NEWS
Gettysburg to Sponsor Gilder Lehrman Master’s Program in American History BY PHOEBE DOSCHER
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t the Oct. 7 faculty meeting, faculty voted to move forward with the proposed online master’s in American history program in conjunction with the Gilder Lehrman Institute (GLI). The program, aimed at high school history teachers, will be taught by scholars from around the country, and will operate under the auspices of Gettysburg College, starting in the fall of 2022. Background on the Gilder Lehrman Master’s Program At the Sept. 9 faculty meeting, President Bob Iuliano and Provost Jack Ryan brought the proposed partnership with the Gilder Lehrman MA in American History program to the table for discussion. “What we’re doing here is just adding an online program for adult learners,” Ryan said. “It has nothing to do with our undergraduate population. It has everything to do with helping students all across America better understand American history.” The 30-credit degree program is fully accredited and open to K-12 educators with a bachelor’s degree who are affiliated with the GLI, in addition to librarians, National Park employees, district supervisors, and museum professionals. Master’s candidates are required to take ten three-credit courses, including a historiography and historical methods course and a capstone or thesis. “This group of adult learners … is spread across 29,000 high schools all across the
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United States,” Ryan said. “They’re in all 50 states. From the mercenary perspective, it puts us in contact with all these schools, and it puts us in contact with all these students.” Online courses will be taught by distinguished faculty on a variety of topics, including “Women in the American Revolution,” “Race and Rights in American History,” “The American Civil War,” and “World War II.” “Most of the courses that are already in place are really taught by significant teacherscholars—names that resonate with people, like David Blight, [who has] a recent book about Frederick Douglass, [and] Catherine Clinton—she helped us begin our Civil War Studies program,” said Ryan. The lectures are asynchronous; master’s candidates are able to attend between three and five synchronous discussion sessions with the teaching assistant assigned to the course. A total of 837 students are currently enrolled in the program; each three-credit course costs $750, totalling $7,500 for the entirety of the master’s program for one student. The Timeline GLI President Jim Basker proposed bringing the program to Gettysburg in May 2021. The program currently operates under Pace University, and was housed at Adams State University in Colorado prior to that.
After the initial proposal, Ryan, Iuliano, History Professor Tim Shannon and Provost Chris Zappe held a meeting in June with the GLI’s Basker, Chief Operating Officer Katherine Mott, and Assistant Director of the MA Program Josh Burnett. Shannon presented questions to the GLI at the meeting, and the history department agreed to move forward with the program. “The history department was very pleased that Bob and Chris and Jack brought the proposal to the department to vet it, and we took that responsibility seriously,” History Department Chair Dina Lowy said. “We asked for syllabi, we wanted to check on the academic rigor of the program, and we were satisfied with what we saw.” Following the meeting, Gettysburg devised a crossdivisional working group of faculty and staff to discuss the program. “The working group’s charge was threefold: [First], evaluate the College’s technical readiness to support a program like this, and the resources that we might need to scale up to operate the program. Number two, evaluation of operational and administrative readiness in the ongoing incremental resources that we would need to support a program of this magnitude. And three, identifying the federal, state, and Middle States requirements for offering the program,” Ryan said. At the Oct. 4 meeting, the faculty voted on the Gilder Lehrman MA in American
