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Having completed its 30th year at the College, the Center
for Interdisciplinary and Special Studies continues to look
forward
By Donald N.S. Unger
 Maura Nelson '02 is majoring in environmental
studies through the Center for Interdisciplinary and Special
Studies (CISS). With the help of faculty mentors, she has
designed her multidisciplinary course of study, which she
is just on the point of completing. And she would have been
hard pressed to find a way to fit such a major into any of
the College's freestanding departments. According to
Richard Matlak, the acting director of CISS, that's
just one of the many kinds of opportunities that the Center
is designed to provide for students.
A professor of English, specializing in English Romantic
literature, Matlak first came to Holy Cross in the fall of
1977. He directed the Interdisciplinary Studies Program for
the 1981-82 academic year and served as interim director
of CISS in 1991-92. From 1992-1997 he chaired the English
department.
"In keeping with its mission to provide experimental
and interdisciplinary teaching innovations," he says, "CISS
affords faculty and students the opportunity to do meaningful
teaching and study outside of the major departments and disciplines.
Faculty members cooperate in developing multidisciplinary
concentrations, multidisciplinary majors and minors, and
multidisciplinary/interdisciplinary courses and programs.
Faculty are also responsible for executing concentration
and program budgets, which have the potential for providing
the community with significant co-curricular programming,
such as the recent Asian Studies panel on human rights, the
Women's Studies conference and panels on rape, and
the African-American conference and concerts on Hair, Hoops,
and Jazz. CISS also sponsors courses to fill gaps in the
College curriculum."
Founded in 1971, CISS has a number of constituent parts.
The Center administers a variety of academic programs not
available through other departments, such as the concentrations,
which are supported by the Office of the Associate Director
for Concentrations, Susan Cunningham; several internship
programs managed by the Associate Director for Special Programs,
Gary DeAngelis, which have the goal of linking Holy Cross
students with the cultural, artistic, business, and political
institutions of the local community, as well as to other
colleges and universities; and CISS provides a variety of
funding opportunities to support these enterprises, such
as the Marshall Memorial Fund.
There are currently nine primary curricular concentrations
and programs offered by CISS: African Studies; African American
Studies; Asian Studies; Environmental Studies; Latin American
Studies; Middle Eastern Studies; Peace and Conflict Studies;
Russian and Eastern European Studies; and Women's Studies.
Three special programs, the College Honors Program American
Sign Language and Deaf Studies, and the Fenwick Scholar Program,
also fall under the purview of CISS.
In addition to providing a venue for the interdisciplinary
work of the Holy Cross faculty, CISS provides opportunities
for students who wish to pursue lines of enquiry and study
not available through other departments, up to and including
designing their own majors or minors, via the Multidisciplinary
Studies Program, which is administered by the Director's
Office.
Internship programs for students overseen
by the Center's
Office of Special Programs include the Academic Internship
Program, which connects students with opportunities in the
Worcester and Boston areas; the Semester Away Program, through
which students can arrange study at other academic institutions
in the United States and Canada; and the Washington Semester
Program, which has given students hands-on experience in
a variety of aspects of the work and life of the nation's
capital. The Washington internships have ranged from the
White House to the U.S. Congress, from the American Enterprise
Institute to the Brookings Institute, from the National Catholic
Reporter to the Holocaust Memorial Research Center, and news
organizations ABC, CBS and CNN.
The experience of Carolyn Howe, the current director of
the Latin American and Latino Studies concentration, underlines
the degree to which CISS provides an important set of scholarly
and intellectual spaces for faculty, as well as providing
an enhanced range of academic options for students.
"The academic concentrations offered though CISS provide
much more than an important service to students," Howe
says. "They offer a way for faculty to find others
who share important intellectual and personal interests.
When I first came to Holy Cross in 1988, the Latin American
Studies concentration faculty became my first friends in
Worcester. Those of us who share strong personal, political
and intellectual interests in Latin America find that we
share much more with each other. We are passionate about
what we do, and we try to share this passion with student
concentrators and with the Holy Cross community in general."
Howe also points out the dynamic nature of the CISS concentrations. "Most
recently," she notes, "the concentration has
been renamed the Latin American and Latino Studies concentration,
reflecting the fact that it is important to include studies
about Latinos in the United States into the curriculum. A
full understanding of Latinos in the U.S. is not possible
without some understanding of Latin America, and an important
aspect of Latin American history is the conquest of the northern
one-third of Mexico during the Mexican-American War of 1845-48
and the migration of so many of its people to the United
States."
Mary Hobgood, the current director of Women's Studies,
explains the manner in which CISS expands the intellectual
conversation on campus in a slightly different way. "CISS
is important for Women's Studies," she argues, "because
it not only promotes interdisciplinary work, it gives spaces
to those who create knowledge from the margins. While departments
have often been weighted to reflect the knowledge produced
by the traditional elite, CISS includes (though it is not
exhausted by) relative newcomers to fields of official knowledge-making,
i.e., white women, people from diverse communities of color
and poor and working-poor people. Since these folks constitute
the world majority, CISS makes an important contribution."
Over 30 years after its founding, CISS continues to grow
and change, both in terms of what it provides to the campus
and what it provides to the community. Matlak places particular
emphasis on recent developments which have resulted in further
binding of town-to-gown.
"I'm extremely pleased with the immediate impact
of Community-Based Learning (C-BL) on our curriculum, which
in its first year has been integrated into over 20 courses
in 12 disciplines and programs—Anthropology, archaeology
and museum studies, creative writing, composition, History,
Sociology, Women's Studies, Latin American studies,
American Sign Language and Deaf Studies, Religious Studies,
Gerontology, and Visual Arts."
"This quite phenomenal success," he continues, "is
attributable to three things: the generous gift of alumnus
and Board of Trustee member, Joseph Donelan '72, to
fund a director's position in C-BL; to the success
of an astute hiring committee with representatives from Student
Affairs, the Chaplains' Office, and Academic Affairs,
with input from students working in Student Affairs—all
working patiently and arduously for several months of the
summer to find a candidate who could work successfully with
the entire campus community; and, finally, the extraordinary
academic and community experience of the director hired,
William Meinhofer. Bilingual, of Swiss and Puerto Rican parentage,
with a Ph.D. in sociology from Boston College, Bill has connected
with the campus community and the Worcester community with
equal effectiveness and aplomb."
Matlak points to Environmental Studies major, Maura Nelson,
as an example of how CISS can provide a place where students
can pursue their passions with exceptional creativity.
"For her capstone project," Matlak says, "one
might have expected that Maura would work on an ES issue.
She went in a somewhat different direction, however. She
wanted to do a meta-project on integrative education; in
other words, she wanted to do research on the pedagogy behind
her educational experience and intellectual growth, to learn
if educational theorists would confirm that she had taken
the right road."
"To my mind," Matlak says, "this is pretty
courageous: How many students would want to know that perhaps
they should have done something other than what they planned
and executed with care and even love?"
An external confirmation of Nelson's educational endeavors
came in the form of a job offer from Menzie-Cura & Associates,
Inc., an environmental consulting firm in Chelmsford, Mass.,
where she will be working on Human Health and Ecological
Risk Assessments.
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