TANJA GEIS/YH

Urban studies may finally get what it deserves

Last May, with support from professors, students submitted a petition to the Dean's Office clamoring for some sort of urban studies program. Wonder of wonders, Yale (eventually) did something: a few weeks ago, a committee of professors, led by Cynthia Farrar and Allan Plattus, began researching the issue. The Dean's Office has even hired a paid student to serve on the committee.

I found all this out after I'd worked myself into a frenzy of righteous indignation over Yale's lack of an urban studies program. From the looks of it, I can't fairly chastise Yale for its steadfast refusal to enact a relatively painless measure that makes sense. The University is on the case—if quietly—and this gesture seems substantial. Congratulations, Yale.

What I can do is contribute my voice. Things that have been said before need to be said again every so often to remind the powers that be that people are watching closely and people still care. The old arguments remain; situations become more acute with the passage of time, even if they do not worsen. Yale has created a wonderful, and overdue, opportunity. To squander it would be a damned shame.

As it stands, the dozens of Yalies interested in urban studies receive official lip service, but not academic direc-tion, whereas the one or two mathematics and philosophy or comparative literature majors that trickle out of each graduating class know exactly what's expected of them. It's not fair. As a freshman, I had never heard of Edmund Spenser or Alexander Pope; I just knew I wanted to learn a lot about English literature. The requirements of the English major ensured that I got familiar with the big boys of that discipline, and all I had to do was sign up.

The Blue Book blurb under urban studies politely notes, "Although there is no major in urban studies at Yale, interested students may wish to consider a Special Divisional major focused on this topic."

Special Divisional majors—student-created courses of study, which require approval from the notoriously inflexible Committee on Honors and Academic Standing—are for weirdos. They're for extremely stubborn people who are extremely interested in some extremely esoteric hybrid of Yale's plentiful existing majors. Urban studies is no such beast. Enough students want it to beg for it year after year, and they shouldn't each have to go it alone, blazing their own path through the bureaucratic jungle. If urban studies were as simple to declare as English, interested Yalies who lack the time and determination to petition would be able to follow their hearts instead of settling for second choices.

Theoretically, urban studies makes sense. Cities—from one-horse towns to bustling metropolises—are the basic units of human society, the purest expression of a social animal's instinct to form communities. Yale is about big ideas: the federal government, international relations, American culture. The curriculum presumes that the large scale is an adequate summary of the small. But without the microscopic, the macroscopic is meaningless. Congress can come up with welfare plans, but city institutions have to tailor and administer them. Abstract entities don't interact with the citizens of the world, the great majority of whom live in cities and villages; municipal institutions, from street gangs to symphony orchestras, do.

In order to understand cities, you have to know some history, some sociology, some political science, and some economics. Architecture, philosophy, and aspects of other subjects come in handy, too—but no single one is close enough to give an urban studier the necessary background. American studies and the urban studies track in architecture lack the proper focus. And declaring an existing major makes it harder to get into, or find time to take, classes in the others. Interdisciplinary programs like ethics, politics, and economics and ethnicity, race, and migration (ER&M), which draw professors from existing departments to create a uniquely focused course of study, set a good precedent for urban studies. The creation of ER&M just three years ago also proves that Yale has the will, and the dough, to cobble together new majors.

What Yale really needs, of course, is more course offerings in urban studies, but now's not the time to examine the teeth of this gift horse. The biggest barrier to urban studies, or to any change at all when it comes to this unwieldy institution, is the University's inertia. Now that the ball is rolling, we can only hope Newton's first law of motion will apply. A little acceleration would be nice, too.

Molly Ball is a junior in Pierson.

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