from Medieval Academy News

Medieval Studies on a Shoestring: Building a Thriving Medieval Program on a Tiny Budget
by Martha Bayless

With many university programs threatened with death by a thousand cuts, these are not auspicious times to champion seemingly marginal programs such as Medieval Studies. Yet our experience at the University of Oregon is that a thriving program can be built on a tiny budget—and that sometimes a tiny budget can even be an asset. For fifteen years we have been sustaining a lively and popular Medieval Studies program on $1000 a year. We have fourteen faculty, all housed in other departments; we offer an undergraduate major and minor, currently with 26 majors and nine minors, and our numbers are growing by leaps and bounds.

I’ve gathered the lessons we’ve learned about working with minimal funding, serving students well, and avoiding faculty burn-out, and formulated them into Four Laws of Medieval Studies Programs. If you already have a Medieval Studies program, these are ways to stretch your money; if your university thinks you can’t afford one, these show how far you can go on a minuscule budget.

Law No. 1: If you build it, they will come. Medieval Studies is the ideal field because the Middle Ages are already intrinsically appealing. We’re in a much better position than people who teach, say, the eighteenth century: every classroom has five or ten students who secretly want to wear medieval swords and capes, but you really never find students yearning to dress up like Dr. Johnson. So by and large, no persuasion is necessary; the only challenge is to get the word out that such a thing as Medieval Studies exists at the university. The most effect-tive ways include:

• an attractive Website. Ours (http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~midages) has course listings, requirements for the major and minor, and a roster of “Fun Links,” including a Medieval Insult Page and a round-up of novels set in the Middle Ages. Our e-mail shows that we get a lot of high-schoolers reading the Website (and applying to the university because of it), as well as current students and the general public;

• posters publicizing the program. Our goal is to make them so attractive that students want to steal them for their dorm rooms;

• public events. We have an annual Medieval Poetry Reading, a festive showing of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” workshops for freshmen and high-schoolers on “How to Write in Runes,” and visiting performers. If you sponsor anything picturesque (a medieval feast, a sword-fighting demonstration), tell your PR office to alert the local TV station and newspaper. They’re always looking for colorful features, and university administrators love programs that get the university noticed;

• lower-level medieval courses, so interested students can make contact with the program early on;

• outreach from medieval faculty, who talk up the program in their classes.

2: Offer sexy courses that fulfill requirements. The topics will attract students to the program, as will the fact that the courses fulfill departmental or general education requirements. And once they’re hooked, students will be eager to take more advanced classes. One huge advantage of offering requirement-fulfilling courses is that you may be able to configure them as “service” courses and your department will ask you to offer them frequently. With a stroke of luck, you might even be able to teach these rather than more general service courses like Composition. Our popular “sexy” courses include:

The Literature of King Arthur

Magic and the Medieval Worldview

The Age of Beowulf

Celtic Myths and Legends

Medieval Women

The Medieval Dream-Vision

The Medieval Feast in Theory and Practice

Introduction to Runes.

3: Innovations should have multiple benefits. For instance, our “sexy” medieval courses benefit four populations. Students find the courses more interesting than many lower-level courses, and they discover the medieval program early enough to major in it. Faculty benefit in getting to teach required lower-level service courses in their own field. Medieval graduate students benefit in that they are allowed to teach these lower-level classes and so have a chance to gain teaching experience (and c.v. credits) in their field. The program benefits by enrolling more majors, gaining a higher profile, having more clout, and enabling faculty to teach even more courses in their field of interest; and so it all builds on itself.

Multiple benefits are especially vital for initiatives that involve faculty. People come up with a number of initiatives that require a lot of time from faculty, but when we get together to discuss common problems, the number-one faculty complaint is lack of time. So an ironclad principle of making faculty want to participate in a Medieval Studies program is: it has to be more of a benefit than an annoyance. By this I mean an actual benefit, not a theoretical benefit that assumes an ideal world in which everyone is selfless and has enormous expanses of free time.

I would guess we’re all familiar with the onerous lecture series, allegedly a benefit to faculty, that requires hiring a babysitter at the end of an exhausting day, trekking along to a half-empty lecture hall, and listening dutifully as a visiting speaker expounds at great length on three lines of a poem composed in a medieval language known to only two of one’s colleagues. I’m not personally convinced that most speakers (with some notable exceptions) really gladden the hearts of overworked academics, and it can be galling and bad for morale when visiting speakers are paid great sums and one’s own colleagues are making do on a pittance.

Since faculty are the backbone of any Medieval Studies program, it’s helpful to keep the faculty annoyance/benefit ratio in mind when devising initiatives. So, lunching with colleagues at a good restaurant near campus to brainstorm ways to get grants to teach innovative courses—yes. Expecting colleagues to give uncompensated talks on campus—no. Setting up a work-in-progress seminar where col-leagues can get feedback on their projects—yes. Wine afterwards—yes. Spending an after-noon in a meeting drafting a mission state-ment—no. Forming new committees—no, no, no!

As a whole, an ideal Medieval Studies program will provide more of what medievalists have a crying need for: strategies (and maybe even funds) for research leave; lively visiting performances (music, drama) that will also appeal to students (and that may even bring back some of the money expended on them); ways for colleagues to share and get feedback on their work; and a sense of community among medievalists.

4: Being underfunded can be an advantage. The truth is that money attracts cuts. Being underfunded means you’re below the radar when it comes to slashing budgets. To give one example: courtesy of a sympathetic librarian, the University of Oregon library has a meager little $1000 budget for medieval books that won’t fit into regular department budgets. All departments suffered mandated percentage cuts to their book budgets—but the medieval budget is so tiny that it was declared exempt from the cuts!

Another advantage of a miniature budget is the headiness that additional money brings. When we manage to augment our budget, whether by selling T-shirts, attracting alumni donations, or running profitable summer courses, an extra $500 makes us nearly giddy with joy. A conventional large department would sneeze at $500—and it would be eaten up in operating costs. With us, it’s pure profit, and we can spend it on what we like—extra events, perhaps, or undergraduate awards, or faculty research grants. Thus operating on a low overhead can be a wonderful advantage.

Occasionally we lament the fact that we don’t have a big Medieval Center as some universities do. But if we did, it would be an underfunded, struggling Medieval Center that demanded a lot of sacrifice from faculty to keep it going. Instead we have a thriving, popular, smaller Medieval Studies program that’s simple to run and that gives back as much as we put into it. With our $1000 we support our Website, coordinate courses, host public events, print posters, run faculty retreats, and provide the university with a flourishing program that attracts students from across the country. That’s one of the best uses of so little money in any university—as both medievalists and administrators can attest.