation—e.g., Latin and Latin American Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Environmental Studies—Dartmouth faculty have few opportunities to work on projects or organize research that require an interdisciplinary approach. When I became Chair of the MALS program, I re-organized the course offerings as “concentrations”—in Cultural Studies, in Globalization Studies, and we’re in the process of creating one in Environmental Studies. I re-organized them in that way so as to mirror the divisions of knowledge in the liberal arts college. The MALS concentrations in Creative Writing and Cultural Studies mirror the Arts and Humanities division, the MALS concentration in Globalization Studies comprises the Social Sciences sector of the program; and the emergent concentration in Environmental Studies will inaugurate an interdisciplinary project in the Sciences.

The MALS Program insists on the importance of interdisciplinarity to each one of the concentrations. Once professors from different disciplines introduce that kind of critical environment within the classroom, a profound interdisciplinary conversation ensues. For example, if a Cultural Studies course on Cold War films is taught by a professor in Film Studies and a professor in History, as a summer offering in MALS recently was, the professors will invariably produce very different understandings of the films’ significance. After the differences in their professors’ interpretations become explicit topics of classroom conversation, the students discover that the differences in the knowledges produced within the fields of History and Film Studies are in part the consequence of the disciplinary assumptions that have been internalized by the exponents of these different disciplines. Moreover, when, in the course of these discussions, students also discover that the different knowledges that their professors have produced about Cold War film were in part the outcome of the different presuppositions organizing their fields, the students go about scrutinizing those presuppositions. The students and faculty who participate in these conversations are the joint beneficiaries of this truly interdisciplinary knowledge.

TDR: You teach the Addictions COCO course; do you teach other MALS courses? What is your role within the MALS program?

Pease: After I agreed to chair the MALS program, I undertook the redesigning of it. When I took up the position of Chair, MALS had only one track. It was called General Liberal Studies. While the General Liberal Studies track offered MALS students a vast array of possible courses that they could take for their degree, it did not provide any orientation for the organization of their interdisciplinary research. As a consequence, the program was lacking in coherence. Since the General Liberal Studies track didn’t provide MALS students methodogical preparation for the continuation of their graduate education, they discovered that many graduate programs would not recognize the MALS degree as adequate preparation for admission into Ph.D. programs.

The new concentrations produced tracks that enabled MALS students successfully to pursue advanced graduate degrees. For example, over the last two years, two of our Cultural Studies Concentrators received fellowships to study American Studies and Renaissance Literature at the University of Michigan, and another was just granted an assistantship at Oxford University. Over that same time period, graduates with a Globalization Studies concentration have received assistantships to NYU, Indiana and Princeton University in Anthropology. Three years ago, a young woman from our Creative Writing concentration received one of the MacArthur “Genius Grants”—which, as you know, are usually restricted to artists and academics who are pretty far along in their careers . Her name is Anna Schuleit, and her work became of such interest to the MacArthur Foundation that they gave her a five-year grant to continue working on her installations. That grant also brought attention to the changes in the MALS program, and the importance of these initiatives.

But after redesigning the interdisciplinary tracks of the MALS program, I discovered that many of the other aspects of it needed re-evaluation as well. That was a daunting but potentially wonderful challenge. MALS is fortunate to have a world class faculty, and they have played an indispensable role in revamping the program’s structure. However, I do not think that the changes that the faculty recommended could have been codified into readily understood rules and procedures were it not for the skill and expertise of Lauren Clarke, the Executive Director of MALS, and our remarkably capable and efficient office staff.

Each Summer I also teach an Introduction to Cultural Studies with Professor Patricia McKee whose very different disciplinary perspective on Cultural Studies results at times in quite intense conversations with our students and with each other. In the past, I taught a MALS course on the Culture of the Cold War with Marty Sherwin, who won the Pulitzer Prize last year for his book on Oppenheimer. While I discussed events and policies from the perspective of Cold War literature, film and drama (I concentrated on Joseph Heller’s Catch–22, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and Marguerite Duras’s Hiroshima Mon Amour), he analyzed the same cultural terrain from his perspective as a historian of atomic diplomacy (his primary texts were NSC-67, George Kennan’s essays, and his own prize-winning history, A World Destroyed). Students loved it.

The MALS program brings faculty together in the same classroom space who have different points of view and whose interests are not restricted merely to defending their disciplinary enclaves. In conversing with one another about problems of shared concern, these MALS faculty invariably produce classroom situations in which they discover how their different intellectual perspectives reveal the blind-spots and lacunae within the disciplines from which they approach these topics. The MALS courses that result from these joint ventures are deeply edifying all the way through.

