The Civic Leadership Program, currently closed for enrollment, may be resurrected in fall 2013 at the earliest.

The program was a two-and-a-half-year, joint undergraduate and master’s degree program for students interested in public leadership. The College of LAS and the political science department announced in August that the University would stop admitting applicants and planned to terminate the master’s portion of the program.

Since then, the political science department has been discussing the future of the program and drafting preliminary plans.

William Bernhard, political science department head, said the department felt the previous program was too resource-intensive and was “at arm’s length with the department’s main mission” of education and research.

“If it’s going to last and be durable, the program has got to be integrated into the fabric of the department,” he said.

Bernhard wrote a working proposal for the program on Sunday, which he has been circulating among faculty and administration.

The proposal, however, is not ready to be released to the public, he said. Though some of the current program fellows are frustrated with the department’s rate of progress, he said he does not want to present anything to students and alumni until he has something concrete.

He also said the program’s restructuring is a collaborative process for the political science department’s faculty.

“It’s not like a business. I’m not the boss of the faculty,” he said. “It’s a process of consensus building. … The downside of that is that it takes time. The upside is that if we can achieve consensus, then we’ve got buy-in, we’ve got sustainability, then everyone is on the same page.”

The department has been discussing alternatives for the program since 2010. Bernhard said the faculty saw too much intellectual value in the program to shut it down but wanted to find a direction for the program before seeking other sources of revenue.

One of the options department heads discussed was taking the elements students liked from the program and putting them into a Bachelor of Arts concentration.

Bernhard said if the department goes ahead with this concentration, it could build relationships with donors and investors that could fund the re-establishment of the master’s year of the program after establishing a sound foundation.

At last week’s Illinois Student Senate meeting, the senate unanimously passed a resolution, sponsored by senators and program fellows Max Ellithorpe and Lauren Eiten, “condemning the trend of informally closing programs.”

The resolution calls on the Urbana-Champaign Senate’s Committee on Educational Policy to create a subcommittee to investigate the restructuring of the program. Ellithorpe and Eiten both serve as student members on the committee.

Ellithorpe said he hopes the committee will hear the senate’s legislation. He said he and other fellows feel that cutting the program director position, previously held by Donald Greco, and refusing to admit students is an informal way for the department to close the program without the Urbana-Champaign Senate’s approval.

“I know that these restructuring processes are complicated and have a lot of stakeholders,” he said. “I’m confident that the College of LAS and the Department of Political Science will hear us and listen to us and hope they have a slow, thorough and meaningful restructuring that takes into account how important the Master’s degree is.”

Eiten said the senate’s legislation is about more than the Civic Leadership Program. This resolution works with previously issued legislation to close an academic loophole that the student senate feels the department is using to shut the program down.

“They keep saying they’re not shutting it down, (but) if you change any portion of a program significantly, it should go through the process,” Eiten said.

Tyler can be reached at [email protected].