South Asia National Resource Center, University of Chicago
1. Quality of the Applicant's Non-Language Instructional Program
The Chicago South Asia program began in the nineteen fifties, impelled by the intellectual creativity of the anthropologists Robert Redfield and Milton Singer. They brought together colleagues with South Asia interests in the social sciences and the humanities in order to explore ideas of Civilization, high culture and folk culture. Their intellectual agendas informed the Chicago South Asia Center for three decades. Following the recent retirement of several faculty who gave substance to the founders' visions, the Center is reinventing itself through new appointments and the development of new intellectual and pedagogic agenda. The newly appointed faculty of the last nine years, Sheldon Pollock, Arjun Appadurai, Kathleen Morrison, Bruce Lincoln, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Martha Nussbaum, Homi Bhabha, and John Kelly, are propelling South Asian studies in new directions. We see this in their work on new questions concerning ethnicity, religion, gender, identity, the subaltern, the transnational flows of persons and images, the media, and popular forms of communication.
The University of Chicago is a private university of 14,517 students strongly weighted toward graduate teaching, with 3,915 undergraduates to 4,198 graduate students in the humanities, social and hard sciences. There are 5,413 students in professional schools and 919 in non-degree programs. It is one of the world’s great intellectual communities and centers of learning. At one to seven, the University has the highest teacher student ratio of all the private universities with which it compares itself. Its greatest strength is as a teacher of teachers. It produces undergraduates who go on to graduate and professional schools at an unparalleled rate (95%), and graduate students most of whom go on to teach. Lingua franca reported in its 1998/99 review of new full-time junior-level faculty appointments in four-year colleges and universities that in fourteen of twenty-one fields studied the University of Chicago placed more of its Ph.D. graduates in such positions than Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford or Yale. Twenty-one of the faculty specializing in South Asia teach in disciplinary departments which rank in the top six in the country. Approximately 260 courses with South Asia content are taught, 160 or so at any one time (Appendix B).
1.A.1) Variety of disciplines and country coverage. The disciplinary breadth of the Center can be observed by the number of departments and professional programs that have faculty with a significant teaching component covering South Asia (Appendix C), and that have awarded degrees with a South Asian language requirement (Table 1). The Center calls on thirty-eight faculty in eighteen departments and three professional programs. Students have graduated with B.A.s, M.A.s and Ph.D.s in twenty-three departments and six professional programs.
Table 1
Degrees Awarded with South Asian Concentration, Autumn 1996–Summer 1999[1]
|Department |Ph.D. |M.A. |B.A. |
|African American Studies | | |1 |
|Anthropology |11 |15 |7 |
|Art |2 |1 | |
|Behavioral Sciences | | |1 |
|Biological Sciences | | |27 |
|Business School * | |1 |N/A |
|Chemistry | |4 | |
|Comp. Studies in Literature | |1 | |
|History of Culture |1 |1 | |
|Divinity School * |11 |13 |N/A |
|Economics |2 |1 |8 |
|Education * |2 | |N/A |
|English Lang. and Lit. | | |5 |
|Geography | | |1 |
|History |3 |3 |6 |
|International Relations * | |3 |N/A |
|Jewish Studies | | |1 |
|Law * | |1 |N/A |
|Law, Letters and Society | | |1 |
|Linguistics |5 |1 | |
|Near Eastern Lang. and Lit. |1 | |1 |
|Philosophy | | |1 |
|Physical Sciences | | |1 |
|Physics | | |1 |
|Political Science |6 |4 |15 |
|Psychology | |1 |2 |
|Public Policy Studies * | |1 |5 |
|Social Sciences | |6 |5 |
|Social Thought |1 | | |
|Sociology |3 |2 | |
|South Asian Lang. and Civ. |9 |5 |24 |
|Total |56 |65 |112 |
Country coverage in the area can be observed by the reach of courses and Ph.D. dissertations. Ralph Nicholas, Clinton Seely, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, who teach Bengali culture and Bengali, attend to both Bangladesh and West Bengal. The University is a founding member of the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the American Institute of Sri Lankan Studies. C.M. Naim teaches the continent's Islamic culture, Urdu and Urdu literature. He advised the Berkeley Urdu Language Program in Pakistan. He and Lloyd Rudolph also represent Chicago in the American Institute of Pakistan Studies. The program has generated many Ph.D.s on Pakistan. Matthew Kapstein teaches courses on Tibet and Nepal; Susanne Hoeber Rudolph teaches Mughal history, common to both the Indian and Pakistani traditions. Fifty-six Ph.D. dissertations have been by students taking 500 South Asia course units. (Please consult for a complete database of Chicago's Ph.D.s on South Asian topics awarded since 1914.) The broad array of issued addressed in dissertations during the past three years include: economics of consumption in rural Pakistan; the politics of gender, class, and culture in Calcutta jute mills; early cinema and its reception in south India; violence in urban Sri Lanka; the impact of political reform and economic liberalization on India’s federal system; and aesthetics, politics and poetics of visual representation in the liturgical practices of the Vallabha Sampradaya Hindu community at Kota.
1.A.2) Availability of South Asia courses in professional schools. Most prolific of the professional schools in offering joint Ph.D.s with the Center is the Divinity School. These graduates are much sought after in liberal arts college history of religions programs. The Center offers an M.A./M.B.A. in conjunction with the Graduate School of Business that calls for sixteen business and twelve South Asia courses, and a joint M.A. degree with the Committee on International Relations. The Center has also collaborated with the Education Department, the Law School, and the School of Public Policy in training students for M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. (See those marked with asterisks in Table 1.) Finally, it is important to note that students in the professional schools often enroll in South Asia courses as electives even though they are not seeking a formal joint degree.
1.B) Depth of specialized course coverage. The departments of Anthropology, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the Divinity School offer a broad selection of courses, each having more than five faculty members who specialize in South Asia. History and Political Science, with three South Asia faculty each, also provide a range of courses from introductory to advanced. History, like South Asian Languages and Civilizations and the Divinity School, offers courses on both ancient and modern South Asia.
1.C) Interdisciplinary courses. Chicago has a well-known tradition of interdisciplinary studies. Graduate students are actively encouraged to transgress departmental lines through extra-departmental courses. Undergraduates benefit from the three-quarter South Asian Civilizations course, the flagship of the South Asia program, which is currently team-taught by a Buddhologist, a Tamil literature scholar, and a political scientist. Its syllabus includes literature, religion, philosophy, history and contemporary issues. Additionally, it is common for faculty to teach across disciplinary lines, such as Dipesh Chakrabarty (history; social theory; literature); Martha Nussbaum (law; religion; gender studies); and Lloyd Rudolph (political economy; history).
1.D.1) Adequate non-language faculty? The Center has thirty-three non-language faculty, at three levels of commitment: 100% to program, six; 50% to program, ten; 25% to program, seventeen (Appendix C). For faculty strength as measured by outstanding publishing quality and quantity, see brief curricula vitae in Appendix C.
1.D.2) Pedagogy training for teaching assistants. The Chicago College insists on training programs for T.A.s and has several formal programs: "The Little Red School House" for literary and writing skills; the Chicago Teaching Program, through Continuing Education, for general pedagogy; and the College's apprenticeship program for handling a discussion class. In addition, South Asia faculty Mithilesh Mishra, Norman Cutler and Clinton Seely have held pedagogic workshops specifically for language T.A.s to supplement the supervised apprenticeship which has been the usual mode in language classes. This fall the University established the Center for Teaching and Learning, which will serve as a pedagogical resource for junior faculty and advanced graduate students. One of the Center's new offerings is a certificate program for graduate students seeking more extensive pedagogic training. The Center is a joint initiative of the undergraduate College, the four graduate divisions, and the Office of the Provost.
2. Quality of the Applicant's Language Instructional Program
2.A.1) Extent of languages covered. The Center regularly offers six modern and two classical languages: Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Tibetan, Urdu, Persian and the classical Sanskrit and Pali. Students may also study North Indian variations – Maithili, Magahi, Sadari, Bhojpuri – as well as Punjabi (Table 3). Students interested in other languages are referred to summer programs and encouraged to take advantage of American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) offerings.
2.A.2) Language enrollment statistics. Table 3 depicts enrollments for our language courses during 1998/99. For a more detailed statement, please see Appendix B. Our students make active use of the summer language program option because of the opportunity it provides for uninterrupted study. The number of individuals taking advantage of the option is about ten annually (Table 2).