I began teaching in the MALS program in the Summer of 1976. I became so invested in what I considered the educational benefits of the courses that I taught that I wanted to take this program—which was under threat of being discontinued when I became Chair in 1999—and attempt to renew it. In the recent past, Dartmouth’s faculty members were a little tentative about expressing an interest in teaching MALS students. This past year Dartmouth faculty from across the Humanities and Social Sciences have expressed interest in teaching in the MALS Program.

Over the last six years, MALS and COCO have entered into a reciprocal relationship. While I take great satisfaction in fostering COCO courses by investing MALS revenue in them, I find it even more gratifying to offer junior faculty who are unable to turn their interdisciplinary research projects into the basis for undergraduate courses the opportunity to organize MALS courses out of those projects. After junior faculty turn their research into MALS courses, those courses can thereafter be recycled as COCO courses within the undergraduate curriculum. The course that works for students in the MALS program thereby becomes of comparable benefit to undergraduates taking COCO courses.

TDR: When did you take over the program?

Pease: I think that was in 1998—no, ’99 was my first year.

TDR: And before that, the program was primarily for people looking to teach at—?

Pease: During the first twenty years of its existence, MALS’ primary constituency taught in high schools and prep schools. Over the past decade, MALS has continued to address the pedagogical and scholarly needs of high school and prep school teachers (as well as the adult learners and Dartmouth administrators in the program), but it has also extended its applicant pool to include young scholars who are pursuing Ph.D.s as well as degrees in Law, Business Administration, Medicine, and Engineering. As a result, the MALS applicant pool has undergone a dramatic change. In addition to prep school and high school teachers, recent graduates from institutions of the standing of Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Berkeley, Bowdoin, and Dartmouth began applying for admission to MALS. MALS is now considered a very good site of transition for recent college graduates who want to be exposed to the wide-range of methodologies associated with Globalization Studies, Cultural Studies, Environmental Studies before going on for a higher degree. MALS offers them that.

TDR: How many students are in MALS?

Pease: We enroll between seventy and ninety MALS students during each term of the academic year, and about a hundred each summer. So it’s a fairly large graduate program.

TDR: And what’s the breakdown between older students who had probably taught some high school or prep school before and people straight out of college?

Pease: Over the last decade, the ratio has shifted. During the academic year, probably two thirds of the students are recent graduates—they’re not necessarily right out of college. Another third include adult learners, Dartmouth staff and students who have returned to complete the MALS degree. In the summer, the ratio is somewhat different. In addition to the year-long students, many high school and prep school teachers enroll in the summer quarter. In all, about a hundred students enroll in the summer. Of that one hundred, I’d estimate that about forty percent are high school and prep school teachers. So it’s a 60/40 ratio during the summer term.

TDR: How long, if they just do summer terms, does it take them to complete the MALS program?

Pease: It takes about five summer terms. You can complete a MALS degree in about a year and a half if you enroll year-long.

TDR: And are there any challenges that the program is facing right now?

Pease: When you administer a program, there are always challenges. Last year I discovered that in their public presentations of their Masters theses, MALS students drew audiences that differed drastically in size and interest. The MALS students whose friends and relatives lived close by would draw between twenty and thirty persons. Others drew between one and two to their presentations. International students were among the MALS graduates most adversely affected by this disparity in attendance. To address this problem, I decided to turn the theses presentations into discussion panels. I aggregated all of the theses into related concentrations and divided them into discussion groups consisting of three theses presentations on a related topic of no more than fifteen minutes. We scheduled three of these discussion groups each day of the final week of the term. Since the members of each discussion panel included MALS students with large and not so large followings, the audience for each of these panels remained about the same size. The panel discussion format also enabled the theses presenters to engage in conversation with their audience and with each other. When I am confronted with a problem, I try to find a solution that creates a benefit for several different constituencies. When it benefits multiple groups, I know that the solution is working.

Another problem that I’m trying to solve at present involves heightening the sense of camaraderie and collegiality among MALS students. Each summer, I direct a MALS Symposium around an issue of great concern. For example, we had a symposium on the ideology of terrorism two years ago. Last summer, the symposium topic was the prison houses of democracy. This summer, we’re going to discuss “1968.” The Summer Symposium fosters intellectual community that is missing from the other terms of the academic calendar. So presently I’m trying to figure out a way to produce intellectual cohesion in the absence of a symposium, and I’m considering various structures that might accomplish that purpose.

TDR: Can you talk a bit about the place of graduate studies at Dartmouth? I’m not talking about the professional schools, but more within the College.

