By BEN SCHWARTZ
Staff Writer
The Sociology, Economics and Political Science Departments have joined to launch a new Social Policy minor next fall. The new interdisciplinary minor will focus on issues of human welfare in Baltimore and other urban areas across the country in addition to looking at possible policy prescriptions to those very same social ills.
The departments will offer for the first time next fall a new 200-level course titled “Introduction to Social Policy and Inequality: Baltimore and Beyond” covering the unequal distribution of wealth, uneven educational opportunities and inadequate access to health care in the inner city. The course, a requirement for the new Social Policy minor and the first to be developed for the innovative program, will be team-taught by professors from all three departments and will be offered every fall semester.
“What we’ve done over the past couple of years is think about how we might leverage the fact that JHU is in a very special place, there are almost no first-rate universities that are in cities that offer a laboratory for studying urban problems like Baltimore does, but is also an hour away from Washington, D.C. which is the place to study the national culture,” Professor of Sociology and Public Policy Andrew Cherlin said.
Cherlin is the chair of the faculty committee for the new minor in Social Policy. Sociology Assistant Professor Stefanie DeLuca, Economics Professor Robert Moffitt, Economics Senior Lecturer Barbara Morgan, Political Science Associate Professor Adam Sheingate and Political Science Associate Professor Steven Teles form the rest of the committee.
Social policy works to lessen inequalities in education, health care, employment, housing, and other areas through local, state, and federal government actions and programs. It involves the laws, rules and regulations governing social, financial and institutional resources.
“The idea behind the program in part is to take the very best of what you guys learn and do while you’re here. Think critically, write, employ your quantitative skills, and take the best of that, your comparative advantage, and apply it to the things that make you upset about society when you see them, what gets you worried, what kinds of things make you think it is unfair,” DeLuca said.
The most unique aspect of the new minor will be an intensive semester in Baltimore or Washington, D.C. junior year. The faculty committee will select 15 students each year to take classes and hold an internship in a government agency or nonprofit organization in the nation’s capital and another 15 to participate in a similar program while remaining in Baltimore.
The committee will give priority to students majoring in sociology, economics or political science who apply for the program. The new minor in Social Policy will also include a senior capstone seminar.
“We want to give students a grounding in [this] field. There are two ways to study it, one is a very technical way where we train you to be analysts who go work in a government agency, that’s not what we’re going to do. We want to give you a grounding in the disciplines of social science so that you can get the big picture of what’s happening and inform public policy,” Cherlin said.
The new course and the new minor in Social Policy are targeted at students interested in pursuing law, medicine, public health or graduate study in social sciences.
“Now, journalists do this, sometimes people talk about it on television, and there are all kinds of other sciences that study these problems, but the advantage of doing a field like social policy is that you can take academic rigor to things that people might otherwise apply their own opinions to or anecdotes,” DeLuca said.
