Dear Editor,

In response to your Oct. 30 editorial on Thurgood Marshall College’s Dimensions of Culture writing program, I’d like to clarify a few key points. D.O.C. is a program we are very proud of and it has benefited from two significant college reviews from affiliated Marshall College faculty and students issued last academic year. Our college is following the key initiatives from these two published reports still found on our Web site. A central recommended initiative was to bring in senior ladder-rank professors to direct the program. Former D.O.C. Director Abraham Shragge supports D.O.C. by teaching D.O.C. 100 for our transfer students and by blueprinting an upper division public service D.O.C. course that we hope to launch next autumn. The “Public Service D.O.C.” course is a chief idea coming from our student committee on D.O.C. In keeping with the D.O.C. reports, our new co-directors of D.O.C. — professors Robert Horwitz and Robert Cancel — are doing an outstanding job of recruiting new ladder-rank faculty for 2009, and in the process they are redesigning the entire D.O.C. sequence. Moreover, we now have three senior ladder-rank faculty (two from UCSD and one from California Western School of Law), which is a dramatic improvement from the previous year. Finally, our college, in partnership with Eleanor Roosevelt College, created a six-day symposium on Human Rights and Global Citizenship (Nov. 17 through Nov. 22) with renowned speakers such as the father of Chicano theater Luis Valdez, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Greg Nava and Harvard law professor Jacqueline Bhabha. The symposium is an essential component of D.O.C. With these thoughts I sincerely believe you could have fleshed out a richer portrait of D.O.C. in healthy transition.

— Allan Havis
Provost, Thurgood Marshall College