A Vision for the Caspersen School
Drew University’s Caspersen School of Graduate Studies, now in its fifty-fouth year of operation, is building on its solid foundation to address the needs of the 21st century. At Drew University, graduate study involves deep contemplation and detailed examination of complex topics as well as a larger engagement with the world. Our students are not cloistered behind walls. Rather, they bridge knowledge and practice. The education you receive at Caspersen will be intrinsically rewarding, professionally fulfilling, and singularly relevant to the changing world around you.
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Graduate education should be engaging and innovative, while offering a personalized opportunity to push past the basics into the realm of advanced study. We have developed programs that are national leaders in their fields, without losing what is so special about a liberal arts college: small seminar-sized classes, a personal connection to faculty, and a university that cares greatly about the whole student. When you attend Caspersen, you join our family.
My vision for Caspersen is to make it into a stellar center for socially-engaged interdisciplinarity and higher learning that attracts both great students and great faculty from around the world. We are currently emerging renewed and energized from the process of our own self-study and reflection about our future. We have learned a great deal that is helping us to strengthen our current programs and build on our strong interdisciplinary foundation. We are also launching a number of forward-looking new programs that will deepen our footprint in the humanities and further connect us to the larger world. Knowledge for its own sake is wonderful. But, knowledge without engagement is socially irresponsible. We ask our students not to divide graduate studies from their life or the world. Accordingly, Caspersen has a focus on civic engagement, unique to graduate schools in the humanities. I firmly believe that the humanities matter in this world. Deep and critical humanistic study not only develops character, but also provides important analytical tools to help solve our pressing social needs.
I am proud of our programs and what they stand for. Our Arts & Letters Program lies at the heart of our interdisciplinary ethos. Students study the human condition through multiple disciplinary perspectives, while developing a deeper knowledge in a concentration of their choosing. They work closely with mentoring faculty and produce serious and meaningful scholarship. Students in our Medical Humanities Program focus their studies on the border between medicine and the human self. Courses such as biomedical ethics, medical narrative and medical anthropology train our students to bring the human condition into focus at its most critical time, illness. Through a hospital clinical rotation they inform their humanities training with clinical experience. Health care has been and will continue to be an important industry that affects us all. Hospitals, medical schools and pharmaceutical companies are recognizing the importance of this type of program to humanize treatment and to reunite medicine to the human condition. Drew University’s Medical Humanities program, one of only two in the country, is the only one that is housed in a graduate school of humanities.
I am also excited about the new graduate programs we are introducing. We recently began a globally-focused Masters of Arts in Teaching program which takes just one year to complete. Our students learn leading-edge pedagogies, while studying deeply in one of six content areas (Social Studies, English, Spanish, Math, Biology and Chemistry). They bring knowledge gained in our classrooms to bear on fieldwork experiences in suburban, urban, and inclusion settings, followed by a semester of student teaching. We are launching in January, 2009 a new low-residency Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry and Poetry in Translation. Our poet-students will study with some of the nation’s most highly regarded working poets. Our new director, Anne Marie Macari, has assembled an impressive roster of poetry faculty, lead by Gerald Stern and Jean Valintine. We are also planning for the introduction in 2010 of a Masters and PhD Program in History & Culture, the first of its kind in the United States. Our students will study with a diverse and highly regarded interdisciplinary faculty. They will also apply their knowledge to the world through internships in the not-for-profit and for-profit world. Their education at Caspersen will enable them to have careers as university teachers or in the larger world of cultural institutions.
The Caspersen School is fortunate to have recently become home to the University’s Research Centers. The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the Center on Religion, Culture and Conflict, and the new Center for Civic Engagement bring prominent scholars to campus, hold numerous public events, and help connect the university to the larger world. They are wonderful partners for Caspersen as we move forward.
As you can see, it is an exciting time to be at Caspersen. We have renewed energy, a new focus on engagement and redoubled commitment to our core mission to foster broadly educated people who have expertise in a field of thought but who are also familiar with and articulate in a range of humanistic studies. The Caspersen School is a special place, one that respects the traditions of the humanities, yet pushes the boundaries. We respect deep and critical study and also demand application and engagement. Our size means we can offer personal attention, but our national reputation means you will be challenged intellectually. We sincerely hope you will join our family.
Sincerely yours,
Richard A. Greenwald, Dean
