By Kylie Lancaster//
Hood College plans to eliminate global studies as a standalone major and restructure political science into a two-track program starting in the fall.
Interim Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs Paige Eager submitted a memo to the Curriculum Committee proposing that future political science students choose a focus in American or global politics after completing the major’s core curriculum.
“Given faculty andstaffing expertise, as well as decreasing enrolled majors in Global Studies in recent years, the Department of Politics, Law, and Criminal Justice proposes to eliminate the Global Studies major while simultaneously revising the existing Political Science major to now include two tracks—American Politics and Global Politics,” Eager said in the proposal.
The global politics track will eliminate the required four semesters of a foreign language and will require fewer art and history courses than were in the global studies major.
Both the American politics and global studies tracts will require two semesters of a foreign language, and students will decide how to fulfill their credit-hour requirements through several course collections created for both tracks.
The global studies minor will also be reinvented into a global politics minor.
These changes will not affect students who are currently majoring in global studies.
“The students who are currently still a global studies major, they’ll be able to finish out their curriculum under that catalog’s requirements with no problem,” Eager said.
The department’s name will be modified to reflect these changes. The prospective, official name will be the Department of Political Science, Global Studies, and Law and Criminal Justice.
The Board of Trustees will formally vote on these changes at its meeting in March.
Associate professor of political science Carin Robinson said these changes to the department are being made to better align with students’ interests.
“It’s being done because we care about our students, and we want to align their interests with what we’re offering, and we also want to account for just the current climate,” Robinson said.
Robinson added that this will better reflect the expertise of different staff members, offer simplicity to students, and foster greater community and engagement within the department.
These adjustments also aim to broaden the knowledge of students studying political science.
“We’re just making sure that students in both tracks have, at least, some kind of surface-level knowledge about what’s either happening on the domestic side or the global side,” Eager said.
Robinson will advise students in the American politics track, while Eager will advise students in the global politics track. Gracia Lopez, a new professor, will advise law and criminal justice students.
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