MALS Newsletter Fall 2007 (PDF) *see below for acrobat reader

The Ramapo MALS program began in January 1995 with the admission of 26 students. Seldom had a program been prepared for more judiciously. Dr. Sydney Weinberg led faculty and administration through a six-year timetable of planning, beginning in 1989. This included an assembly of some two dozen founding faculty and outside experts, meeting bi-weekly seminars for two years.

The Ramapo faculty was evaluated as extraordinary by external evaluation from Georgetown. On site evaluation by University of Delaware Professor of History and MALS Director, Dr. Raymond Callahan, noted that the overall coherence of the curriculum was exceptional.

MALS is currently one of several masters programs at Ramapo College. Other graduate programs include educational technology,and nursing. Dr. Sydney Weinberg directed the MALS program from 1995-2002. Dr. Mark Howenstein (with Dr. Edward Shannon as Associate) directed the program in 2003. Dr. Anthony T. Padovano was appointed director on January 1, 2004.

The first task of the current director was a massive review of the Graduate Program, a decade after its inception. Deans, directors, faculty and administrators were interviewed; interrogatories were sent to every graduate, all current students and all faculty who have ever taught in the program. The effort to create a new structure was influenced by the insights and suggestions that this comprehensive survey produced.

Georgetown University Dean, Dr. Phyllis O’Callaghan, a leader in the National Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs noted that Ramapo College’s multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and multicultural dimensions matched the philosophy of MALS.

There are more than 150 MALS programs in the United States. The first began in 1953 at Wesleyan, followed soon by Johns Hopkins, the New School and Georgetown. These programs were both traditional and innovative. They were traditional because they picked up the American preference for broad-based learning which existed in this country before the emergence of disciplinary education in the late nineteenth century. The programs were innovative, given the mid-twentieth century bias for exclusively disciplinary majors in undergraduate education and, especially, in graduate curriculums. The MALS emphasis was strong on interdisciplinarity. The programs often appeared as maverick experiments when they were implemented in fairly conventional university settings. At Ramapo, program and college were uniquely matched.

MALS programs are now in place at Dartmouth and Duke, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia and New York University, the University of Chicago and Emory, and, internationally, at Oxford University. The institution of these programs across such a spectrum is an indication that the Ramapo ideal of interdisciplinarity is visionary and workable.