Last week, in a unanimous decision by the school faculty, Brandeis University became the first U.S. college to create a liberal arts program specifically devoted to the study of the Internet.
The new program, entitled "Internet Studies," will be available as an interdepartmental minor comprising courses in computer science, legal studies, economics, anthropology, politics and the fine arts, among others, according to Tim Hickey, professor of computer science at Brandeis and interim head of the program.
He explained that the program had been a natural outgrowth of the increasing emphasis on the Internet in many departments.
"We were already offering almost a dozen courses in many key aspects of the Internet," Hickey said, adding that the program has thus far seen the introduction of only one new course, "Internet and Society," which along with the pre-existing "Introduction to Computers" will form the required core of the new minor.
Hickey also noted that the creation of the program had been partly motivated by growing student interest in the field. "'Internet and Society' was approved after pre-registration, and already it is the 10th largest class at the college," he said.
The program, which will start in September 2001, according to Hickey, has no direct counterpart at Dartmouth or any other Ivy League institution, though many schools do offer individual courses based around study of the Internet.
Robert Constable, Dean of Information and Computing at Cornell University, said that although no minor or major in Internet-related studies is currently offered at Cornell, a number of courses do deal with the subject.
"We have programs that are broadly interdisciplinary," he said, citing the school's Information Science minor, which involves disciplines as diverse as communications, psychology, and sociology, and which draws faculty from a wide range of departments.
Other schools, among them Harvard and Yale, do boast research programs dedicated to the Internet, though none offers the minor that Brandeis does.
As for Dartmouth, Computer Science Professor David Nicol said he knew of no such programs at the College.
"There's nothing like it that exists at the present," he said, while noting that a new initiative is in the works to bring together computing and the other disciplines in what he referred to as a "third leg of the sciences."
One point common to all schools, however, seems to be a rapidly growing interest in computing and the Internet that has paralleled the worldwide explosion in computer use and electronic commerce.
Hickey, speaking of the response to the new program at Brandeis, mentioned the "high interest" among the student body, while Constable noted that at Cornell "it's impossible to keep up with student interest."
At Dartmouth, Nicol said that enrollment in the graduate computer science program had increased in recent years, and added that computer science had also rapidly gained in popularity as a major.
