How to Build a Major in a Young Field

When the University of Toledo decided to upgrade its minor in disability studies to a major, the program’s professors weren’t sure what to expect. At times they even wondered whether the expansion was a good idea.

Would undergraduates want to earn a bachelor’s degree in a field that, although fast-growing, still isn’t deemed relevant in some environments? Might that degree be a liability?

“My fear,” says Jim Ferris, who holds an endowed chair of disability studies at Toledo, “was that some undergraduate would have it on their résumé and be up for a job, and the employer wouldn’t know what disability studies meant and just hire someone else.”

Professors at Toledo and other scholars in the discipline say the program exemplifies how disability studies continues to gain traction even as the field, in some ways, is still shaping its identity.

For decades, disabled people were studied within a medical framework, which treated disability as a problem that needed to be solved. But in 1994, Syracuse University established the first disability-studies program in the United States, with a focus on examining disability from social, cultural, and political points of view.

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Disability studies now is interdisciplinary, and that fuels its growth. At the same time, it muddies the field’s future, with disability-studies scholars in various disciplines thinking about what that growth means and what direction it should take.

At Toledo it’s too early to tell the new degree’s value on the job market, but so far the program — the first in the country that allows undergraduates to earn degrees in disability studies on a campus (there are bachelor’s-degree programs online) — has drawn more students than expected. Fourteen students at Toledo have declared disability studies as their major; Mr. Ferris says he and his colleagues had hoped for three.

Some disability-studies scholars, who say they have noticed an uptick in undergraduate interest, are watching how the Toledo program evolves and hoping that its success might spur other institutions to follow suit.

“Most of the time, people study disability in graduate schools and professional schools,” says Brenda J. Brueggemann, president of the Society for Disability Studies and a professor of English at the University of Louisville. “Giving students the tools to think about it and talk about it long before they get there is great. I think it’s powerful that there’s a major in disability studies at Toledo.”

Shift to a Major

The University of Toledo’s program was seeded by a $1.9-million donation in 2001 from the Ability Center of Greater Toledo, a nonprofit organization that helps people with disabilities live independently. The endowment money paved the way for a minor in the field that began a year later. Upgrading to a degree program, in the College of Languages, Literature, and Social Sciences, was the goal from the beginning, says Kim E. Nielsen, a professor of disability studies at Toledo.

She was hired in 2012 to help build the program. In addition to Ms. Nielsen and Mr. Ferris, the program’s full-time faculty includes two tenure-track professors.

“Like any institution, getting faculty and getting everything organized takes time,” says Ms. Nielsen, acting director of the program while Mr. Ferris is on sabbatical.

With the new major, students will be prepared to lead the organizations that serve people with disabilities, Mr. Ferris says. And if they decide to go to graduate school to pursue disability studies, then they’ll enter with a deeper knowledge of the field.

“A major says we’re serious much more strongly and clearly than a minor does,” Mr. Ferris says.

There are nearly 40 academic programs in disability studies in North America, according to a curated list on Syracuse University’s website. Most of them fit into three groups: minors, graduate degrees, and certificate programs, along with at least one bachelor’s degree offered online and another that offers an online component.

The new interdisciplinary major at Toledo includes courses in disability law, gender and disability, the history of disability in the United States, and the history of disability in American literature. Students are also required to do an internship.

“A good number of our students are double majors,” Mr. Ferris says. “That allows them to take the ideas that we develop in disability studies and apply them in a whole host of different ways to different fields.”

In a move to formally link disability studies to one field, the program has established a partnership with Toledo’s business school that makes it possible for students to earn a combined bachelor’s degree in disability studies and an M.B.A. in five years instead of six. The goal is to prepare students for careers in policy, advocacy, health care, human resources, or management.

“We’re really on the cusp of expanding our reach,” Mr. Ferris says. He expects enrollment to grow as more students begin to understand that what they learn in the classroom can be used in a variety of careers to make a difference in people’s lives.

The work it takes to do that is probably much easier because college students today belong to a generation that grew up in the 26 years since the Americans With Disabilities Act was passed. “The legislative advances in the latter part of the 20th century have seeded the ground in ways that students are much more ready to focus on disability studies,” Mr. Ferris says.

The law, he says, has created an environment in which every student has been educated alongside someone with a disability.

Interdisciplinary Field

Disability studies is more interdisciplinary than most fields. It spans the social sciences, the humanities, the law, and education, among other fields.

The fact that it doesn’t belong to a single discipline has helped to fuel the field’s growth, with scholarly research in multiple disciplines broadening its scope. But being interdisciplinary has its pros and cons, scholars say.

One upside is that disability-studies scholarship not only is found in journals specific to the field, such as Disability Studies Quarterly, but now is widely accepted in a variety of other disciplinary journals, Mr. Ferris says, a sign that critical disability scholarship has built up credibility and gained wider interest.

On the other hand, he says, “it’s a little more challenging to keep up with all the good work in the field,” since new studies and emerging research are published in such a wide range of places.

Having more people engaged in disability-studies hasn’t paid off in some ways, says Michael Bérubé, a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University who does work in the field.

“In my experience, one or two major figures in the field are trying to get things done” in any one college’s disability-studies program, he says. “That’s not the way to sustain things. When they go, everything goes with them.”

Without broader institutional support in many places, Mr. Bérubé says, the field and its curriculum vary greatly from campus to campus.

At some institutions, like Toledo, disability studies is rooted in the humanities and social sciences. The School of Education is home to disability studies at Syracuse University. At Miami University the minor lives in the department of sociology and gerontology.

“In almost every field,” Ms. Brueggemann says, “you can put disability studies in there somehow,” which makes coordinating multiple fields one of the challenges of creating a program.

“You have to think where are there pockets of faculty and students who are probably already doing this work but they don’t call it that,” says Ms. Brueggemann, who formerly coordinated Ohio State University’s minor in disability studies. “Then you build from there.”

Disability studies also “cuts across all identities,” she says, a factor that has contributed to the field’s prominence. In recent years, disability-studies scholarship has increasingly highlighted the intersection of disability, race, and gender.

At Toledo, disability-studies faculty members are preparing for the major’s second year. This summer, Ms. Nielsen says, they will meet to “talk about the year — the curriculum, what went well, and what we think needs improvement.”

The program will need to sustain its early success to energize student recruitment and to keep making the connections with organizations and companies needed to build a pool of internships. There’s also the task of proving to administrators — ever watchful of how resources are used — that creating a major meets student demand and was the right move.

Audrey Williams June is a senior reporter who writes about the academic workplace, faculty pay, and work-life balance in academe. Contact her at audrey.june@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @chronaudrey.