Pease: I think Dartmouth is an institution that has done well by way of John Dickey’s having produced a rationale for offering doctoral programs in the sciences while simultaneously maintaining a commitment to undergraduate education. The asymmetry between the doctoral research in the sciences and the absence of Ph.D. offerings in the liberal arts sector of this institution sustained Dartmouth’s commitment to the liberal arts. The liberal arts ethos, which MALS continues, facilitates Dartmouth students’ exposure to a broad range of very different disciplines while enabling them to choose the particular discipline(s) in which they wish to concentrate. MALS ratifies that ethos in its emphasis on interdisciplinarity as the core of graduate education.

You could not have Dartmouth undergraduates exposed to up-to-date science research if you did not have doctoral programs in the sciences. If Dartmouth did not have Ph.D. programs in the sciences, the institution would lose the capacity to bring scholars to Dartmouth who were pursuing cutting-edge scientific research. Scientific research requires laboratories. Labs must be staffed by research assistants. But the Humanities professors do not need, or at least I don’t feel the need, especially in this market, Ph.D students to further their research. I’ve published widely, I lecture internationally. In this job market, if I had graduate students for whom I could not find jobs, I would feel guilt each day, because I would feel as though I were benefiting from their assistance while I was unable to find them suitable appointments.

To do my part in fostering the acquisition of Humanities Ph.D.s, I hold an International Institute here at Dartmouth for one week every summer on the topic of the Future of American Studies. The Institute brings in Ph.D. candidates in American Studies from all over the world. These scholars have developed support networks that have become the basis for their finding jobs. That institute has fostered Ph.D. level thinking in my honors students and my Presidential Scholars, and the other undergraduates I have invited to the Institute—it has no downside. I get to help Ph.D. students everywhere. I get to read all their work, so I know the cutting edge in my discipline, and I assist them in producing a network that enables them to find jobs. It would take Dartmouth at least twenty-five years to develop a first-rate humanities Ph.D. program, and the market is already inhospitable to the production of any such Ph.D. program.

So I find that what I’m doing as a teacher of undergraduates, to which vocation, as you may know, I am completely committed—I love teaching—and what I do in MALS, to be interdependent. They’re reciprocally enriching. Reciprocal benefits constitute one of my core values. I don’t believe in doing anything that doesn’t benefit a lot of people. I don’t believe you should do anything just for yourself.

TDR: The way higher education works seems a little opaque. Could you talk a little more about the mechanics of what it would take in order to get a first-rate Ph.D. program in the humanities at Dartmouth.

Pease: Well, in order to get a first-rate, say, English department at Dartmouth, you would have to produce a crop—administrators call it “crop”—of Dartmouth Ph.D. students who would then go out into the larger scholarly environment, and in the course of their teaching, send their students back to Dartmouth to learn. That takes two generations. You don’t become a first-rate Ph.D. institution until the Ph.D.s you have turned out in turn educate students who want to matriculate at Dartmouth’s English department to pursue work on their Ph.D.s. The two-generational span indicates both the substantive value and the durability of your Ph.D. program.

Of course you could also try the star system. You could go out and buy celebrity scholars. But if you did that, you’d have to know that those celebrity scholars are just in it for the market, and they’d leave you if they received an offer from a more prestigious (or wealthier) English Department! So in order to develop a Ph.D. program with gravitas, you have to decide you’re going to make a twenty-five year investment.

Dartmouth is a first-rate institution; it’s a world-class institution. It should not agree to fund Ph.D. initiatives that will remain second-rate for twenty-five years. Dartmouth should build upon and enrich its already existing doctoral programs, but I think it would be devastating to this institution to develop Ph.D. programs in the social sciences and the humanities.

TDR: You mentioned that the MALS program was also conceived of at Wesleyan and Georgetown. What has happened with those programs? Have they followed the same arc that Dartmouth’s MALS program has?

Pease: I don’t think they have undertaken the wholesale redefinition that the Dartmouth MALS program has. And I don’t say this out of any sense of institutional vanity. I say it because I do think our MALS program is unique. I don’t know of any other MALS programs that have developed concentrations in Cultural Studies, in Globalization Studies, in Environmental Studies, and in Creative Writing that allow for the best faculty to pursue interdisciplinary instruction in courses that they can’t offer in their undergraduate teaching.

TDR: Is the difference between the MALS creative writing program and an MFA that the MALS program emphasizes the interdisciplinary?

Pease: Yes. In the MALS Creative Writing track, you have to fulfill all the interdisciplinary requirements as well as concentrate in Creative Writing, and that means you could be both a creative writing instructor in a community college as well as an instructor in the field of literature. MALS Creative Writers have more options.

TDR: Thank you for your time and best of luck with your MALS program.

TDR Interview: Professor Donald Pease on MALS

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