Following proposals from three departments to suspend programs, the Academic Senate approved these suspensions — the M.A. in Women and Gender Studies, the M.A. in Anthropology and the B.A. in Chinese: Concentration in Flagship Chinese Language — at the end of April.
Jackson Wilson, Academic Senate chair, said the suspensions were done to provide transparency about program availability.
“This is most often done to allow for changes in the academic program that can support the sustainability and/or quality of the academic program for future students,” Wilson said.
The Chinese Flagship Program was federally funded for 15 years until the end of Spring 2024, according to prior coverage by Golden Gate Xpress.
“If within the next three years, we can reinstate the funding, we will resume the program,” said Frederik Green, modern languages and literatures department chair.
For the anthropology master’s program, there aren’t enough students. The classes got smaller and smaller to a point where it was unsustainable, according to Mark Griffin, department chair.
“It really is just a pretty simple matter that over the last five years, we’ve had a declining number of applications and a declining number of folks that we admit to the program that actually start,” said Griffin. “Most folks apply to multiple different programs and they simply decided not to come here.”
Griffin said that the department will monitor the numbers of students at other anthropology master’s programs in California. If there’s an increase in enrollment elsewhere, meaning higher demand, the department will look to bring the master’s program back.
Since 1994, Niccolo Caldararo has lectured in the anthropology department. He said there aren’t enough people teaching.
“Currently, there are only five faculty members in the Department of Anthropology,” Caldararo said. “I cannot recall when there were so few — usually there are nine or 10. And with so few full-time instructors, you can not effectively maintain the teaching requirements for undergrads, let alone a graduate program — just my opinion. I would be sad to see this realized, as we have had an excellent M.A. program for decades.”
The women and gender studies department doesn’t have enough people to teach the program.
“We made this difficult decision because we only have four tenured/tenure-track faculty and we wanted to focus our efforts on our B.A. and three minors,” said Martha Kenney, department chair.
Deborah Cohler, a professor, added that four faculty members have left in the past few years and haven’t been replaced. She said on top of that, recent layoffs of lecturers in the department have made it difficult to support only undergraduates.
“We will enthusiastically resume our M.A. program when the university supports the department’s need for the eight full-time tenured positions, which the last three of our external reviews have recommended,” Cohler said.
