Duke, UNC-CH join in German

2 schools to merge doctoral programs

DURHAM -- As the faculties of German graduate programs across the country dwindle in number, resources and scope, the faculties at Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill are joining forces in the hope of bucking this ominous national trend.

Starting this fall, doctoral students in German at UNC-CH and Duke will all be part of the same program, a rare venture for humanities departments at major universities.

These graduate students -- six to eight a year are expected to enroll -- will, like students in the Duke/UNC Robertson Scholars program, take courses at each university. Once finished, they will receive a diploma with both institutions' names on it. Tuition and fees for the students, who will teach undergraduate courses, will be fully funded for five years.

Undergraduate German programs at the universities will remain separate and distinct. The joint graduate venture is the result of several years of planning and a long feeling-out process, during which time faculty members at the two institutions went to conferences together, brought visiting professors in from Germany to teach at both universities, and started a monthly work-in-progress seminar during which students and professors alike reported on work they were doing.

It was a test period, said Ann Marie Rasmussen, chairwoman of Duke's Germanic Languages and Literature department.

"The faculty would have to get along," she said. "People have to want to change."

For years, German departments have shrunk as interest in undergraduate language courses -- a German department's bread and butter -- has waned in comparison with other disciplines. A 2006 study by the Modern Language Association found that enrollment in German language courses at U.S. colleges had risen 3.5 percent over four years. Over that same span, enrollment in Spanish courses grew 10.3 percent, in Italian, 22.6 percent. Japanese enrollment increased 27.5 percent, and enrollment in Arabic courses, while still comparatively small in total numbers, jumped 126.5 percent.

"It's this whole shift," Rasmussen said, "this expansion of what 'international' means and our awareness of the entire globe."

As a result, German graduate programs at UNC-CH and Duke had been forced to pare their offerings to a few areas of expertise. Duke's German department, for example, has shrunk from eight full-time faculty members to four this year, though Rasmussen said the drop came all at once in 2007 thanks to the retirement of one professor, the unexpected death of another, and the departure of two more for jobs elsewhere.

UNC-CH's faculty numbers have held steady. There, the merger is a way to navigate uncertainty, said Clayton Koelb, who is chairman of the German Language and Literatures Department.

"There won't be a place for more than a few exceptional German graduate programs in North America," he said.

The sales pitch to the two faculties has been this: By joining forces, they can once again create a curriculum with broad reach -- teaching everything from basic German language to gender studies, critical theory, psychoanalysis, early modern German, medieval, and Jewish studies, Rasmussen said.

Sara Lennox, a German studies professor at the University of Massachusetts and president of the national German Studies Association, said foreign language departments across the nation are struggling, in part because faculty in the humanities don't bring in grant funding like those in the sciences do, and perhaps also because of a societal de-emphasis on the value of literature. The Duke/UNC-CH merger, she said, is a good idea.

"I think it's a great move," Lennox said. "Now they can offer a comprehensive program again. Neither could do it alone."

Rasmussen said this sort of joint venture hinges largely on geography; it is unusual for two such academic programs to be close enough to each other that students can easily take courses and teach at both campuses.

And Rasmussen hopes faculty will teach on both campuses as well.

"If we're asking [students] to do it, we should do it, too," she said.