Table 2
Summer Language Study, 1999[2]
|Student |Dept. |Lang. |Location |
|Thomas Asher |Anthro. |Hindi |AIIS |
|Kristen Bloomer * |Divinity |Tamil |Pondicherry |
|Robert Moore * |Divinity |Tibetan |Virginia |
|Gabriel Robinson * |Divinity |Bengali |AIIS |
|Kristen Rudisill |Divinity |Hindi |AIIS |
|Blake Wentworth |Divinity |Tamil |AIIS |
|Ernst Kirchner * |Hum. Dev. |Tamil |Pondicherry |
|Genevieve Lakier |Soc. Sci. |Tibetan |Wisconsin |
|Whitney Cox * |SALC |Tamil |AIIS |
|Andrew Nicholson * |SALC |Hindi |Wisconsin |
|Melinda Pilling * |SALC |Hindi |Washington |
2.B.1) Levels of instruction. Chakrabarty and Seely in Bengali and Trivedi in Hindi/Urdu offer advanced readings in those three languages, as does Naim in Urdu. Cutler handles all levels of Tamil with assistance from a supervised instructional assistant for the lower level courses. Kapstein offers advanced courses in Tibetan. Helmet Moayyad and John Perry offer Persian at all levels. Collins, Doniger, Kapstein, Pollock provide Sanskrit; Collins provides Pali for students of Buddhism. Please see Table 3 for a summary statement.
2.B.2) Courses taught in foreign languages. Other than advanced literature courses, only a few South Asia courses, such as Ronald Inden's Film in India, are currently taught in a South Asian language. However, the Center plans to link with the College’s "foreign-languages-across-the-curriculum" program during the coming three years to encourage more offerings.
2.C.1) Sufficiency of language faculty. Fifteen faculty and four teaching assistants provide the personnel to staff four language levels (Table 3 and Appendix C). At the retirement of three faculty members who taught Hindi in addition to other subjects, the program was able to hire Mithilesh Mishra, who is well versed in language pedagogy and especially in performance-based teaching and proficiency testing. Mishra acquired his experience with the intensive intermediate-level Hindi course offered in the summer at the University of Wisconsin and his responsibilities at Chicago are confined to language pedagogy. Mishra teaches first and second year classes together with an instructional assistant who also taught in the Wisconsin intensive summer program. Harish Trivedi, a visitor and experienced scholar of North Indian cultural traditions, has worked with more advanced students while the department searches for a permanent appointment in North Indian literatures and cultures.
Table 3
Languages Offered, 1998/99[3]
|Regularly Offered |Levels |No. of Faculty |
|Bengali |4 | 2 |
|Hindi |4 | 2 (+2) |
|Pali |2 | 1 |
|Persian |4 | 3 |
|Sanskrit |4 | 3 (+1) |
|Tamil |4 | 1 (+1) |
|Tibetan |4 | 2 |
|Urdu |4 | 1 |
|Total | |15 (+4) |
|Offered on Demand |
|Maithili |
|Punjabi |
|Magahi |
|Bhojpuri |
|Sadari |
|Enrollments |
|Bengali |14 |Hindi |125 |
|Persian |86 |Tamil |33 |
|Tibetan |26 |Urdu |33 |
|Pali |3 |Sanskrit |92 |
2.C.2) Language pedagogy. Three of the Chicago modern language faculty have attended one of the ACTFL training workshops on performance-based teaching and proficiency testing: Cutler, Naim, and Seely. In addition, Professors Cutler and Seely qualified as proficiency testers in English, as ACTFL is not equipped to certify proficiency testers in Bengali and Tamil. They have adapted both performance and proficiency methods to a context in which there are no national proficiency guidelines.
Hindi does have national guidelines. Mishra is on the committee set up by the South Asian Language Teachers' Association to improve performance teaching and proficiency testing. Supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, he is preparing digitized materials for performance-oriented teaching.
2.D) Performance based instruction; teaching resources; proficiency requirements. Cutler and Seely are leading figures in the small community of Bengali and Tamil teachers in devising materials for instruction based on performance. These resources increase the emphasis on "active" rather than "passive" skills, and on functional language use. Cutler requires weekly conversation with a native speaker, eschews rote repetition of authored dialogues, emphasizes role-playing, uses slowed soundtracks of Tamil movies to demonstrate context specific dialogues, and exposes students to journalistic prose. Seely and a native speaker conduct weekly conversation sessions and use situation cards to stimulate dialogue. He has designed a series of interactive computer exercises for use in teaching. Mishra and his assistant conduct weekly informal conversation sessions to improve aural/oral performance and require their students to keep diaries in Hindi. The Tibetan instructor will be expected to be proficient in this approach.
As a member of the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning (CLTL), Chicago continues to expand faculty resources and opportunities for language instruction. Several faculty are creating new resources for language teaching: Mishra is developing audio-visual digitized tapes under his Mellon grant; Kapstein is beginning to prepare a reader for advanced Tibetan (Timeline 11 and Budget Yrs. 1-2, E.1.b); Naim has recently revised the text and accompanying tapes of his Introductory Urdu; Cutler is collaborating with Schiffman at Pennsylvania to create a site on the World Wide Web for Tamil pedagogical materials with funding from CLTL; Nye is creating thirty-four electronic dictionaries under grant support from US/ED; and James Lindholm, a Tamil consultant, has provided user-friendly dialogues, slow echo re-dramatization, and drills based on two Tamil films for use in our Tamil program. Over the past decade, our faculty’s innovative projects have been awarded more than $43,000 in support from the CLTL. (Please see Appendix C for individual CVs with full bibliographic details.)
A state of the art Language Faculty Resource Center supports classroom pedagogy, creation of language teaching resources, and computerized linguistics research on South Asian languages. The nine-room complex of computer, video and audio equipment was completed in the early 1990s and is now being augmented with support from the Mellon Foundation.
Mishra is using proficiency tests in first and second year Hindi in the context of national guidelines. In the absence of guidelines, Naim conducts entry and exit testing which approximates the proficiency categories. Seely evaluates students' Bengali capacity at the beginning and end of the academic year in a manner consistent with ACTFL oral proficiency standards.
3. Quality of Curriculum Design
3.A.1) Baccalaureate degree programs. Chicago undergraduates are introduced to South Asia through a course specifically designed for them, the three-quarter sequence on South Asian Civilizations. Each year about sixty students from the College enroll in this year-long sequence of courses. In addition, all graduate courses at the 300 level are routinely open to undergraduates. South Asia courses had a total of 928 undergraduate enrollments in 1998/99. In the same year 40 baccalaureate degrees were awarded with South Asia concentrations, as defined by US/ED.
The position of Associate Dean of International and Second Language Education was created by the College in 1999. The Associate Dean is responsible for the language competency examination system, the Foreign Language Proficiency Certificate program, implementation of foreign language acquisition courses and summer language training seminars and courses. In coordination with the Director of Foreign Study Programs, she oversees the study and internship abroad programs and supervises grant programs to support international research and foreign language acquisition.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation recently awarded a major, five-year grant to the College for restructuring language teaching and learning. This ambitious new program has as its principal goals the internationalization of the curriculum, increasing opportunities for study abroad, and creating an emphasis on language competency rather than fulfillment of a minimal requirement. Meanwhile, the University is raising an endowment of $5,000,000 to sustain the programs and to support the awarding of 150 fellowships annually for study abroad.
While the emphasis under the Mellon grant is on the most frequently taught languages, the program also produces significant benefits for the less frequently taught languages. These benefits include: 1) appointment of the new and permanent Associate Dean of International and Second Language Education, 2) creation of a Language Instruction Coordinating Committee in the College, 3) upgrading equipment in existing language laboratories and creating a network of language learning spaces in dormitories, and 5) establishing incentives to fuse language teaching with teaching of content across the curriculum. The related South Asia Center initiative to create an International Satellite TV Center will further enhance language instruction in the less frequently taught languages (Timeline 3 and Budget Yrs. 1-3, E.1.e). The Center will also collaborate with the College to establish an intensive language study program in India during the next triennium and simultaneously offer students the opportunity to take the South Asian Civilizations course in India (Timeline 1 and Budget Yrs. 1-2, C.2).
3.A.2) Appropriateness of undergraduate options. South Asian studies undergraduate concentrations are available in the social sciences and the humanities. Each concentration requires three quarters of the South Asian Civilizations sequence, six quarters of a South Asian language for humanities and three for social sciences, six other approved courses for humanities and three for social sciences, and a B.A. thesis written under the supervision of a faculty advisor for social sciences students. Social sciences concentrators must in addition complete two approved South Asia elective courses. Students are encouraged to take more than the minimum language requirements and almost all of the undergraduates do. The certificate (comparable to a minor) in South Asian studies is another option in the College. It involves five courses but no language requirement. Science students often take this option in order to broaden their non-science education. About nine certificates in South Asian studies are conferred annually.
