It's common knowledge that the international relations department is a flagship institution at Brown. The department peaked as the single most popular concentration among graduating Brown students in 2005, and since then has hovered around third place. However, this common knowledge is mistaken.
As Mark Blyth, the new director of the international academic programs, described in a letter to the international relations and development studies concentrators last Thursday, the international relations that you naively thought was a "department" (or at least was given the same rights) is not — it is a program. In the refreshingly honest words of the letter, that means that "we have fewer resources, no permanent faculty, and an overworked advising structure. We are critically under-resourced." And possibly about to become more so, as the University is merging the already-giant IR program (300 students) with the development studies program (100 students), creating what will likely be the largest department, er, "program," at Brown.
Anyone paying close attention to the IR department-program at Brown would not be surprised by the director's statement. Or anyone not paying close attention who has ever tried to obtain guidance, get into a seminar or write a thesis in this critically over-crowded program, for that matter.
All 300-plus students in the IR program have a single undergraduate advisor capable of signing off on paperwork and offering guidance. The English and Engineering departments, both of which have half the students that IR does, have six and twelve advisors, respectively. The huge, new, beautiful Watson Institute building is an empty palace, with its single advisor and handful of staff and faculty occupying one niche.
After all, labeling IR a program means that the University can avoid hiring permanent faculty. According to the new joint-program description, IR and development studies together have over 400 students and three faculty members. Not only does this make the chance of one-on-one mentoring by an IR professor minuscule, it makes small classes a distant dream for most concentrators until they reach senior year. Even then, chances are still low. IR offered a single seminar to over 100 seniors this fall; American civilization, with its similar but geographically different content and a fraction of the students, offered four.
However, IR is interdisciplinary; students could just take their courses in other departments. IR can substitute political science and history courses for IR courses quite easily in terms of content, but not in practice. Political science, history and international relations concentrators combined make up nearly a quarter of Brown students, and they are increasingly being packed into the most competitive and cutthroat registration process at Brown. Overflow from the IR program has resulted in the swamping of political science's and history's also-limited seminars, and leads to resentment and in-fighting among the concentrations. Regardless, even interdisciplinary concentrations benefit from a support system and faculty-student interaction.
The IR program's unusually difficult thesis requirements also bear the marks of funding suffocation. An IR thesis at Brown is usually required to be around 120 - 150 pages; Georgetown only requires about 50 - 80 pages. Even the most writing-intensive concentrations at Brown, such as comparative literature and English, also only expect 50 - 80 pages.
Why are the thesis requirements nearly double that of other departments? Maybe the IR program wants to be academically rigorous. Or maybe since the IR program does not have the staff to handle more than one twenty-student senior seminar, it has decided to resort to desperate measures to weed out applicants, including raising requirements to the point that writing a senior thesis requires dropping just about everything else.
All of this is by design, not by accident. In the words of the new director, "Deans like programs because unlike departments, they cost about one-tenth of a department to run. This is because they have no permanent faculty and they live off the offerings of faculty in other departments. We are cheap." I believe it.
After all, the program is a windfall for Brown. For every student who majors in IR instead of an "expensive" concentration, the University saves money on training advisors and hiring faculty. Lack of funding forces the IR program to separate students from the resources they deserve — advising, faculty, seminars, theses — and the University is making money by doing so. As IR becomes more and more relevant in a globalizing world and continues to attract more students, the University will continue to save thousands in unhired faculty, advisors, and staff.
And now that the recession has wiped out millions of Brown's endowment dollars, the administration's first instinct, apparently, has been to choke more money out of the program. While I believe the new director has the best of intentions and several good ideas, the overly convenient timing and lack of genuine duplication between the programs reeks of spending cuts. The sad aspect of all of this is that, regardless of how hard the administration of the IR program works, and has worked, they have also been doomed to fail by a university that seems to have no interest in funding their success.
Michelle Uhrick '11 is an international relations and economics concentrator from Connecticut. She can be contacted at michelle_uhrick@brown.edu
