Call to Establish a Peace and Conflict Studies Program

To The Campus,

According to the New York Times, more than 400 universities and colleges worldwide offer individual courses, certificates and undergraduate or graduate degrees in peace studies. We believe that now is the time for Middlebury to join the ranks of schools dedicated to the cultivation of peace by developing its own Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) program.What is Peace and Conflict Studies?

PACS is an interdisciplinary study of the conditions under which peace and conflict are developed and the study of how conflict can be transformed into peace. Peace and conflict studies is most frequently offered as an interdisciplinary program to ensure that the complex factors that foster sustained and dynamic conditions of peace can be investigated through different disciplinary lenses.

PACS requires its own program because no existing department is able to fully address peace as an object of academic inquiry. Instead, peace is often assumed to be about the study of conflict or is glossed over as an impossibility or unworthy of investigation. It is important to note that the Women’s and Gender Studies Department was established by the College on these exact same premises. In the same way that many disciplines glossed over gender as unimportant or immutable, existing academic disciplines are so embedded in the framework of the nation-state that they harmfully omit a more critical interrogation that would be provided in a Peace and Conflict Studies program.

Why Peace and Conflict Studies?
PACS is at the heart of the Middlebury’s mission statement. Middlebury strives, as the mission statement explains, “to cultivate the intellectual, creative, physical, ethical and social qualities essential for leadership in a rapidly changing global community.” It is only logical to recognize that this renders essential the act of engaging in learning about how to cultivate peace. The rich liberal arts tradition that Middlebury is known for exists in continuity with the multifaceted nature of peace and conflict studies. In order to develop into an effective leader, one must truly understand the depth of both maintaining peace and overcoming conflict.

People everywhere are realizing the importance of PACS. We believe that people around the globe are cognizant of the tremendous importance of making a dedicated effort to understand the complexities of conflict so that peaceful resolutions may become more viable. Here at Middlebury, students filled an entire lecture hall in September 2010 to listen to a talk advertised with the title “How to Be a Peacemaker: Nonviolence in a Time of War.” At the lecture, more than 70 students signed a petition urging the administration to develop a peace and conflict studies program — an additional testament to the student body’s emphatic demand to formally study peace in our curriculum.

Middlebury will benefit from the addition of such a program. Our peer institutions such as Swarthmore, Haverford and Wellesley have already made important efforts to include peace and conflict studies into the academic program of their respective institutions. Given that Middlebury already has several courses appropriate for a PACS program — and that the Monterey Institute’s graduate programs in Conflict Resolution and Nonproliferation both declare, in their own words, a dedication to cultivating peace — there is no reason why we should not explicitly declare our own dedication to the cultivation of peace, possibly drawing in more prospective students as a result.

What This Program is Not
It is clear that in this day and age the word ‘peace’ certainly has a certain stigma. The PACS program would not push an ideological agenda, but would open up the conversation so that students can come to conclusions for themselves through approaching the subject from a variety of angles.

What We Are Calling For
The creation of an introductory PACS course. This course would be taught by one to three Middlebury professors approaching PACS from their specific fields throughout the semester. The course will cover the basics of peace and conflict studies.

The establishment of a PACS minor. The PACS minor would require the aforementioned introductory course and FIVE other courses from an approved list. It could be housed within the Political Science Department, the Geography Department, the Philosophy Department or another relevant department.

The establishment of an interdisciplinary PACS department and major. Given the interdisciplinary nature of PACS, its department would be decentralized, with only a few PACS-specific professors and department chairs (similar to that of the WAGS department). The PACS major would include an introductory course requirement and a minimum of NINE other required courses.

Where We Go From Here
While we believe that a PACS program at Middlebury should be instated as soon as possible, we recognize that the school does not have unlimited funds, especially with the given financial situation. Therefore, we understand that the implementation of a PACS program would be a careful and deliberate process. We have accounted for this by organizing our request into three graduated steps of development.

We believe that the study of peace and conflict is applicable, appropriate and immensely necessary to a liberal arts education and that because of this, a program in PACS should be given the same funding and support as that of any other program at Middlebury. We believe that peace has been left out of the curriculum at Middlebury for far too long and that studying peace in conjunction with conflict (through a variety of perspectives) will finally expose students to the concepts of peace and peacemaking, making them better equipped to address conflict around the world and at home.

Peacefully and hopefully,
The Peace and Conflict Studies Club

(If you want to learn more about the Peace and Conflict Studies Club, email pac@middlebury.edu. We meet Thursdays at 6:30pm in Ross B11)