Students in the baccalaureate program are carefully supervised by an academic advisor to ensure that their academic programs are well considered and comprehensive. In addition, each major has a program advisor with whom students consult about curriculum requirements, research prospects, and overseas opportunities.
3.B.1) Variety of options for graduate studies. Please see sections 1.A and 1.B for detailed statements on the wide array of courses available to graduate students. This variety is reflected in the introductory table to Appendix C. A new option is under consideration. The University may inaugurate a South Asia M.A. program during the coming three years (Timeline 3). Further, the Center will support development of five new courses under US/ED funding. These new courses will also be available to undergraduates (Timeline 4 and Budget Yrs. 1-3, E.1).
3.B.2) Appropriateness and quality of graduate studies options. In both the Humanities and the Social Sciences Divisions, graduate students specializing in South Asia must master the theoretical aspect of their discipline as well as become experts concerning a particular region. For students in both divisions, language study is an essential part of the process. The chief humanities department, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, requires expertise in a "language of concentration" as well as study of both a second South Asian language and a relevant non-South Asian language. These combinations of languages must include one modern and one premodern. The Social Sciences departments have language requirements that accept South Asian languages as appropriate. On average, students in both divisions complete their Ph.D. in six or seven years, three of which are generally spent in the classroom on course requirements. These time frames allow adequate opportunities for fieldwork and study within the chosen discipline.
3.C.1) Career advising. South Asia students have dual access to advising – through a disciplinary as well as an area studies network. This is focused in: 1) departments; 2) the university-wide Career and Placement Center; 3) the South Asia Center; and 4) with individual instructors. Departments at Chicago typically have a designated staff member responsible for placement. The Career and Placement Center provides free on-line job-listings, workshops, and counseling on employment opportunities. The South Asia Center connects our students with institutions seeking candidates with South Asia competence and organizes career information sessions targeting area studies in coordination with the University’s Foreign Language and Area Studies Council and the Center for International Studies (Timeline 40). Individual faculty and preceptors meet with students to advise on careers and to disseminate information about available teaching and professional positions as well as opportunities for study abroad.
3.C.2) Establishment of programs abroad. Graduate students are expected to go to South Asia as part of their Ph.D. training. Our students fieldwork is often supported by fellowships from Fulbright, AIIS, the Social Science Research Council, the University's MacArthur sponsored Program in International Peace and Cooperation, and the Committee on Southern Asian Studies. Chicago has the largest number of Fulbright fellowships and also the most junior and senior fellows funded under the AIIS fellowship program of any center in the country. In 1999 Chicago students received the most Fulbright-Hays fellowships for the thirteenth year in a row. Five of Chicago’s eighteen Fulbright awards went to Southern Asianists. Since 1962 the number of AIIS fellowship received is 357, with our nearest competitor at 281. Chicago's training pre-eminence in fieldwork has persisted: the AIIS figure for 1997-99 is ten, with our nearest competitor at seven (Table 4).
Table 4
AIIS Fellowships for Junior and Senior
Field Research, 1962–1999
From American Institute of Indian Studies,
Update on Fellows Selected by University
|University |No. of Fellows |No. of Fellows |
| |1962-1999 |1997-1999 |
|Chicago | 357 | 10 |
|Pennsylvania | 281 | 4 |
|Wisconsin | 254 | 4 |
|Berkeley | 250 | 5 |
|Columbia | 120 | 7 |
|Minnesota | 110 | 3 |
|Washington | 109 | 2 |
|Texas | 102 | 4 |
|Michigan | 94 | 4 |
|Harvard | 83 | 0 |
|Univ. of Illinois | 77 | 0 |
|Virginia | 75 | 3 |
|Cornell/Syracuse | 65/? | 2/1 |
|(Consortium) | | |
3.C.3) Access to other study programs at other institutions. We regularly inform undergraduate students of the overseas opportunities offered by the University of Wisconsin program, the Associated Colleges of the Midwest's program in Maharashtra, and the new program in Mysore launched by the University of Iowa. The vigorous use of summer programs by graduate students (11 in 1999) is noted in 2.A.2 and Table 2. Chicago will create a Web site on summer language programs during the next triennium to assist our students and those at other South Asia programs.
4. Quality of Staff Resources
4.A.1) Qualification, career development, and time commitment. The Center's thirty-eight faculty and six staff comprise a formidable aggregation of South Asia competencies. As demonstrated in Appendix C, this group represents multiple disciplines in the humanities, social and natural sciences, and professional schools and offers expertise in virtually every region of South Asia. Chicago in the 1960s was a leader in setting research agendas for South Asia. The faculty of that era are retiring. The challenge of the 1990s was to continue as a leading South Asia center. Fortunately, the University’s administration has responded vigorously to the need for replacements and prepared the program to continue its role of intellectual leadership.
The most recent National Research Council (NRC) evaluation of Ph.D.-granting programs reveals the extraordinary quality, productivity, and teaching effectiveness of the faculty. According to the NRC, Chicago’s graduate programs in economics, religion, and sociology ranked first in the nation; anthropology, art history, history, linguistics, and political science ranked among the top ten programs. Core faculty in each of these departments identify South Asia as their primary research focus, conduct fieldwork throughout the region and use regional case studies in their curriculum.
Conventional measures of academic productivity and standing within the disciplines, such as publications, research fellowships and peer-reviewed grants, underscore the national and international stature of the faculty. Since 1996, South Asia faculty were awarded twelve major grants from federal agencies, private foundations and other competitive grants programs. Funding sources have included the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Ford, MacArthur, and Rockefeller Foundations, among others. The diverse, extensive and multidisciplinary array of recent book titles and articles produced by the faculty are enumerated in Appendix C.
The Center will collaborate with the Departments of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and Art History to seed three new positions during the coming triennium: a Tibetan instructor, a professor of medieval Indian literature, and a professor of South Asian art history. Working with the University’s Development staff, we expect to raise endowments for the Tibetan and art history positions. We request US/ED funding for half salaries during the coming three years to enable the Center to continue its successful practice of seeding those positions (Timeline 37-39 and Budget Yrs. 1-3, A.2-A.3).
4.A.2) Opportunities for career development and overseas experience. Chicago provides significant professional development opportunities for faculty, such as funds for participation in national conferences, competitive, internal grant programs to seed research, and support for faculty release time. Junior faculty receive release time for research before tenure review and sabbatical programs sustain the institutional commitment to faculty research.
The Committee on Southern Asian Studies provides support for faculty travel to conferences and research travel to South Asia by up to three faculty each year. In addition, the Provost, Divisional Deans and the Center for International Studies have competitive grants programs for overseas research targeted to junior faculty. Some departments, such as Anthropology and History, have endowed funds for faculty research.
Despite these opportunities for professional development, US/ED funds for faculty travel to South Asia to establish linkages with local professionals, initiate new research programs, and gather materials for curricular innovations have been critical to research and pedagogy in various disciplines. Given the disproportionate impact of these small faculty travel grants, we request funds for a total of three trips to South Asia. These trips will be targeted to junior faculty and to faculty intending to gather materials for curriculum development, particularly for courses that engage the new academic initiatives of the Center (Timeline 1 & 41 and Budget Yrs. 1-3, C.2).
4.A.3) Time commitment. Faculty in the social science departments who also teach general disciplinary topics usually devote fifty percent of their teaching and advising time to South Asian studies while humanists teaching South Asian languages and literatures do so full time. The following figures suggest the distribution.
Percent and number of persons: 100% 11 75% 3 50% 15 25% 15
Dr. Linda Clum, the newly appointed Assistant Director for Southern Asian Studies, will interact intensively with B.A. students, orienting them to the University and to the South Asia program. She will also assist faculty M.A. advisors to create academic programs tailored to their individual objectives and research interests.
4.B.1) Center oversight. A seven-member Executive Committee chaired by the Center Director governs the Center. Members include the Center’s Director, James Nye (Bibliographer, Library); the Associate Director, Norman Cutler (Tamil literature); the acting Chair of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, Clinton Seely (Bengali literature); the former Center Director, Susanne Rudolph (Political Science); the Chair of the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, Steven Collins (Buddhist studies and Pali); Wendy Doniger (Religion, Divinity School): and Director of the Center for International Studies, Rashid Khalidi (History), ex officio.
The Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS) provides governance for the common activities of the South Asia program and makes recommendations to the Center’s Executive Committee. COSAS is an interdisciplinary committee which meets on a quarterly basis to allocate budgets; select programs to support; award fellowships; run a cross-disciplinary, Committee-wide weekly seminar; and affiliate associate members. It was and is the recipient of major non-governmental gifts and institutional grants meant for South Asia generally and has available an endowment of approximately four and a half million dollars. COSAS includes all faculty members teaching about South Asia from the participating disciplines and the professional schools as well as the South Asia bibliographer. The chair is elected for a three-year term. The Center Director reports to the Committee and consults on use of Center funds.
4.B.2) Staffing administration and outreach. The Center is administered by a bibliographer and a faculty member whose service is treated as part of their ordinary academic obligations. James Nye, Bibliographer for Southern Asia, is Director; Norman Cutler, Associate Professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, is Associate Director. Administrative staff, each of whom is fluent in at least one South Asian language, include: Linda Clum, full-time Assistant Director, principally responsible for financial affairs, grant administration, student advising, staff supervision and management; Emily Bloch, Outreach Coordinator, an advanced South Asia graduate student working half time; and two other graduate students working quarter time in Outreach. (Please see Appendix C for brief biographical information on all staff.)
4.C) Removing obstacles to equal treatment of faculty and staff. The minorities whose representation is most often the subject of discussion in our context are South Asians, who have sometimes been excluded in a field of special concern to them, and women. Of South Asians, the Center has four full professors, an associate professor and three junior appointments ranging from instructional assistants to assistant professors. The Center has five women of whom three are full professors, one associate professor, and one junior appointments. Special efforts are made to alert women's networks and to bring job opportunities to the attention of South Asia professional conferences and meetings that include potential candidates of South Asian extraction. These efforts to attract a diverse pool of applicants were most recently exhibited in our search for an Assistant Director for the Center. Within a pleasingly large pool of nineteen applicants, more than 37% were minorities and 47% were women. A woman was selected.
The University has a policy of affirmative action and equal opportunity for employment, forbidding discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national or ethnic origin, age, disability or veteran status. This policy is widely disseminated through announcements in all relevant media and internal enforcement is monitored by an affirmative action officer.
5. Strength of Library
5.A) The University's Library holdings and services to readers. The University of Chicago Library's century-long commitment to South Asia has produced a collection that is a leading asset to international scholarship with the further advantage of being part of one of America's finest research libraries. This leadership can be measured in the ambitious collection program, abundant services to readers, strength of staff, efficient provision of inter-library loans, and imaginative projects to further scholarship.
The Library's commitment to South Asia is part of a wider dedication to area studies at the University of Chicago. Together with its South Asia holdings, the collection of materials on Southeast Asia, East Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East amount to more than 2,800,000 volumes and comprise one of the world's great resources for area studies. These collections and their support by faculty and staff allow cross-cultural and cross-regional scholarship on topics such as Islamic studies, where the sources and issues cut across all of Asia as well as other regions. The University Library’s collections include resources in a variety of formats: over 6.2 million cataloged and classified volumes; more than 35,500 active serials together with over 100,000 inactive serials; over 2.5 million microforms; about 24,000 linear feet of manuscripts and archival materials; more than 250,000 rare books; approximately 400,000 maps and aerial photographs; and more than 24,000 sound recordings.
The Library supports scholarship on virtually all topics related to South Asia through an ambitious program of collecting contemporary materials that complement the foundation of a century of collection development. More than 529,810 volumes comprise the South Asia collection. There are 330,680 volumes of books and 199,130 volumes of serials in more than thirty languages of the South Asian subcontinent. The Library also contains more than 10,200 sheet maps and a vast array of photographs, posters, and audio and video recordings on South Asia. With the exceptions of agricultural and engineering technology, all subjects are within the Library’s collecting scope. Breadth of collection has been a hallmark of the Library’s Southern Asia Department. The collection includes "high" culture materials, such as philological treatises and texts in the classical South Asian languages. It also contains "popular" materials, such as novels and magazines, key constituents of what has recently been described as "public culture." The University of Chicago is the only library other than the Library of Congress to collect in all languages of the region.
Extensive services are provided to readers and institutions beyond the University. Because Chicago collects from opposing sides of political divisions, scholars from the subcontinent visit the collection to consult materials that are difficult or impossible to obtain under prevailing political circumstances. In addition, requests to explore the collection from scholars from across America and throughout the world are routinely accommodated.
5.B) Chicago's financial support for acquisitions and library staff. Generous support from the University combined with the regular receipt of grants enables consistent growth of the collection. These same financial sources support a strong staff, permit intensive processing of titles into the collection, and provide a hospitable climate for special projects. The amounts provided in Table 5 are conservative figures that do not reflect the value of space or of routine services provided by other departments.
While libraries at several South Asia National Resource Centers have reduced their staff, the University of Chicago has increased funding for personnel to select, acquire, catalog, and preserve our collection. Some of this additional support has come from grants for cataloging and preserving early publications acquired through collaborative arrangements in India.
Table 5
Library Acquisitions Funds, Staff Salaries,
and Benefits, 1998/99
University funds $ 99,580
Department of Education, Title VI 29,000
Total for acquisitions $128,580
University funds for 6 FTE in Chicago $174,300
Grant funds for 12 FTE in India 58,400
Total for 18 FTE $232,700
Grants from the Ford Foundation, NEH, the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, and the Department of Education have supported major initiatives. In the past five years external funding for South Asia library collection development, preservation, and cataloging has exceeded $2,200,000. Grants have contributed to the innovative purchase and preservation of two important collections in India: the Roja Muthiah Research Library in Madras and the Urdu Research Centre in Hyderabad. These two projects have fostered unprecedented cooperation of public and private institutions in India and the United States. Private grants and institutional cooperation have also contributed to the deposit at the University of the British Library’s duplicate 22,000-volume set of official publications of India, an essential archive for the study of British imperialism in South Asia.
5.C.1) Cooperative arrangements for access to research materials. Chicago continues its role as a founder and organizer of important collaborative consortia that provide indispensable research materials to scholars throughout the world using the latest network technology. Chicago is a driving force in the recent development of the Center for South Asian Libraries (CSAL) an overseas research center incorporated by the Center for Research Libraries. CSAL will acquire, preserve, and disseminate older printed materials from the subcontinent in order to meet an increasing demand for such resources. Chicago also is a founder and organizer of both Digital Dictionaries of South Asia and the Digital South Asia Library. These collaborative programs have been awarded recent grants totaling more than $1,000,000. As their titles suggest, they will provide critical tools for scholarship to researchers over the Internet: dictionaries, texts, maps, statistical data, photographs, and indexes.
These consortia and the grants awarded to them represent only the latest efforts on behalf of South Asia studies at Chicago. Longstanding commitments to collaboration have been maintained and renewed. The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), the South Asia Microform Project, the Center for Research Libraries, and the Library of Congress Cooperative Acquisitions Program continue to underpin Chicago's cooperative library activities. Comprised of the thirteen major private and public institutions in the Midwest (the "Big Ten" universities plus Chicago, Illinois at Chicago, and Pennsylvania State), the CIC continues to foster rational divisions of labor and collaboration among its members through the South Asia Library Project working group. The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) remains a linchpin for collaboration not only by storing less-frequently used materials but also through cooperative programs such the South Asia Microform Project, based at the CRL, that preserves and disseminates important texts. The Cooperative Acquisitions Program represents the renewal of the PL480 program, the fundamental source of materials from South Asia for U.S. libraries, formerly provided free of charge by the federal government.
5.C.2) Accessibility of library holdings. For scholars interested in access to materials without actually visiting Chicago, most items can be obtained through interlibrary loan. Furthermore, as demonstrated in the previous description of the Digital South Asia Library and Digital Dictionaries of South Asia projects, the capability exists to provide many materials via the Internet, whether in the form of full-text documents or scanned images. The US/ED funding requested for the library is to help cushion the end of foreign currency (former PL-480) funds. The support will help Chicago to maintain its preeminence in acquisitions and its capacity to serve regional and national scholars via inter-library loan.
6. Outreach Activities
The South Asia Outreach Educational Project is an essential liaison between the University of Chicago's faculty and the wider community. It presents workshops, exhibitions, film showings, and lecture programs in schools and colleges. Three times a year it publishes the Chicago South Asia Newsletter, which circulates to 2,640 readers in the U.S. and abroad. On a daily basis Outreach handles a large number of inquiries, totaling to about 250 per quarter. The average participation rate in Outreach's four or five public exhibitions or conferences, to which the community is invited, is forty; the average quarterly requests for teaching aids and resources are thirty-five. Outreach also publishes a series of widely used informational booklets.
