RICK BIELACZYC-WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY Give it a chance: History professor Melvin Small teaches at Wayne State Peace in the Classroom A new way to study international and domestic quarrels grows, but is it academically legitimate? of union-management relations" and "race relations in urban society." Emphasis is placed on the growing field of arbitration in the United States. Recent graduate Evan Dixon plans a career in international-con- flict resolution, but he's learning about me- diation in a Detroit community center, dealing with "a lot of neighbor-to-neighbor stuff and barking dogs." Critics attack peace studies as a waste of time or as nonacademic propaganda. The most frequent charge, launched from the right, is that the programs follow a left- wing line and use only antinuclear litera- ture such as Jonathan Schell's "The Fate of the Earth" and Dietrich Fischer's "Pre- venting War in the Nuclear Age." Less strident critics argue that peace topics can be covered within other departments and need not be carved out as a separate sub- ject. Even advocates admit that the subject may not yet be well enough established as a major. Although students stream into in- troductory survey classes, not many are fully committing themselves to the topic. Of the 350 students who take classes in Berkeley's program, only 30 are majors. At Wayne State, only three or four students at a time focus on peace and even then-in ac- cordance with university conditions-only as a comajor with another, more tradition- al subject such as economics. Adding peace to the curriculum is not new (Indiana's Manchester College pio- neered a program in 1948), but peace stud- ies seems to have come into its own in recent years because of the lack of prog- ress in arms control. "It was pretty slow until the 1980s," says Robert Holt, a psy- chology professor who spearheaded the addition of a peace-studies minor at New York University two years ago. Propo- nents defend peace studies as legitimate. "Peace studies is an academic field of knowledge and I think any field of knowl- edge belongs on a university campus," says Maire Dugan, director of the peace- research consortium. The battle within the academic commu- nity even spilled onto the op-ed page of The New York Times, which is where NYU dean Herbert London turned to attack his school's new minor in 1985. "Alas, peace studies is the academic liberal's latest ef- fort to impose his brand of peace on an unwary student population ..." London wrote. "In the 1920s, people who taught such nonsense at least had the courage to define their position as pacifism. Their views didn't masquerade as a new scholar- ly discipline." Although more students and teachers are interested in giving peace an academic chance, the atmosphere within the scholarly community is proving to be anything but tranquil. CHRISTOPHER M. BELLITTO with KAREN SPRINGEN in Detroit, MICHAEL NEWMAN n Berkeley and ROBIN G A RE ISS in Urbana-Champaign n the '60s, students took to the streets in the name of peace, handing out flowers. and chanting slogans to protest the Viet- nam War. In the'80s, peace has moved into the classroom. According to the national Consortium on Peace Research, Education and Development, only six peace-studies programs existed in 1970; today more than 100 schools offer at least some official class- es on the topic. Students may take an un- dergraduate concentration in peace at Boston College or a master's degree in in- ternational peacemaking at the University of Hawaii. However widespread, peace studies remain loosely defined; the only agreement is that, in the understated de- scription of Berkeley senior John Evans, "it's a very progressive major." Like black- and women's studies pro- grams, peace studies are heavily interdisci- plinary. Courses are often chosen among regular offerings in departments from physics to philosophy. Many focus on the 20th-century history of the West with em- phasis on U.S.-Soviet relations since World War II, looking at the issue from economic and political standpoints. War and peace themes in the arts are sometimes incorpo- rated. Besides a prevalent focus on the arms race, some programs specialize in geo- graphic areas or study nonviolence in a broad, theoretical manner. Each semester at Berkeley, a case-study seminar concentrates on a different region- al hot spot. This fall, South Korean Prof. Yueng-Hui Lee was attracted from Seoul's Hanyang University to discuss the history of conflict in his battered nation. Wayne State in Detroit defines peace as a basic theory of conflict resolution equally appli- cable to international and domestic dis- putes. The program there offers electives in the "philosophy of peace," the "psychology a, 1 4 s JAMES D. WILSON-NEWSWEEK Hot spots: South Korea's Lee at Berkeley OCTOBER 1987 NEWSWEEK ON CAMPUS 21