Colorado College—as of the beginning of the 2015-16 academic year—is home to 42 majors and 33 minors. At face value, there appears to be many ways by which students can choose to study the world, but nothing CC students study is stagnant. With a changing world comes the need for a changing curriculum, and as a liberal arts college, CC must be malleable; we must adapt to our developing needs for new forms of art and ways of understanding our peers. Our goal as an institution must be to fill the holes created by the inevitable expansion of time and social development.
Robert Mahaffie assumed his position of paraprofessional for the Film and New Media Studies department immediately following his graduation in 2015. He entered Colorado College in 2012 unsure of his academic path, for neither his future major nor minor had yet to be created. He eventually declared the then-called “Film and New Media” major and Theater Design minor, two programs that were formally integrated into the CC curriculum and, according to Mahaffie, have “since exploded.” Shortly after, the department began to offer significantly more film classes, the waitlists started growing, and now the Film and Media Studies department is one of the most popular on campus.
“[Introductory film courses] are such a great way to get some kind of grounding in film,” Mahffie said, “which I think everyone should do, because it’s such a common part of our lives as of late.”
Considering the amount of video content both in movie theaters and on social media, Mahaffie stresses that he “[wants] to see people make good stuff,” for art is “so much about how to tell a good story.” The process and relaying of personal discovery is so crucial to our campus community that the Film and Media Studies major went from nonexistent to essential almost immediately. One of the first to graduate from the major, Mahaffie has since dedicated his year to helping students convey their personal experiences through art.
In terms of the youth of this department, he is extremely adamant about how “long overdue” many majors and minors in the arts have been, “especially the film major.”
“It’s crazy that we did not have a film major until three or four years ago,” Mahffie said. “Granted, it is very young as an art form, but young is relative considering it is 115 years old now. I think that both [film and theater major/minor opportunities] open students up to a new world of creative possibility; you can see it on campus.”
It is not as though various means of creativity did not exist in the student body prior to the creation of the Film and Media Studies major and Theater Design minor, but the school has since given students the resources to create art in a more creatively stimulating environment. Art, especially in the form of digital media, is consistently growing with human intellectual and technological progress, and the response to the ever-changing means by which we choose to express ourselves should never be inactive.
The goal, however, should not just be to move with change, but to progress because of it, especially amongst the current social climate of Colorado Springs, the country, and the world. Before someone can relay their personal identity to someone else, they must understand it. This is not a new need on our campus, but it is a topic that has just gained approval to be considered an official major after a 10-year process: Race, Ethnic, and Migration Studies (REM). Although some form of ethnic studies has existed as a thematic minor since 1991, there have only been faces to the department for the past five years, and next year, for the first time in CC history, students will be able to declare REM as their major.
According to the College Board, over 50 liberal arts colleges in the United States offer some form of ethnic studies major, and until Block 4 of this year, CC was not one of them. Claire Garcia, director of the program and consistent advocate for the importance of REM on campus, wholly believes it is “the most relevant major in the whole curriculum,” for “it addresses the most currently pressing issues and questions in a genuinely interdisciplinary way.” The REM major, she states, stresses a “question-based approach to learning,” and shapes itself based on the current needs of students and our greater world.
She remembers a time when one of her colleagues questioned “whether Ethnic Studies is a ‘real’ academic discipline,” but calmly continued to explain that this department is not only a “serious academic, intellectual enterprise,” but also “changes the way people relate to each other.”
Like Film and Media Studies, one of the goals of the REM Department is to “create bridges between the classroom and community,” and to “increase the way students are able to communicate with each other,” while “[developing] concepts and vocabulary to talk in a responsibly, respectful way about certain problems […] and how they affect our present lives,” said Garcia.
When discussing the emergence of new majors on campus, the most frequently used word by both students and faculty is “overdue.”
“I came into college knowing I wanted to study Race and Ethnic Studies,” said first-year Maya Littlejohn, “and was just hoping the school would catch up with where it needed to be.”
The need for such a program and an increase in campus dialogue on race could not be ignored after the series of events in the fall, and Littlejohn hopes that “students who aren’t as aware [of minority issues on campus] will be able to have the experience of taking REM classes, and there will hopefully be less of a pressure for minority students to teach their peers [about racial issues].”
On the CC website under “Departments & Programs,” the college states that its students enrolled in the school are “learning to understand,” but what is to be understood is changing unpredictably: much faster than the slow pace it has taken for the REM major to be approved, and the approximately 110 years for a major to be created after the development of film as an art form.
Given the immediate success of the curriculum’s recently incorporated majors, CC must push perspectives further and view problems from new and sometimes uncomfortable angles in order to remain progressive observers of the world.