Individual faculty are directly involved in outreach activities. They participate in scholarly conferences and meetings and speak at public events. Chicago's South Asia faculty have also made distinctive contributions in national deliberations and consultations regarding the future of areas studies. These engagements have had a pronounced impact on major U.S. foundations and other philanthropic bodies. For example, Arjun Appadurai has been part of a small group of advisors who helped the Ford Foundation with its program called "Crossing Borders: Revitalizing Area Studies." He has helped set guidelines, made site visits, and assisted the Foundation as it awards grants totaling $25 million over a six-year period under this initiative. Similarly, Chicago South Asia faculty, including Susanne Rudolph, Rashid Khalidi, Sheldon Pollock, and Arjun Appadurai, played important consultative roles in the efforts to retain a strong area-studies perspective among the priorities being developed by the Social Science Research Council. Similarly, South Asia faculty contributed to new guidelines for the major program in "Global Security and Sustainability" at the MacArthur Foundation. All of this involvement by Chicago South Asia faculty strengthens the emerging partnerships between the government, the university sector, and the philanthropic world in supporting and reinvigorating area studies.
6.A) Elementary and secondary school outreach. Outreach to school teachers is a serious focus for the University. As one example, the University’s combined area centers will submit a proposal this fall for The World Knowledge Project. This $200,000 project will result in high-quality, age-appropriate materials for teaching about the cultures of world regions and organize a resource lending library for use by teachers. Elementary and secondary teachers and students in the Chicago area will be the primary beneficiaries. But, the resources will be made available both in print form and via the Web from , the Chicago South Asia site.
Outreach organizes its year in anticipation of the annual teacher's workshop in late spring. This workshop suggests ways for teachers to incorporate South Asian materials into their curricula. An average of thirty-five teachers attend each year with an impact extending to more than 1,200 students. As in the past, Outreach will prepare suitable readers and teacher handbooks focusing on teaching strategies for the participants. All of these resources in addition to the curricula prepared by teachers during the workshops will be made available via the Center's site on the Web.
Further collaborative summer courses for teachers are planned with Chicago’s other area centers. These will follow the model developed in conjunction with the Center for East Asian Studies this past summer. "Asia in the Chicago Classroom" was a highly successful four-week course that drew an enthusiastic group of fifteen teachers from the metropolitan area to study art historical, religious, political, and ethnic issues related to the interpretation and presentation of Asia in the classroom. Our goal is to continue these summer seminars and thereby expand the group of "master teachers" familiar with Asia, its interpretation as part of world knowledge, and its place in the Chicago classroom.
6.B) Outreach to post secondary institutions. Chicago is well positioned to provide post-secondary outreach because of the faculty’s national and international activities and reputation. Chicago scholars organize meetings, conferences and fellowship programs through which South Asia college teachers have opportunities to keep abreast of a changing South Asia. These programs bring to campus between forty to fifty short-term and long-term fellows. Typical of these efforts is Appadurai's project, "Regional Worlds", designed to reconceptualize "area" teaching. This project funded five Midwest fellows in its initial South Asia focus year. These successful teaching seminars will be continued through the University’s Midwest Faculty Seminar program. A grant from the Ford Foundation will partially support the seminar during the second year (Timeline 27 and Budget Yrs. 1-3, E.2.b). The Center will also advertise its South Asia Seminar and the South Asia Workshop more widely to attract a larger number of college faculty from the Chicago area.
6.C) Outreach to business, media, and the general public. South Asia Outreach events are all open to the public. However, some are specifically designed for the general public. Faculty frequently lend their expertise to local and national media by giving interviews for T.V., radio, magazines, and newspapers. During the past three years this has included: CBS, NBC, Public Television, National Public Radio, Voice of America, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, New Republic, New York Times, Newsweek, Time, and Washington Post. Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph are regularly asked to conduct informational sessions for ambassadors and other high-level staff at the Department of State and other governmental agencies. Other selected examples of outreach during the past year will suggest the range of our engagement: co-sponsored Emerging Markets Conference with Chicago’s Graduate School of Business and corporate sponsors to raise awareness of South Asia business and investment issues (200 participants); collaborated with the Indo-American Center to organize a lending library as well as a series of workshops for K-12 educators (5,000 members); sponsored and coordinated visit of Dr Tenzin Choedrak, chief doctor and director of Pharmaceutical Department of Men-Tsee Khang as well as personal physician to the Dalai Lama (300 participants); and administered a grant from Illinois Art Council to distribute Barbara Rossi's book From the Ocean of Painting: India's Popular Paintings, 1589 to the Present to 147 public and college libraries in Illinois.
A major outreach event planned for the winter of 2000 will bring representatives from the city’s sixty consular offices together with Chicago’s international studies students and faculty (Timeline 32). Quarterly Media Forums will bring representatives of the news media together with Chicago international studies faculty during the next triennium (Timeline 31). The area studies centers are also working closely with the director of the University News and Information Office to provide a more effective means of communicating with other local media outlets.
7. Commitment to the Subject Area on Which the Applicant Focuses
It is the intellectual liveliness and innovativeness of area studies that generates the University's commitment. Chicago’s area studies faculty set intellectual agendas rather than behaving as marginalized practitioners of esoteric activity. They have carried innovative approaches from their specialized studies into "mainstream" arenas. This has forced American historians to read subaltern history, thus contributing to the intellectual currency of constructivism and exporting concepts from colonial and identity studies into writing on race, class and ethnicity. Scholars of South Asia have set a standard for investigating the new issues that globalization raises for history, anthropology, political science, and sociology. Chicago scholars who study South Asia, such as Appadurai, Bhabha, Inden, and Pollock, have made a disproportionate contribution to the flourishing of cultural studies nationally and internationally. As a specific example, Pollock’s "literary cultures in history project" supported with a major grant from NEH is a reconceptualization of the discipline of literary history which will serve as a model for the study of non-South Asian literary cultures.
7.A) University's financial commitment to Center operations and South Asia area studies. The overall sum contributed by the University for the Center's programs and staff, just over three million dollars, represents an impressive ongoing commitment. Center support from the Department of Education, while vital for the programs, is less than 10% of the total annual expenses. The future reliability of this commitment is evident from the support for the rebuilding of the Hindi language faculty with a junior and a senior appointment; support for an "open" appointment; the recent appointment of four South Asia faculty in place of the four lost; and support signaled for the yet unfilled second history appointment. When the University moved recently to create a dynamic Center for International Studies, it made clear its strong support by declaring that area studies would play a central role in the new Center's definition. More than a half million dollars in University support for the Center for International Studies is a direct benefit to the South Asia and other area centers on campus.
The Humanities Division has committed to pay for salaries of all tenured language faculty over the next triennium (Timeline 10 and Budget Yrs. 1-3, A.2). This commitment reverses the previous practice of paying portions of senior faculty salaries from our US/ED grant.
Financial and advisory support from the development office of the Humanities Division helped in creating the "Friends of South Asia." This small executive committee of distinguished Chicagoans helps to promote and fund our programs in the Chicago, Illinois, and national communities. In 1998, the Center was provided with a newly refurbished suite of three offices by the Social Sciences Division. During the current academic year the Center will be integrated with the Social Sciences financial support services, ensuring one-quarter additional full-time equivalent of administrative support.
Table 6
University Financial Support, 1998/99
Center and Outreach
Administrative salaries $41,000
1998 office equipment 17,000
and refurbishing offices
Supplies 6,900
Faculty
Salaries and benefits 1,434,700
Research, travel, seed money 22,000
Public meetings, seminars 11,000
Outreach 9,200
Library
Salaries 232,700
Acquisitions 99,580
Graduate Fellowships 1,324,200
Overseas Institutional Connections 100,000
Total[4] $3,265,200
Chicago's linkages to institutions overseas come through the American Institute of Indian Studies which, at thirty fellowships a year, is the major source of support for research abroad at the Ph.D. level and above. Additionally, AIIS funds thirty-five students annually under the Language Study in India program. Chicago is host to the AIIS office. The value of the University’s contribution to AIIS for this service is $100,000.
The financial data in Table 6 does not include indirect expenses that the University incurs in maintaining the Center beyond the 8% permitted by US/ED. Under our current Title VI award, this amount to an estimated $113,900 annually. The contribution is calculated on the basis of the difference between our "other sponsored activities" rate of 45% and the permitted 8% under Title VI.
7.B) University's financial support to graduate students. The University routinely offers students tuition remissions, stipends, teaching fellowships, and research fellowships. This support, as noted in Table 6, is substantial.
