Peace Studies Comes to America’s Universities

By Colman McCarthy

If it’s true that all governments say they want peace, and that all human hearts yearn for it,, a question arises: should schools be teaching ways to create the peaceable society?

Earning little public attention beyond their campuses, and sometimes even less inside those boundaries, Washington’s four dominant universities—American, Catholic, Georgetown and George Washington—are answering yes.

This fall, students at each school are taking courses in peace studies in larger numbers than ever. Professors report that enrollments would be much larger if more courses were offered. At the same time, peace teachers have no illusions that a few lessons and a required reading list on the literature of peace will have governments clamoring to disarm or that structural violence will turn Franciscan next week. Both locally and nationally, peace education is in its infancy. Out of some 3,000 U.S. colleges, well less than 100 offer degrees in peace studies—compared with 1200 that sponsor ROTC.

In Washington, each of the four schools shares a common dynamic: an academically rigorous program was begun, and is kept afloat, by a small group of tenured professors committed to exposing students to the idea and ideal that alternatives to violent solutions to conflicts—whether found among nations, family members, races, classes and species—exist and that humans are not predestined to rely only the fist and the gun.

Students have responded. It has been a consumer issue: put the product on the shelf and we’ll buy it.

My own teaching of courses on nonviolence since 1982—at four area universities,

plus public and private high schools, and a prison—keeps me in contact with, and energized by, the local peace education community. Recently, I spent time with some of the program directors and professors to learn about their current efforts, as well as successes and frustrations.

.American University. The International Peace and Conflict Resolution program owes much of its breadth, even existence, to Prof. Abdul Aziz Said. The 69-year-old Islamic scholar—he corresponded in the 1960s with Thomas Merton about Sufi mysticism—modestly credits student pressure as the main force moving university officials to begin offering peace courses in the late 1980s and a major in the mid-1990s.

An average of 15 students a year pursue majors, with 70 working on masters degrees and three or four going for doctorates. With six fulltime professors and six adjuncts, the plentiful course offerings include “Nonviolence: Theory and Practice,” “Building Peaceable Schools,” “Applied Conflict Resolution,” and “The Literature of Peace.”

Said—at A.U. since 1957 and the longest serving faculty member—may have a mystical mind and heart but he also has active hands, ones that keep shaking the money tree. The budget for his program is $700,000, plus a $4.5 million endowment for scholarships. On why he teaches peace: “It is an inner calling, a way of reinvesting the sacred in my life.”

With a thriving program that provides ample intellectual nutrition, A.U.’s peace studies students take their energies off campus to such sites as the annual protest at the School of

the Americas in Georgia and anti-death penalty rallies in Philadelphia. They are also heavily involved in Project Pen, the campus internship program that sends students into D.C. primary and secondary schools to teach conflict resolution skills.