University of Delaware Office of Public Relations The Messenger Vol. 5, No. 1/1995 MALS Program attracts intellectual adventurers in midlife We're about recharging the intellectual battery," Raymond Callahan, professor of history, says when asked why students enroll in the UD's interdisciplinary Master of Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS) Program. Callahan, who has taught at the University since 1967 and received the Excellence-in-Teaching Award in 1990, helps to handpick students in the program he has directed since its inception in 1988. The MALS Program has 50 graduates and 120 currently enrolled students. They hail from a number of backgrounds, including well- established careers in journalism, law, medicine, research, marketing and technology. Their median age is 47. What unites them, Callahan says, is intellectual adventurousness and competitiveness. Many already hold advanced degrees or have pursued studies at UD's Academy of Lifelong Learning, an intellectual cooperative for persons of retirement age. In addition, most are at a point in their lives when they have the time and the money to do something just for themselves, something that "isn't necessarily directly career-related," says Callahan, "but might have useful career spinoffs." Some of the students say they feel they are making up for lost time. They may have bypassed liberal studies courses as undergraduates, focused their attention on tightly structured majors or had no interest in the arts, philosophy or ethics when they were 18. The MALS Program is offered statewide, and a third of its students are in southern Delaware. According to William H. Williams, program coordinator for MALS in Georgetown since 1989, the students he sees "are attracted to the larger questions of what it means to be human." MALS students are asked to complete two of five core courses, including "Nature and Human Nature," "The American Frontier in Fact and Fiction" and "Force, Conflict and Change." The six required electives can be drawn from the MALS catalog or from other departments' graduate-level offerings. There is an arrangement with the UD Museum Studies Program that allows MALS students to work simultaneously toward a museum studies certificate. Electives also can be Special Problems courses that are individually directed study courses, tailored to the student's specific interests. Spring 1996 MALS electives include "Interpreting the Past," "Ethics and International Relations," "Modernism in America" and "The Scientist in Society." Students in the program also are expected to write a traditional, six-credit master's thesis or to design a 50- to 80- page "synthesis" project that, like the program, crosses disciplinary boundaries. For instance, to gain his MALS degree in 1994, John Taylor Jr., editor of the editorial page of The News Journal in Wilmington, Del., submitted Tilbury Tales, a collection of stories about teaching in a working-class neighborhood 30 years ago. In the admission process, Callahan and members of the program's advisory committee are most interested in an applicant's commitment to continual intellectual growth. They put a great deal of emphasis on a prospective students' application essay, which is a brief intellectual autobiography. Those who seem good program prospects are then invited for an interview with the committee, after which an admission decision is made. To receive more information, sample a seminar or discuss the program, contact Callahan at (302) 831-6075 or write him at 207 McDowell Hall, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716. He also can be reached by fax at (302) 831-4461 or via e-mail to Raymond.Callahan@mvs.udel.edu. If you live in Sussex County, Del., contact Bill Williams at (302) 855-1623 or write to him at the Higher Education Building, Delaware Technical and Community College, Georgetown, DE 19947. His e-mail address is 25159@brahms.udel.edu. -Priscilla Goldsmith, Delaware '78, '85M