8. FLAS Awardee Selection Procedures
The Center follows consistent, explicit procedures in its selection of FLAS fellowship recipients. It adheres to US/ED regulations and guidelines. The FLAS competition is advertised in early January. Approximately 8,000 students are reached by informing departments and professional schools of the available awards, posting campus-wide notifications in print media, and disseminating details of the competition through the Center's electronic mail list, Web site, and databases. The application packets sent to new students include information on FLAS and other fellowship possibilities. The Deans of Students also carefully review applications for admission to the University for students who may be eligible for FLAS support but who did not specifically apply for it. These applications are routinely forwarded to the area committees.
New students and continuing students apply by submitting a one-page current project statement and three letters of support, one from a language teacher. The full packet of application information is available to students via the Center's Web site. Applications are supported by individual student files which have been thoroughly assessed and commented upon by the Deans of Students. Those files contain graduate and undergraduate transcripts, GRE scores, and recommendations of departments for other funding. Students from professional schools are especially encouraged to apply. The Center annually receives 30-40 applications for five academic-year and three summer awards.
Selection criteria include: 1) intellectual quality as measured by grades, standardized tests (such as GREs), letters, and project; 2) distribution across fields, languages, and areas; 3) language capability; 4) underrepresented categories of students; and 5) U.S. citizenship or permanent residency status. Students with near-native fluency and incoming graduate students are given a low priority. Selection is by a faculty committee. A two-tiered system for selection has been carefully crafted over nearly four decades to ensure that the best-qualified candidates receive FLAS support. A committee, appointed by the Center Director, includes representatives of disciplines and schools with the most applicants. Other faculty may participate if they wish. Files reviewed by the committee include the results of first tier reviews and ranking by each student's home department and Dean of Students. The committee, including a representative of each modern language and one for pre-modern, discusses the case of each candidate and then prepares a list of recommended awardees in ranked order.
Timing for selection is as follows. The Director assembles the selection committee in February, just after the University’s admissions process has closed and before admissions decisions are announced, to decide on both year-long and summer grants. He reassesses the decisions in April after acceptances are known. On the basis of the rankings provided by the selection committee, the appropriate dean of students notifies alternative candidates of awards. The Director also promptly secures University funds for augmenting residues of FLAS funds to full awards.
The Center requests seven academic-year and five summer FLAS awards for the next triennium. This request is based upon the large number of highly qualified students for whom we are currently unable to provide FLAS support.
9. Impact and Evaluation
9.A.1) Impact 1: Enrollments, placement, participation, usage. Coursework on South Asia is offered to students in twenty-three departments and six professional schools (Table 1 and Appendix B). The 1998/99 academic year featured 928 course enrollments for undergraduate and 964 for graduate students. This training produced 40 B.A.s and 49 M.A.s and Ph.D.s in the same academic year.
Table 7
Placement of M.A.s and Ph.D.s, 1997–1998
Higher Education 15 Post Doctoral 2
Non-Profit Organizations 2 Seeking Employment 3
Continuing Education 27 No Answer 9
We have stressed that Chicago's most important role is as a teacher of teachers. The University’s record of placement for South Asia graduates has been extremely good. The Ph.D.s placed in higher education are the Center's contribution to the next generation of training. They are teaching at Loyola, University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers, Bates, Beloit, Southern Methodist, Brown, Macalester, Kalamazoo, University of California Riverside, Pitzer, University of Chicago, and Delhi University. The "Not for Profit" placements are at Amnesty International and the Rand Corporation. Earlier graduates have been placed in highly visible government and not for profit positions: Head of Intelligence and Research at the Department of State; Vice President of the Asia Society; South Asia Desk Officer, Department of State; First Secretary, U.S. Embassy, New Delhi. The figure showing "continuing education" accounts for most of our M.A.s, who go on to the Ph.D. The figure may be read as future Ph.D.s. We do not know the post graduation placement of all the forty B.A.s of the last year. We do know from a recent Gallup poll investigation that 95% of Chicago's undergraduates go on to post-collegiate education.
9.A.2) Impact 2: Mid-career training of collegiate faculty from other institutions. The most important vehicle for public dissemination of our program is a series of projects, already mentioned under outreach, for attracting post-secondary teachers and scholars to campus. These projects have been independently funded by several major foundations for about one and a quarter million dollars. They annually bring to campus between forty and fifty short-term (three months) and long-term (six to nine months) fellows plus approximately 100 participants in advanced seminars. A few examples of these grant-funded programs for "retooling" area experts include: "International Exploration of Cultural Dimensions of Globalization," MacArthur; "Cultural Dimensions of Transnational Media Flows," Rockefeller; "Asceticism, Religion and Civilization in South Asia," NEH; "Regional Worlds," Ford; and "Human Rights," MacArthur.
As demonstrated in Table 7, our graduates are well placed at the end of their programs. Other indices of success in our program are also strong. In 1998/99, there were 148 graduate students of South Asia in all South Asia departments. They ranged from first-year graduate students to seventh-year students writing dissertations.
9.A.3) Equal access. Section 4.C includes a statement on steps we have taken with respect to faculty and staff to meet requirements for equal access and treatment for underrepresented groups. We have employed the same approaches with respect to graduate students. (See addendum with "Information on Section 427 of GEPA".)
9.B.1) Comprehensive, objective evaluation plan. Previously the Center was evaluated every five years by a team consisting of one inside and one or two outside evaluators. The University's Center for International Studies (CIS) will institute a new evaluation plan during the coming triennium. In the first year, an internal team of three non-area faculty will review CIS and all of the area centers. They will focus on the interconnections between Chicago's centers, CIS's coordinating and leadership role, and the larger position of area studies on campus. The second year will focus on evaluation of the South Asia Center. One external and one internal evaluator will undertake a comprehensive evaluation of the Center's programs. A third evaluator with ACTFL certification will assess language instruction. Those categories used in the triennial applications to the Department of Education will guide the evaluators. They will meet confidentially with students, staff, faculty, and administrators. In the third year, Chicago's five area center directors will function as a team to evaluate each Center. During this assessment, the directors will consider issues raised during the first two years in the light of changes already effected. They will give special attention to factors which would further enhance internal collaborative engagements between the Centers and enhance the position of each area Center at the University. The University’s Center for International Studies will pay half the expenses of this three-year evaluation program (Timeline 49-51 and Budget Yrs. 1-3, E.3.a-c).
The Center's administrative office maintains a database, updated each quarter, tracking enrollment, placement, financial operations, details of fellowship disbursement, conferences and meetings, faculty activity, and so forth. This file enables us to provide objective evidence for our reports under GPRA (Timeline 9, 23, 33, 36, 42, and 47).
9.B.2) Role of evaluations in program improvement. In an earlier evaluation, Professors John Hawley (Columbia), Owen Lynch (NYU), and Bruce Cumings (Chicago) proposed that Chicago establish a planning mechanism for the transition from the retiring 1960s faculty. This recommendation was followed, resulting in six replacements. They stated that students were not always adequately informed of available courses; remarked on the overemphasis on contemporary South Asia in one of the two alternating versions of the Civilizations course; worried about the language faculty feeling locked in by three-quarter sequences without sufficient research leave opportunities; and were concerned that we might hire language pedagogues on a separate, untenured track. The program was in a position to address most of these problems promptly. However, strategy with respect to language faculty is highly disputed both at Chicago and nationally. Tradeoffs between sophisticated pedagogy and literary emphasis require further discussion.
The most recent evaluation, by Professors Joseph Elder (Sociology, Wisconsin) and Anthony Yu (East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Chicago), was very positive about undergraduate and graduate student satisfaction with the program (students "unanimous in their praise for content and pedagogy"), optimistic about the replacement plans, full of praise for library ("superb leadership"), and positive about outreach ("models for outreach in other regions").
10. Program Planning and Budget
10.A) Proposed Activities: Their nature, quality, and purposes. The Center proposes a program of activities intended to further strengthen the position of South Asian studies at the University of Chicago. These initiatives cluster under five major headings: 1) enhancing capacities in South Asian area studies, 2) developing language teaching and learning strengths, 3) conducting seminars, 4) expanding teacher training and outreach, and 5) comprehensively evaluating the Center and its activities. First, South Asian studies will be stronger at Chicago at the conclusion of this grant because of our development of new area courses, the initiation of a new undergraduate study abroad program in India, and the addition of new positions in literature and art history. Second, a new lectureship in Tibetan (in conjunction with Chicago's East Asia NRC) will be seeded with partial support from US/ED. This will enhance our language program at the same time that Chicago is shifting all salaries for tenured language faculty from the Center budget to the University’s. Further, our creation of new language resources on the Web will support Chicago’s language instruction program as well as those at other universities. Third, the Center will sponsor three seminars on human rights in collaboration with the University’s Globalization Project, Human Rights Program, and Center for Latin American Studies. Street children and family life will be one of the themes. The shifting demography in South Asia during this century has led to dense urban environments. Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi are among the world’s most populated cities. The plight of street children as an ongoing, systemic, and expanding crisis belies the credibility of human rights in South Asia and raises critical questions about family structures. The seminars will address this and other fundamental crises that undermine the future of South Asia by producing a permanent underclass, one that includes the most vulnerable sectors of the population. The seminars will also be a component in our post-secondary teacher training with participants supported via the Midwest Faculty Seminar program. Fourth, under the heading of teaching training and outreach, the South Asia Center will inaugurate The World Knowledge Program in conjunction with other University NRCs. We will seek non-federal support to develop materials for elementary and secondary teachers and students in the Chicago area. While engaged in this initiative, we will continue our robust program of teacher workshops and interaction with the local business community. We will also begin a program of small grants for travel to the Chicago South Asia library collection. Further, we will apply for at least one Group Projects Abroad grant under the Fulbright-Hays Training Grants program to enable curriculum development by local high school teachers. Fifth, the Center will pursue an ambitious and comprehensive program of self evaluation as described in section 9 above.
