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[hilde]

Our department is considering starting a master's program. We are a humanities department at a growing public university, in a state that has historically low support for higher education. At present, we have five full time members, but anticipate our numbers growing by at least a couple.

Should we start a program? Here are some questions I'd love the comments of chairs and deans on the following:

How many faculty would be required, at a minimum, to run a successful master's program?

How many faculty (i.e., what size subset of the number above) would need to be actively engaged in helping with the MA program to keep the amount of work per faculty member reasonable?

What other factors would you consider crucial to determining whether a department go ahead with a MA program?

Would you seek any kind of institutional, marketing/business studies be done before embarking?

What do you see as the major pitfalls of starting an MA program?

Can you recommend any literature that addresses this question?

Any other important questions we should be asking?

Thanks for your input.

[philo]

My department's situation is similar to yours.  2-3 years ago, our dean suggested to us that we start an M.A. program.  After careful consideration---I was really proud of how we deliberated on this---we decided against.  Our reasoning may not apply to your case, but we looked at the following:
1.  Our school is actually trying to weed out M.A. programs that don't graduate at least n people a year. I forget what n is, but it wasn't 1 or 2.
2.  We are also trying to start more Ph.D. programs, and all the resources for grad. education, like money for TAships, is being given to them.
3.  So therefore, we would have to have a critical mass of M.A. students in the department, and we would have to get them from the local community, since we had no money to induce someone to move here in order to study with us.  We decided that the only way we could possibly get enough students locally would be by accepting people into the program with whom we weren't interested in working.

If you decide that your position might be similar, you could look at joining with some other departments to start a joint M.A. program in the Humanities.  That makes it easier to meet the requirement for a minimum number of students, and it might be good from an interdisciplinary teaching/learning standpoint.