The Committee on Instruction recently approved a proposal to split the Asian Studies Program and create a new Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Literatures.
The proposal will now go to the Committee on Organization and Policy for approval. If the COP approves it, the general faculty will review the proposal and vote on it. If the faculty approve the proposal, then the Board of Trustees will vote on the plan.
COI Chair Gary Johnson said he expects the proposal to pass and be fully operational by July 1, the start of the new academic and fiscal year.
The new department will contain most of the classes and professors now in the Asian Studies Program, said Registrar Tom Bickel. The change is essentially structural, he added. "To the students, the change will be virtually invisible," Bickel said.
Professors currently teaching in the Asian Studies Program will become permanent faculty members in the new department, Bickel said.
Only the off-campus program to Morocco will remain in Asian Studies Department after the creation of this new department, said Dean of the Humanities Mary Jean Green.
Green said the new department will not require new financial resources, but will require a reallocation of the resources currently assigned to Asian Studies.
"No positions are being added, and no administrative work is being added," she said. "If anything, it will simplify things."
Green said the Asian Studies Program wanted to create the department because the professors thought the proposed department had interests similar to the other literature and languages departments in the Humanities division.
In a letter to Johnson last month, Green wrote, "the reorganization will better serve the interests of the Asian Studies curriculum by enabling the language and literature faculty in Asian and Middle Eastern languages to function within an administrative framework similar to that of the other language departments at Dartmouth."
All other language departments at the College are in the Humanities division, while the Asian Studies program is currently under the Social Sciences division.
"It puts people with common interests together and makes a good deal of administrative sense," Green said.
"I think everyone is very happy about this reorganization," she said. "Humanities is happy to welcome this new department."
Bickel said the split of Mathematics and Computer Science was the last time an academic structural change occurred.
