"The Department of Religious Studies at IU is relatively small. This means that students have an opportunity to work closely with the faculty in a fairly intimate environment. We urge you to take advantage of office hours and get to know the faculty."
-- IUB Religious Studies' Undergraduate Handbook
Related Link: Religious Studies home page.
By Susan Voelkel
This gentle invitation is illustrative of what IUB Department of Religious Studies' chair Stephen Stein believes won a first-place ranking in the "Gourman Report:" emphasis on undergraduate education.
This year the IUB department nudged out such traditional Goliaths as Harvard, Yale and Princeton.
"We are delighted and thrilled by the rating," Stein said. "We have both good teaching and high research productivity, and stress the link between teaching and research."
Stein speaks of the department with pride in a modest way:
"Students don't come to IU to major in religious studies. They find us after they get here." They often explore religious studies after realizing that a "well-educated person must be knowledgeable about religion because it is such a central force in the lives of many individuals and such a dynamic element in current events."
In describing the department which has 23 faculty members, Stein portrayed the faculty as "a floating coalition." There are clusters of specialties, such as ethics, religion in America, Biblical studies, Asian religions and cultures, and constructive religious thought. The department is clearly interdisciplinary, incorporating such fields as anthropology, history, philosophy, art, sociology and literature. Religious studies thus complements the other liberal arts.
Each year the IUB department has 12,000 to 14,000 students in classes. There are about 75 undergraduate majors and 30 graduate degree candidates. Approximately 25 degrees are awarded annually.
"A Religious Studies major will not automatically get you a job," the Undergraduate Handbook says, "but then very few majors will do that for you anyway. Today the heads of major corporations want graduates who have a general knowledge of the world and can think clearly and write persuasively. Religious Studies provides students with the critical skills necessary to perform a wide variety of professional tasks."
The "Gourman Report" ratings are published by National Education Standards, a Los Angeles research organization.
In addition to the first-place ranking of Religious Studies, 37 other IU College of Arts and Sciences programs placed in the top 20 among their peers in the Gourman Report. They are:
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