Grant enables SOCI doctoral curriculum

By Seth Brown     5/16/10 7:00pm

While the French Studies doctoral program has stopped accepting new graduate students, the Department of Sociology begins preparations to start their own graduate program, with the first cohort of students joining the department in fall 2011. The Faculty Senate approved the new program at their April 21 session.The program will be funded initially by a $6.4 million gift from the Houston Endowment Inc., with the university gradually taking over fiscal responsibility itself. The gift was made in light of the continuing research Rice sociologists have done concerning Houston, such as Professor Stephen Klineberg's Houston Area Survey, which measures economic and demographic changes and responses to these, and Professor Michael Emerson's Center on Race, Religion, and Urban Life. Both of these are now contained within Rice's Institute for Urban Research, which conducts a variety of research projects pertaining to cities and urban issues.

The gift will provide stipends for four to five doctoral candidates per year, with a projected 20 students total by 2016. Several more candidates could be funded by external grants, Department of Sociology Chair Elizabeth Long said. Each spring, there are 15-20 undergraduate students who graduate with sociology degrees, Long said.

The gift also provides for several new faculty members, further expenses of the doctoral program and program expenses for the Institute for Urban Research, according to the program's proposal.

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"A lot of people in our department have done national studies, but I think there is an interest on everybody's part to use the city as a kind of laboratory," Long said. "Houston is probably the most diverse city in the country - we have an enormous number of linguistic and cultural groups."

Sociology Professor Bridget Gorman said that the next step for the department will be advertising the new program and determining what sort of qualities the department will look for in applicants.

"Right now we're in the nuts and bolts phase," Gorman said. "We have to start selling the program to students."

Long said that she does not think the addition of a graduate program will negatively impact the undergraduate program. She noted that undergraduates are already involved in research in the city - for instance through Klineberg's annual HAS - and she said that she is hoping to open some graduate courses to advanced undergraduate students.

Sociology Professor Michael Lindsay said he thought the presence of graduate students would contribute to the undergraduate experience.

"I think there will be tremendous synergy between undergraduate offerings and the new graduate program," Lindsay said. "In the years ahead I think we'll find even more ways to capitalize on the strengths of both."

He said the new graduate students will aid in designing a new introductory sociology course, and then serve as discussion leaders for it, though it will still be taught by a faculty member. Lindsay also said that graduate students may be able to offer courses of their own to undergraduates. He added that graduate students will also give Rice greater influence on the field of sociology and aid in the department's research efforts.

"Graduate students will allow us to go deeper and further along research trajectories at a faster pace," Lindsay said.

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