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The person who is charged with making
this newly enriched, newly deepened graduate program work
is UMass historian Kathy Peiss. She earned her own Ph.D. at
Brown University, and is an expert on American, women's, and
cultural history. As graduate program director, Peiss spends
a large chunk of her worklife helping the University's 30
master's and 30 doctoral students in the History Department
navigate and chart their individual courses of study. With
the inauguration last fall of the Five College Program, Peiss
says, with a good-natured laugh, her role as a graduate advisor
is sometimes "a combination of traffic cop and chief
therapist." But in fact, she says, it's a "wonderfully
rewarding job" to help fledgling historians choose from
this newly expanded menu of courses and areas of concentration.
Equally rewarding ? and equally demanding, Peiss adds, with
a glance at her very full calendar ? is working with participating
faculty to design and offer entirely new courses at the graduate
level. Three a year is her goal. This year two new courses
already have been launched. It's a matter of gradually bringing
on board two dozen more faculty from the four colleges who
have signed on. "I think it will take about four years,"
says Peiss, "but we'll get there." Rome, as all
historians know, wasn't built in a day.
Actually, Rome figured in one of this spring's seminars, when
UMass historian Carlin Barton, an expert on ancient Rome,
collaborated with Mount Holyoke's Jonathan Lipman, a China
scholar. Their brand-new graduate-level special topics course
was entitled Global History. Last fall, Mount Holyoke's historian
Joseph J. Ellis taught The Revolutionary Generation ? a study
of U.S. political history and culture in the 50-year period
bounded by the Declaration of Independence and the deaths
(both on July 4, 1826) of Presidents John Adams and Thomas
Jefferson. Ellis, who was for many years Dean of the Faculty
at Mount Holyoke, is a well-known scholar whose American Sphinx:
The Character of Thomas Jefferson, won the 1997 National Book
Award for Nonfiction. 
First-year master's degree graduate student Patricia Baloyra
was one of the eight students in Ellis's special topics course
on The Revolutionary Generation. A refugee from the practice
of commercial law in Miami ("I didn't feel I was really
accomplishing anything," she says), Baloyra has returned
to history with plans to earn a Ph.D. and become a university
professor. Ellis's course was "excellent," she says,
"and it brought special focus to my thinking about how
I will structure my concentration in early American history."
Her chief interests are U.S. constitutional history and biography
? the twin subjects of Ellis's course and areas in which UMass
is not notably strong. Thus, it is a real boon, in Baloyra's
view, that the program has added "more professors to
the pot."
Tom Conroy was a fellow student in Ellis's course, which he
rated as "wonderful; a great experience." Conroy
came to UMass after working for some years as coordinator
of visitor programs at the Essex Institute in Salem, Mass.
Museum education work tweaked his interest in American history
and he, like Baloyra, undeterred by a poor job market, has
his sights set on a Ph.D. and a career in academic life. This
spring, in the home stretch for his master's degree, he is
doing a special field unit on 18th century English social
history with Amherst College's Prof. Margaret Hunt.
Professor Ellis himself strongly believes that it is not only
graduate students like Conroy and Baloyra who benefit from
the enriched history program. Like a number of participating
faculty from the four colleges, he finds interaction with
students at the graduate level to be a stimulating change
from teaching undergraduates.
Ellis fancifully compares the teaching of undergraduate students
to a game of tennis in which "You hit the ball and the
ball comes back to you most of the time. But at the graduate
level, it's more like pinball. You shoot the ball ? and what
comes back to you is all over the place!" Decoded, this
means that graduate students, instead of parroting back the
professor's ideas, are always trying out their own new theories.
In the Oedipal sense, graduate students "see themselves
as professionals who will one day supplant us." And this
is as it should be, says Ellis. "They're bursting with
intellectual energy!"
As a faculty member from Mount Holyoke, one of the two women's
colleges in the consortium, Ellis has relished teaching for
a semester in a coeducational environment. In general, he
says, the UMass/Five College Graduate Program in History is
a "win-win" proposition for faculty. "It's
really a faculty development program that lets you experience
another kind of institution, another kind of student, and
then come back, refreshed, to your own institution. And you
don't have to go through the chaos of relocating, your spouse
doesn't have to change jobs, your kids don't have to enroll
in a new school."
Ellis hopes he will teach again soon at UMass. There are some
wrinkles to be worked out, having chiefly to do with advisory
responsibilities. And of course faculty at the colleges have
pressing commitments to their own students that sometimes
make it difficult to attend to the needs of graduate students.
All who are charged with the success of the program know they
can draw on a deep reservoir of good will in the history community.
"We'll solve these problems as they arise," says
Bruce Laurie confidently.
Some years ago, as UMass historians began seriously to move
forward with the formalizing of the collaborative graduate
program, they decided to take a hard look at their Ph.D. program,
established in 1963, and their M.A. program, established in
1950. A couple of inescapable facts were staring them in the
face: the perennially difficult job market for new Ph.D.s
and the virtually constant fiscal constraints on traditional
academic disciplines such as history. "So we decided
to repoint the program," Kathy Peiss reports ? in effect,
to shrink the number of students entering the highly selective
doctoral program, while placing more emphasis on the M.A.
program, which arguably offers a more bankable set of skills.
The University's master's program is a rigorous, two-year
program that emphasizes breadth of historical knowledge, historiography,
and research skills. Candidates may choose to concentrate
in the areas of public history or global history. A newly-minted
M.A. in public history should be well qualified to work in
museums, archives, and historic preservation. An M.A. in global
history, which enriches traditional history courses through
cross-cultural comparisons in Western and non-Western fields,
should be able to teach and do research at the higher education
and secondary school level. Last year, for the first time,
to help its graduate students think through their options,
the department mounted a career forum. Several UMass alumni
whose doctorates have taken them far from the classroom to
the field of archives, for example, and academic administration
returned to the campus to talk about the world of work for
Ph.D.s in history. Peiss says the event was very well received.
She hopes to repeat it.
It's probably too early to be certain that the sleeker doctoral
program down from 45 candidates in the early 1990s to 30,
and now fortified with 25 affiliated Five College faculty
members will attract an even more selective group of students
than before. The signs are very hopeful.
Historians, those students of human affairs who have seen
it all, aren't much given to hyperbole. But Peiss happily
reports that the most recent group of applicants has presented
"an unusually strong pool for us to draw from."
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