After a year-and-a-half of teetering on the brink of elimination, the fate of the South Asia Regional Studies Department will soon be resolved.
School of Arts and Sciences Dean Samuel Preston said that within the first week following spring break, he will announce the decision to either retain and refocus the department or merge it with the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Department.
Over the past two years, the future of the department has been in a state of limbo. The need for Penn's SARS Department -- established in 1947 as the first department of its kind in the nation -- came into question in 2000, as it had not made a full-time faculty appointment in 25 years and the number of standing faculty had shrunk to under half of its original size.
And in the fall of 2000, the department did not receive Title VI funding from the U.S. Department of Education for the first time in its existence.
Preston said that the decision will be made at an upcoming meeting with his associate deans, and that they will base it in part on the feedback from faculty in various departments who specialize in South Asian studies.
A year ago, Preston announced that the SARS program would retain its departmental status, but continuing problems in the department's structure have led the University to search for a more effective and permanent solution.
"We've determined that we need a locus for cultural, literary and linguistic studies of South Asia," Preston said, explaining that South Asian studies are currently located in both SARS and AMES. "We decided that we have to choose one."
Preston added that the associate deans would be focusing strictly on the SARS Department and not the SARS Center or graduate group.
SARS Department Chairwoman Rosane Rocher said that she is confident that South Asian studies will maintain its status as a department.
"I'm very positive about the future of the department," Rocher said. "We hope that the department will be refocused from regional studies, a term not in much use anymore, to the studies of South Asian languages and cultures."
Rocher said that the difficulty in keeping the department alive has not been a result of dwindling student interest, but rather the awkwardness of its current arrangement. Since its creation as an area studies department after World War II, South Asian studies gradually became integrated with other departments, especially those in the social sciences.
SARS Undergraduate Advisory Board member Shaun Gonzales, a College junior, said he also hopes SARS will remain an autonomous department, but he believes that its structure could be tweaked to concentrate on the more humanistic and cultural aspects of South Asian studies.
"If the SARS department were to become a program, it would no longer have the ability to house faculty," Gonzales said. "And if South Asia studies is deprived of this power, then it is very possible for the study of South Asian culture to decline over time under future and less committed deans."
But Preston said that there are benefits and drawbacks to both options.
"South Asian studies will have a higher profile if it remains a separate department," Preston said. "But that may forfeit some of the synergies [between various Asian studies at Penn] by not having them all in one department."
But Gonzales said that merging with AMES would be detrimental to the pursuit of not only South Asian studies, but of other Asian studies as well.
"The merger of SARS with AMES would essentially make AMES a cultural dustbin," said Gonzales, a SARS and International Relations major. "You would have a department covering every country and culture from Israel to Japan."
"Meanwhile, we have a separate department for Romance languages, Germanic languages and civilizations, classical studies and Slavic studies," he added. "A merger with AMES would be culturally insensitive for these reasons."
But whatever the outcome, Preston said that the school will continue its current searches for specialists in South Asian studies, including South Asian cultural studies and the linguistic studies of Sanskrit.
"We're hopeful of additional appointments in South Asian studies," Preston said.