10.B.1) Timeline for strengthening the program. The timeline in Appendix A represents the Center’s major program development plans as described in this narrative.
10.B.2) Effective use of resources and personnel. The University has a reputation for leanness and efficiency in its use of resources. This is substantiated in the South Asia Center. A single full-time Assistant Director is responsible for administering the array of activities described in this narrative. We expect even further effectiveness in the coming triennium as a result of collaboration with Chicago’s other NRCs in addressing academic issues related to area studies, in shared approaches to outreach, and in the appointment of a new administrative assistant shared by the centers. Our effective use of resources enables us to spend a large percentage of Title VI funds for outreach and teacher training, 14% of the budget over the next three years.
10.C) Costs in relation to objectives. Chicago’s program is remarkable for 1) the high percentage of requested US/ED funds used to seed new initiatives, 2) the University’s substantial contribution to the program, and 3) the large number of Ph.D.s trained. First, more than 31% of the requested grant is for seeding new faculty positions and for pilot projects. The Center will seek endowed and other support from external and University sources for these new positions and activities during the next triennium. Chicago has a solid record in raising support from external funding agencies to sustain South Asian studies. So there are strong grounds for confidence in our ability to maintain the new initiatives at the end of the grant. Second, the University paid over three million dollars to match the approximately $300,000 that the Department of Education allocated last year. By matching-fund criteria, this 10-to-1 ratio demonstrates that the University supports the Center’s major financial requirements and our budget demonstrates that federal money is effectively deployed for new initiatives and fellowships. As noted in section 7.A, the University is committed to pay all salaries of tenured language faculty, further increasing that ratio over the next triennium. Third, the fact that the US/ED grant results in many Ph.D.s (56 over three years), with high placement rates, demonstrates that money is effectively spent on educating the next generation of South Asia educators.
10.D) Long-term impact on undergraduate, graduate, and professional training programs. The Center’s use of federal funds to seed new faculty positions in the social sciences, humanities, and language instruction will result in improved education for students at all levels and in all programs. Enhanced collaboration with the College will lead to an innovative program of overseas study and intensive language instruction for undergraduates. Our creation of high quality pedagogical resources for language instruction on the Web will benefit students worldwide.
Contents
Application for Federal Assistance (Standard Form 424) [unnumbered]
List of Tables ii
Budget Information
Non-Construction Programs (ED Form 524) [unnumbered]
Itemized Budget Breakdown A1
Assurances, Certifications, and Disclosure Forms
Non-Construction Programs (Standard Form 424B) [unnumbered]
Certifications Regarding Lobbying; Debarment, Suspension and Other [unnumbered]
Responsibility Matters; and Drug-Free Workplace Requirements (ED80-0013)
Certification Regarding Debarment, Suspension, Ineligibility and [unnumbered]
Voluntary Exclusion – Lower Tier Covered Transactions (ED80-0014)
Abstract B1
Application Narrative
1. Quality of the Applicant's Non-Language Instructional Program C1
1.A.1) Variety of disciplines and country coverage C2
1.A.2) Availability of South Asia courses in professional schools C3
1.B) Depth of specialized course coverage C4
1.C) Interdisciplinary courses C4
1.D.1) Adequate non-language faculty? C4
1.D.2) Pedagogy training for teaching assistants C5
2. Quality of the Applicant's Language Instructional Program C5
2.A.1) Extent of languages covered C5
2.A.2) Amount of enrollments C5
2.B.1) Levels of instruction C6
2.B.2) Courses taught in foreign languages C6
2.C.1) Sufficiency of language faculty C6
2.C.2) Language pedagogy C7
2.D) Performance based instruction; teaching resources; proficiency requirements C8
3. Quality of Curriculum Design C9
3.A.1) Undergraduate options and language requirement C9
3.A.2) Appropriateness of undergraduate options C10
3.B.1) Variety of graduate options C11
3.B.2) Appropriateness and quality of graduate options C11
3.C.1) Career advising, research abroad, inter-institutional access C12
3.C.2) Access to other study programs at other institutions C12
4. Quality of Staff Resources C13
4.A.1) Qualification, career development and time commitment C13
4.A.2) Opportunities for career development and overseas experience C15
4.A.3) Time commitment C15
4.B.1) Oversight, staffing, and representation of the underrepresented C16
4.B.2) Staffing administration and outreach C16
4.C) Removing obstacles to equal treatment of faculty and staff C17
5. Strength of Library C18
5.A) The University's Library holdings and services to readers C18
5.B) Chicago's financial support for acquisitions and library staff C19
5.C.1) Cooperative arrangements for access to research materials C20
5.C.2) Accessibility of library holdings. C21
6. Outreach Activities C22
6.A) Elementary and secondary school outreach C23
6.B) Outreach to post secondary institutions C24
6.C) Outreach to business, media, and the general public C24
7. Commitment to the Subject Area on Which the Applicant Focuses C25
7.A) University support for area studies and South Asia C26
7.B) University's financial support C27
8. FLAS Awardee Selection Procedures C28
8.A) Selection plan C28
9. Impact and Evaluation C29
9.A.1) Impact 1: enrollments, placement, participation, usage C29
9.A.2) Impact 2: mid-career training of collegiate faculty from other institutions C30
9.A.3) Equal access C31
9.B.1) Comprehensive, objective evaluation plan C31
9.B.2) Role of evaluations in program improvement C32
10. Program Planning and Budget C33
10.A) Proposed Activities C33
10.B.1) Development Plan for Strengthening the Program C34
10.B.2) Effective use of resources and personnel. C34
10.C) Cost-Effectiveness of Proposed Activities C34
10.D) Long-Term Impact on Undergraduate, Graduate, and Professional Training Programs. C35
Appendices
A: Timeline D1
B: Course List and Enrollments E1
C: Biographical Information F1
Information on Section 427 of GEPA G1
Tables
1 Degrees awarded with South Asian concentration, autumn 1996–summer 1999 C2
2 Summer language study, 1999 C6
3 Languages offered, 1998/99 C7
4 AIIS fellowships for junior and senior field research, 1962–1999 C13
5 Library acquisitions funds, staff salaries, and benefits, 1998/99 C20
6 University financial support, 1998/99 C27
7 Placement of M.A.s and Ph.D.s, 1997–1998 C30
ABSTRACT
University Of Chicago South Asia National Resource Center
Founded in the 1950s, this well established South Asia Center has reinvented itself in the 1980s and 1990s. Building on the strength of its founders, the Center has steadily added new faculty in the 1990s both in language and area studies. It has infused older competencies with new perspectives and pedagogies.
The Center's main product is teachers. It places graduates in liberal arts colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad. It has supplied high-ranking officers to the Department of State and to important not-for-profit institutions such as the Asia Society, the Rand Corporation, the Ford Foundation, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, and Amnesty International.
Ranging across all the countries in the area, the program has granted degrees for dissertations on Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Tibet. In recent years the program has produced an annual average of 18-22 Ph.D.s, 21-23 M.A.s, and 38-42 B.A.s. Thirty-eight area and language faculty in twenty-three departments and six professional programs train them. Approximately 220 courses with South Asia content are taught; around 150 are taught at any one time.
Students of South Asia receive their degrees through various disciplinary departments but add comprehensive language and area training. This is useful for placement in that it opens both disciplinary and South Asia tracks for job candidates. Interdisciplinary collaboration also characterizes the three-quarter flagship course, South Asian Civilizations, especially designed as an introduction the course is taught by historians, political scientists, literature scholars, and classicists. Multifarious opportunities for graduate study of South Asia are available. The Business School and the Committee on International Relations have designed formal joint degrees, while the Divinity, Public Policy, and Law programs grant degrees with an area emphasis.
