Sen. Doc. No. 20-087 SPECIAL REPORT OF THE ACADEMIC PRIORITIES, GRADUATE AND PROGRAM AND BUDGET COUNCILS concerning CREATION OF A Ph.D AND A M.A. IN WOMEN, GENDER, SEXUALITY STUDIES (#6766) Presented at the 796th Regular Meeting of the Faculty Senate April 23, 2020 COUNCIL MEMBERSHIP ACADEMIC PRIORITIES COUNCIL Richard Bogartz, Kathleen Debevec Witz, Steve Goodwin, Farshid Hajir, Jean DeMartinis, Piper Gaubatz, Sangeeta Kamat, Roberta Marvin, Joya Misra, MJ Peterson, Catrine Tudor- Locke, Jack Wileden ACADEMIC PRIORITIES COUNCIL The Academic Priorities Council recommends approval of this proposal. GRADUATE COUNCIL Sonia Alvarez, Pamela Aselton, Joseph Black, D. Anthony Butterfield, Ana Caicedo, David Cort, Robert DeConto, Jennifer Friedman, Mark Hamin, Neil Immerman, Cynthia Jacelon, Ramakrishna Janaswamy, Barbara Krauthamer, John Lopes, Martina Nieswandt, MJ Peterson, Sarah Pfatteicher, Sarah Poissant, Rebecca Reznik-Zellen, Frederic Schaffer, Patrick Sullivan, David Vaillancourt, Tilman Wolf, Kristine Yu GRADUATE COUNCIL The Graduate Council recommends approval of this proposal. Sen. Doc. No. 20-087 PROGRAM AND BUDGET COUNCIL Joseph Bartolomeo, William Brown, D. Anthony Butterfield, Elizabeth Chang, Nancy Cohen, Patricia Galvis-Assmus, Steve Goodwin, Deborah Gould, Moira Inghilleri, Lisa Liebowitz, Andrew Mangels, Ernest May, Lynn McKenna, Anthony Paik, MJ Peterson, Alexander Phillips, Anurag Sharma PROGRAM AND BUDGET COUNCIL The Program and Budget Council recommends approval of this proposal. See the following attachments for description of this proposal: 1. Degree Proposal Outline 2. Proposal Budget 3. Faculty Curricula Vitae 4. Graduate Program Curricula Outline 5. Course Summary MOTION: That the Faculty Senate approve the Creation of a Ph.D. and M.A. In 36-20 Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, as presented in Sen. Doc. No. 20-087 Sen. Doc. No. 20-087 UMass New Academic Program –Submission Template Ph.D. and M.A. in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Proposed Degree(s) Title: Ph.D. and M.A. in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Proposed CIP Code: 05.0207 Date of Board of Trustees Vote: (leave blank; AASAIR will fill in) Date Letter of Intent submitted to Commissioner (leave blank; AASAIR will fill in) A. Alignment with Institution Mission Priorities. How does the proposed program align with the institution’s mission priorities? As the flagship public university in the state of Massachusetts, UMass Amherst seeks to create a “positive impact on the commonwealth and the broader society through education and advancing knowledge.” Central to this mission, as expressed in the Chancellor’s 2018-23 Strategic Plan, is the mandate to “add to the commonwealth’s long tradition of intellectual and educational leadership” and to create impact through research, teaching, and public service. Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies (WGSS) is uniquely situated to deepen and expand the mission of the University because, as an academic field with deep roots in the feminist and civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, it is organized around a commitment to advancing knowledge and engaging in groundbreaking research, teaching, and service to the community. The interdisciplinary methods and modes of inquiry at the heart of WGSS prepare students to formulate research questions and engage in knowledge projects that yield insights unavailable within the bounds of traditional disciplinary inquiry. As the Provost’s Joint Task Force on Strategic Oversight recognized in their 2013 report Innovation and Impact: Renewing the Promise of the Public Research University: “Many of the most important research challenges occur at the boundaries between disciplines.” The Task Force’s call for the development of “flexible and nimble mechanisms to help incubate interdisciplinary research” and an increase in support for “cross-disciplinary collaboration” signals the University’s existing commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship and sets the stage for the development of a Ph.D. program in WGSS at UMass Amherst. Cross-disciplinary collaboration and interdisciplinary research are fundamental to the work we do in WGSS and are evident in the doctoral level scholarship of our students. A research- oriented graduate certificate program such as our WGSS Graduate Certificate in Feminist Studies, provides students with opportunities to partner with WGSS faculty in the research and teaching enterprise and to acquire the critical tools that will enable them to engage in interdisciplinary work. The research and scholarship of our WGSS certificate students clearly illustrate the ways in which our program supports the agenda of the Provost’s Joint Task Force and also the Chancellor’s larger mission, as expressed in the 