Expand the Menu of Majors

For better or worse, one way that prospective students search for colleges is by looking for particular majors, and one way that prospective students' enthusiasms about higher education are excited is by imagining themselves majoring in various things.  In short, the list of majors (again, FBOW) functions a bit like the menu in the restaurant window.

It may well be that Mills does not optimally present the possibilities that prospective students would find here (in other words, students CAN do more than it looks like they can).  Our offerings in terms of majors are, for the most part, program- and department-bound.  We have been (wisely, we probably feel) rather conservative in this regard.  We have developed a few (e.g. intermedia arts, public policy), but we tend right away to think of these as programs/proto-departments that need to stand on their own.  Our experiments in expanding student options within the existing envelope of course offerings are fewer.

This proposal is for more consideration of moderately creative multi-disciplinary majors that put together courses from different areas.  They can be "housed" in a given department but draw on courses in multiple departments.  We have some models for this (there is an anthropology/sociology degree, for example, that uses parts of the sociology major but substitutes several anthropology courses).  This is arguably the very spirit of the liberal arts.

We rightly worry about falsely advertising things we can't really offer, but there might be attractive majors that we do have the courses for (or that we almost do and that a strategic supplementary hire would leverage).  This might be an opportunity to define new positions that can create multiple such leverages.  Strategically, this should be co-driven by what would really enhance the attractiveness of our repertoire of majors and what existing curricular resources are most exploitable via strategic investment.

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