Week 4

The Multicultural Student Services, the MSS, department is more of a multidisciplinary organization than an interdisciplinary one. I guess that the easiest way is to go over examples of both that the MSS. The ways that it is multidisciplinary, is that first, it has separate groups that fall under the department. There are the African and African American, Native American, Chicano/Chicana, Latin American, Asian American, Pacific Islander and LGBTQ organizations that all fall under the MSS department but do totally separate programs for the specific groups. On the other hand it is interdisciplinary in nature because it is a part of the complex infrastructure of ASU. First, the MSS falls under a hierarchy, President Crow, the Vice President of Student Affairs and the Dean of Students. The overarching programs that is done by the MSS transcend all the individual groups that are a part of the MSS and bring them together, so that when there is an organizational fair, organizations from each individual group are represented. So the coordinators of the MSS work in an interdisciplinary manner because they make sure that every group they account for is doing programs that are going to ensure that the intent of the president as far as retention, grades and campus involvement are upheld by the each denomination. The coordinators look at the groups under them as one group, because they all have the same goals to accomplish. If those goals are not met for a specific group then intervention is needed within that group. For example if the GPA for members of one group is lower than the projected goal, then for that group there will be some plan of action to rectify that situation specifically. Other than the overarching similar goals, though, each of the coalitions of organizations in each group is free to achieve the goals by hosting approved programming and projects which are all open to the ASU public and fall in line with the goals of the MSS. The different disciplines vary as the programs vary, the programs and organizations can fall into the disciplines of education, politics, sociology, psychology, family studies, gender studies, cultural studies, communication, marketing, social sciences, finance, business and anthropology.