The Dartmouth faculty recently voted to elevate the linguistics and cognitive science program to permanent status, a sign of the program's success despite its somewhat humble beginnings, according to Provost Barry Scherr and linguistics program chair Lindsay Whaley.
Members of Dartmouth's faculty first examined starting a linguistics program in the early 1970s, according to Scherr. At the time, Walter Arndt, a Russian professor who was also interested in linguistics, taught a course called Language 26 which was similar to today's introductory linguistics course.
The Dartmouth faculty voted down Ardnt's proposal, so the question did not emerge again until the mid-1980s, Scherr said.
A faculty committee, of which both Scherr and current Dean of Faculty Jamshed Bharucha were members, researched the study of linguistics and cognitive science at various other schools across the country, including Brown and Vassar.
The faculty approved a linguistics and cognitive science program in 1987, and the program began offering courses in 1993. Also that year, the College hired Whaley as the first professor to hold a joint appointment in linguistics and another department.
Whaley said that the department's small size posed various problems in its inaugural years. As linguistics and cognitive science had few faculty and could only offer relatively few courses, the new program initially had difficulty attracting students.
Small programs often run into particular difficulties at Dartmouth because of the set-up of the D-Plan. Whaley noted that many students ran into difficulties completing majors or minors in linguistics or cognitive science because they were on leave during the only term that a required course was offered.
A number of students thus had to spend transfer terms at schools like the University of California-San Diego or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to complete their majors, Scherr said.
The program's highly interdisciplinary nature has also been a mixed blessing, according to Whaley.
While he admired the way that linguistics combines offerings in the humanities, social and natural sciences, he also said that hiring faculty to teach such interdisciplinary courses is difficult.
"It's very difficult to hire someone with a joint appointment in, say, cognitive science and computer science," he said, "since the person has to be approved by committees from several different departments."
Whaley emphasized that he did not wish to overstate the extent of the problems that the young department has faced. "It's easy for those of us in the program to talk about struggles, but it isn't the case that we've been fighting an evil administration," he said. "They've made an institutional effort to help us out."
Neither Scherr nor Whaley thought that the program's elevation to permanent status would change its day-to-day functioning. However, Scherr expected that the program's elevation will help it when it seeks funding or becomes interested in hiring another faculty member.
