The Board of Trustees approved a new Ph.D. program in art history Friday morning, according to SMU President R. Gerald Turner.
The program is slated to begin in Fall 2011, but the university is still raising funds for an endowed chair and fellowship support for the graduate students, according to Turner.
“That’s been talked about [the program] for at least 10 years, maybe longer,” Turner said.
“The interest in that program with all the fine arts complexes that are making up Dallas now—[we] felt that this was the right time to do it.”
Turner spoke with The Daily Campus after the Board’s regular February meeting to discuss what happened. The Board of Trustees meeting is not open to the public or press.
Art History Chair Janis Bergman-Carton said the university had recommended a Ph.D. program for sometime, but the department had always said no.
“What made us reconsider this time around is that we have a very dynamic dean at the Meadows School of the Arts—José Antonio Bowen—who, from the day he arrived, was fully supportive of this project and has, in the last three years, for example, increased the stipend for our M.A. students, which is critical to attracting the best and the brightest, and we see the results of that,” Bergman-Carton said.
Bergman-Carton said the program was possible through the support of Bowen and a “very generous donor,” who gave $2 million so that the department could look for a senior scholar.
The Ph.D. program, according to Bergman-Carton, will follow a new, “very distinctive” rubric of study that differs from the traditional area studies model.
Bergman-Carton said the program will have students, “really looking at the discipline in a completely different way.”
The Board of Trustees also went over the financial situation of the university for the rest of this fiscal year, which ends May 31.
Turner noted that the university’s endowment has recovered from the economy’s downturn. SMU’s endowment went down to $1 billion from $1.4 billion, a decline of 26.3 percent.
As of the end of last year, the endowment had seen an increase of $86 million to $1.119 billion.
The Board also received an update on the Second Century fundraising campaign. The university is halfway through the campaign, which will end in 2013.
Turner reported that the university has raised $416 million of the $750 million goal.
“I would like to think we would be further down the line without the recession, but that [the recession] slows everything down,” he said. “We’re doing extremely well given the economic hard times we’ve had to be past the halfway in time and past halfway point in total.”
The Board of Trustees will meet again on May 7.
The agenda has not yet been determined, but they will approve the final university budget for the next year.