2018-23 Strategic Plan, to “instill in our students an ongoing commitment to create a better, more just world.” Recent graduate research projects include: Reproductive Migration and Indo-Caribbean Women; Women’s Rights and Forced Sterilization in Peru; Intellectual Traditions and Practices of Left Activism in 1 Sen. Doc. No. 20-087 the U.S.; the Politics of Sex Work; Resisting the Colonial Consensus in Vietnamese and French Leftist politics; Biopolitics and the Science of Lactation; Medicalization, Naturalization and the Study of Abortion as a Biosocial Achievement; Gender, Sexuality and the “Queer South”; Gender, Race and Surveillance. A new Ph.D. program in WGSS, enrolling a cohort of 4 students every other year (see Section C- 4, page 9 for admission information), will expand opportunities for graduate students to engage in even more in-depth interdisciplinary research, and will also aid in preparing them for a wide range of professional careers. A WGSS Ph.D. from UMass will provide students with background in multiple bodies of knowledge and rigorous training in diverse methods of problem-solving that will enable them to use their doctoral-level credential to take on leadership roles in a variety of fields, not just higher education, but also public policy, media, health education, human rights research and advocacy. It will also enable students to contribute to larger debates about how to improve people’s lives that bring to bear a 45-year tradition of thinking about gender, sexuality, race, and class while incorporating the newest innovations in disciplines and interdisciplines. The state of Massachusetts is already a leader in public policies that particularly benefit women, children, and LGBTQ people such as universal health care, same-sex marriage, and high-quality public education; Massachusetts would benefit from the creation of a new advanced graduate degree that would prepare students for innovation and critical thought with respect to culture and policy related to race, gender, sexuality, and political economy. Our new Ph.D. program promises to emerge as a leader among other established WGSS doctoral programs in the U.S. because it will build on an already strong graduate certificate program in Feminist Studies. Each year, this certificate program admits 10-12 new students. These are students who seek the feminist interdisciplinary training we offer while they are enrolled in master’s and doctoral degree programs in departments all across the university, including: Anthropology, Computer Science, Molecular and Cellular Biology, English, History, Sociology, Education, Political Science, Economics, Nutrition, Theater, Communication, Comparative Literature, Afro-American Studies, Public Health, German Studies, American Studies, and Spanish and Portuguese. The wide range of students who are attracted to advanced work in Feminist Studies, along with the large number of faculty from across the university who seek to affiliate with our program, attest to the strong interest in the interdisciplinary training we offer and also the intellectual breadth and depth of our program. Our new Ph.D. program will not only strengthen these interdisciplinary connections, fundamental to the cutting-edge scholarship of WGSS, but will also better align our department with our national peers in this field, such as the two largest programs, Rutgers University (5-6 Ph.D. students admitted annually/27 core faculty in WGSS) and UCLA (6-7 Ph.D. students admitted annually/17 core faculty in WGSS), and programs more comparable to ours, including: University of Minnesota (3-4 Ph.D. students admitted annually/13 core faculty in WGSS), Ohio State University (4-5 Ph.D. students admitted annually/ 11 core faculty in WGSS), and Emory University (5 Ph.D. students admitted annually/ 10 core faculty in WGSS). Less competitors than powerful allies in our bid to create a new Ph.D. program that will enlarge the community of WGSS scholars and professionals nationwide, these other institutions nevertheless cannot offer students the extensive academic resources and professional opportunities available at UMass and 2 Sen. Doc. No. 20-087 in the New England region more broadly. Our program would be the only WGSS Ph.D. in New England, which, with its multitude of small liberal arts colleges and large research universities, makes this region an ideal place to found such a program. We fully expect the strong reputation of our faculty along with our nationally ranked department to draw applicants not just from New England, but also from across the country and internationally. Extensive consultation with our colleagues from the other member institutions of the Five College Consortium (Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Hampshire College, Smith College), strengthens our belief that, even if we