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504 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 9 (1989)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0504 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE The academic year 1988-89 marks the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the first serious and structured peace studies program in the United States, that of Manchester College, a fine liberal arts institution of the Brethren tradition in northern Indiana. In the four decades since that Manchester curricular innovation, peace studies has become rather prevalent, if not somewhat standard, as one of the transdisciplinary areas of inquiry offered on U.S. college and university campuses. The fourth edition of Peace and World Order Studies: A Curriculum Guide, a compilation of peace studies syllabi and materials of pedagogical interest, such as films for classroom use, sold over 5000 copies.' The upcoming, revised, and expanded edition of the Guide notes that over 180 colleges have an undergraduate major or minor, while another 150 institutions offer some course or courses in peace studies.2 Among those colleges and universities that compose this list are some of the finest teaching and research centers in U.S. higher education. But the road from a single program at a small midwestern college to the relative mainstream of university education has not been one without controversy and peril. As might be expected, much of the raison d'etre for a number of programs came with the quest for relevance and amid the campus ferment that characterized the Vietnam war years. When the war no longer constituted the burning issue on campuses, a few programs lost their momentum and passed from the scene. Others sprang up steadily throughout the 1970s and early 1980s; many that began in the latter decade were stimulated by new concerns about the problems of living in the nuclear era: Because a large number of peace studies enterprises emerged on university campuses in the midst of such trying social conditions and as part of the national dialogue about U.S. military policy, it is not surprising that many institutions had long and serious debates about whether the university ought to engage in a curricular focus on questions of war and peace. In some instances, concerns with academic freedom and principles of free and open inquiry were raised. In other circumstances, issues of an implicit ideological bias or worry about the activist orientation that might lie in the development of a peace studies curriculum plunged campuses into debilitating debates. In some locales, the discussions were no less serious but raised different questions. Most notable were those regarding whether a discernible field of study, that is, peace research, existed and whether faculty interested in such areas of inquiry and teaching, but who obviously were trained in a traditional discipline, were sufficiently prepared to teach such a field of study. 1. Barbara J. Wien, ed., Peace and World Order Studies: A Curriculum Guide, 4th ed. (New York: World Policy Institute, 1984). 2. Daniel C. Thomas and Michael Klare, eds., Peace and World Order Studies: A Curriculum Guide, 5th ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989). 3. This tendency of programs to appear seemingly because, rather than as, political issues emerged nationally provided some celebrated and heated debates on campuses. For example, after the faculty of New York University voted-with only one negative vote-to institute a minor in peace studies in the Division of Arts and Letters, Herbert London, dean of the university's Gallatin Division, wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times that critiqued the decision. See London, Peace Studies-Hardly Academic, New York Times, 5 Apr. 1985. 9

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