Where there's a will...

In my previous post I discussed some difficulties I have encountered in receiving bureaucratic support for my sociology of martial arts (or whatever) course. To date, my colleague and I have been unsuccessful in obtaining OFFICIAL sanction for our course. That being said, we recently may have uncovered/derived (this sounds devious?) an alternative way of going about this.

In lieu of university endorsement, we plan to teach the class as an independent study course. Traditionally, these classes are open to any student (undergrad and grad) for whom a topic of interest is not covered by existing course offerings (i.e. martial arts). Students interested in pursuing this course would then locate a supervisor who would assist the learner in locating resources and decide upon a plan for evaluation. In our case, we have inverted the process by flagging and filling a gap in course offerings. 

So far so good. However, because we are subverting the usual routes we will not receive credit, in the usual university bureaucratic sense, for our efforts; which is fine with me. I would teach this course for free, anyway. The life of an academic, however, is hectic (FYI - we DON'T get our summers off!). In addition to research, teaching, supervising grad students, we are heavily burdened with committee work at the departmental, faculty and university levels. I'm not complaining because I love my job, only putting into perspective the time draw this course presents. 

All this being true, I think such a course is important. Martial arts, and especially BJJ, teaches us so much about ourselves and the social world around us. To this end, the deafening silence in the academy around martial arts ought to be shattered. The question becomes, how do we get the University bureaucracy to buy in?