The chief enhancements proposed include: the initiation of a new undergraduate study abroad program in India; the seeding of new positions in literature, Tibetan language, and art history; shifting all salaries for tenured language faculty from the Center budget to the University’s; creation of new language resources on the Web; sponsoring three seminars on human rights; and inaugurating The World Knowledge Program in collaboration with other Chicago NRCs.
The Library is the leading South Asia private library in the U.S. and abroad. Its strength rests not only on an outstanding collection of 529,800 volumes, 4,400 current serials, 3,500 audio-visuals, and 10,200 maps, but on the quality of the collection processing and accessibility. With 6.5 FTEs serving under a full-time bibliographer and full-time assistant to the bibliographer, staffing is very high, processing of materials expeditious, and access for university and visiting scholars user-friendly. Major collaborative projects with Tamil and Urdu private collections in India are designed to preserve materials and make them available in the United States while new, federally-funded digital initiatives at the Library will improve access to vital South Asia resources worldwide.
Outreach by faculty and specially hired staff includes initiatives to post-secondary institutions, media, business, and government. Four projects bring 100 or so collegiate teachers to campus annually for conferences or long-term fellowships funded by Ford, MacArthur, Mellon, and NEH. The regular and highly acclaimed summer workshop for secondary teachers includes packages of well-selected teaching materials.
University of Chicago
South Asia National Resource Center
Application to:
Department of Education
for Three-Year Cycle 2000-2003
Submitted: October 18, 1999
James H. Nye
Center Director
Addendum
Information on Section 427 of GEPA
The University of Chicago policy statements reproduced here are taken from the student policy manual, faculty handbook, and employee handbook.
The University of Chicago is continuously improving accessibility of its facilities, each year projects are undertaken to increase accessibility to and within University buildings. Ramps, curb cuts, signage, and lifts are examples of facilities work of the last several years. Accessible workstations (in computer labs) and adaptive technology (in the libraries) are examples of other ways in which the University is enhancing accessibility. The process of accommodation is quite individualized, and reasonable accommodations may take many forms.
Student Manual of University Policies and Regulations
Student Conduct
ASSISTANCE FOR DISABLED STUDENTS
Students with disabilities should, in as timely a fashion as possible, contact their area Dean of Students and the Office of the Dean of Students in the University (773/702-7773) to request assistance and coordination of accommodations at the University. The University may request appropriate documentation of the disability. In the case of a learning disability, a very specific assessment protocol administered within the last three years may be required. It should be remembered that the costs of such tests entirely fall in most cases to the students themselves. Students who already have the necessary documentation may send it to the Office of the Dean of Students (Administration Building, Room 219), and referrals to diagnosticians may be obtained from that office.
Once the appropriate documentation is received, professionals will review it to clarify the nature and extent of the problem. Afterward, the student, the area Dean of Students, the Office of the Dean of Students and others as appropriate will normally meet to discuss the situation and what accommodation might be reasonable. If academic work is at issue, faculty may also become involved in these discussions. The student and the area Dean of Students will maintain contact as appropriate for ongoing efforts to accommodate the student.
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
PERSONNEL POLICY GUIDELINES
Subject: Equal Employment Opportunity
Section: U201
Date: October 31, 1995
Prior version Date(s): October 10, 1985
Purpose: To express the University's continuing practice to nondiscrimination in employment.
Policy: The University of Chicago offers equal opportunities in employment to all employees and applicants. No person shall be discriminated against in employment because of race, color, marital status, parental status, ancestry, source of income, religion, sex, age, national origin, handicap, sexual orientation or veteran status. This policy includes the commitment to maintain a working environment free from sexual harassment.
Guidelines: 1.This policy applies to all terms, conditions and privileges of employment including: recruitment, hiring, probationary periods, training and development, job assignments, supervision, promotion, rates of pay or benefits, transfer, educational assistance, layoff and recall, social and recreational programs, terminations and retirement.
2.The Associate Vice President for Human Resources Management, under the Vice President for Administration, is responsible for assuring that University policies regarding the fair and equitable treatment of employees are carried out, including the equal employment opportunity policy.
3.The Affirmative Action Officer interprets the equal employment opportunity policy and advises employees, supervisors and managers about such policy as requested.
4.Department heads, managers and supervisors have primary responsibility for ensuring that employment decisions and the work environment are in compliance with this policy. They should understand that their work performance will be evaluated, in part, on the basis of their efforts and result in the area of EEO.
5.Employees should normally bring any work-related complaints under the policy to their supervisor as with other types of employee complaints. However, an employee may elect to take such a complaint to the Human Resources Management staff or the Affirmative Action Officer. Every effort will be made to treat complaints promptly, impartially, and confidentially with a view to arriving at fair resolutions.
6.The University shall provide, upon request by the applicant, accommodations for the applicant's disability in order to complete the application process.
7.The University shall provide upon request by the employee reasonable accommodations for the employee's disability when doing so will enable him or her to successfully perform the essential duties of the job.
University Policies
STATEMENT OF NON-DISCRIMINATION
In keeping with its long-standing traditions and policies, the University of Chicago, in admissions, employment, and access to programs, considers students on the basis of individual merit and without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national or ethnic origin, age, disability, or other factors irrelevant to participation in the programs of the University. The Affirmative Action Officer (702-5671) is the University's official responsible for coordinating its adherence to this policy and the related federal and state laws and regulations (including Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended).
ASSISTANCE FOR DISABLED STUDENTS
The University of Chicago is a community of scholars, researchers, educators, students, and staff members devoted to the pursuit of knowledge. We strive to be supportive of the academic, personal, and work-related needs of each individual. While we are committed to doing our best to help those with disabilities become full participants in the life of the University, it should be remembered that the academic rigors of this institution and the severe midwestern winters pose obstacles for all students. This University does not have a comprehensive program oriented wholly towards educating students with disabilities.
Students with disabilities should, in as timely a fashion as possible, contact their Dean of Students and the Associate Dean of Students of the University (702-7773) to request assistance and coordination of accommodations at the University. The University may request appropriate documentation of the disability. In the case of a learning disability, a very specific assessment protocol administered within the last three years may be required. It should be remembered that the cost of such tests entirely fall in most cases to the students themselves. Students who already have the necessary documentation may send it to the Associate Dean of Students of the University; referrals to diagnosticians may be obtained from that office.
Once the appropriate documentation is received, professionals will review it to clarify the nature and extent of the problem. Afterward, the student, the Dean of Students, the Associate Dean of Students of the University, and others as appropriate will normally meet to discuss the situation and what accommodation might be reasonable. If academic work is at issue, the faculty may also become involved in these discussions. The student and the Dean of Students will maintain contact as appropriate for ongoing efforts to accommodate the student.
DOMESTIC PARTNERSHIP
A domestic partnership is defined as two individuals of the same gender who live together in a long-term relationship of indefinite duration, with an exclusive mutual commitment in which the partners agree to be jointly responsible for each other's common welfare and share financial responsibilities. The partners may not be related by blood to a degree of closeness which would prohibit legal marriage in the state in which they legally reside. Benefits will be extended to the student's domestic partner and dependents for the Student Medical Plan, Housing, Athletic Facilities and the Library. A Statement of Domestic Partnership is available at and needs to be approved by the Benefits Office at 956 E. 58th Street, room 103, 702-9634.
STUDENT REGULATIONS AND DISCIPLINE
Students matriculating at the University of Chicago will find an environment that encourages intellectual growth through free inquiry. By the same token, however, University of Chicago students are expected to assume the obligations and responsibilities of membership in a free community. The University expects of all students responsible social conduct reflecting credit upon themselves and upon the University.
Area Student Disciplinary Committees in the College and in each division and school address violations of University regulations or of the standards of behavior expected of University students (for example, theft, plagiarism, cheating on examinations, violations of library regulations, computer abuse, and the physical or verbal abuse of others). Information about these Area Disciplinary Committees and their procedures is available from the dean of students in each area, and is printed in the Student Manual. of University Policies and Regulations. Every student should become familiar with the Student Manual. It is updated annually.
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[1]South Asian concentration equates to 500 units of South Asian courses, as defined by US/ED. This chart reflects a substantial increase in reported B.A.s over previous reports. It is based on more accurate information extracted from the Registrar's database in 1999. Asterisk signifies professional schools and programs. "N/A" denotes not applicable.
[2]Asterisk denotes recipient of FLAS summer language fellowship.
[3]Numbers within parentheses indicate instructional assistants.
[4]This figure omits outside funding, $1,117,033 for disseminating new perspectives and $131,860 for library preservation and expansion.
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