As the chief academic officer, I am responsible for the quality of the academic program, which means hiring and providing resources to the faculty and maintaining optimal teaching and research facilities such as the library, labs and classrooms. I also am responsible for providing students with meaningful, rigorous study abroad, for the integrity and functionality of our registrar's office, for the Center for Teaching and Learning … in short, I oversee everything that goes into the instructional program, on and off our campus.
I love being able to provide resources to faculty members so that they can, in turn, transform the lives of our students through their teaching and the example of their scholarship.
I oversee funds that help faculty attend professional conferences
and develop new courses, and that pay for classroom design so new
pedagogies (working in small groups and role-plays, for example) can
take place in class. It is very satisfying to hear students'
stories about the ways that faculty members have influenced them. Our
students are remarkable in their creativity, energy and willingness
to expand their personal and intellectual boundaries, and the faculty
is equally remarkable in these ways.
Small liberal arts colleges have an ecology all their own because everything is about learning. Of course our students learn from faculty, but they also learn from one another, coaches, student affairs staff, and dining service and facilities staff. These people and many others come together to create a liberal arts education. I find it rewarding to discover ways to make every moment educational and every person a teacher.
My greatest challenge is anticipating areas of advancement in knowledge so that we have faculty on board who can provide a comprehensive, contemporary education, now and in the future. I need to be creative, persuasive and resourceful in order to recruit excellent faculty in an increasingly competitivelabor market. I try to determine whether we need to add faculty in the humanities, whether science labs in the future will look like our labs today and whether to devote more resources to language instruction. Such investments must serve us well because they form the fixed capital of the institution. Another major challenge is finding the financial resources to support these decisions.
A vibrant program of fine and performing arts is integral to a liberal arts education. The act of translating imagination into expression is, at some deep level, essential for every academic and human endeavor - for scientists unlocking secrets of the natural world, social scientists probing human relations and experiences, and humanists who make meaning of those experiences. This is not just about a major; we need to develop the creative capacity of all our students. Imaginative expression is the foundation of empathy. Because we are committed to diversity, it is important for our students to make the leap from who they were raised to be, to the experiences of another. If they can imagine being born in another country, another era or another body, then they can become truly global citizens. The fine and performing arts are crucial to that process.
The campaign's most far-reaching impact on the academic program will come through scholarship support that provides access for the very best students, including those whose family resources are modest. Competitive scholarships are essential because students learn from one another and challenge the faculty - the magic of the classroom is as much dependent upon the students as the faculty. New scholarship funds will free resources that can be devoted to other critical areas, such as faculty salaries.
Technology and physical plant improvements will raise our classroom and laboratory standards to the high levels expected today. A particularly innovative enhancement is an information resource center in the Warren Hunting Smith Library and Melly Academic Center, a place where students will, from the very conception of a project to its presentation, have all the resources that they need in one place. Reference librarians, technology experts, writing specialists and others will be available there. The new space will invite collaborative work and provide equipment for students to videotape their practice presentations and present their findings in print and digital form.
The campaign also will support transformational teaching by providing us with resources to take students off campus for experiences that enrich their classroom learning. For instance, this past fall, the faculty member teaching a First Year Seminar entitled "The Politics of Disaster" asked if I could pay for his students to fly to New Orleans with faculty advisors so they could see and experience first-hand what they had been studying. It was an expensive educational opportunity, but it was one that the students will never forget.
The Colleges' foremost academic distinction is interdisciplinarity in its intellectual endeavors. I am struck by the determination of our faculty to connect their own fields of inquiry to others, to grow beyond their graduate school training and to transmit to students their enthusiasm for learning and their eagerness to tackle the boundaries of knowledge. We always have had a commitment to deliver an integrated liberal arts education rather than one that comes in small packets with labels of majors and minors. To my knowledge, we are unique among our peers because we require an interdisciplinary field of concentration. Interdisciplinarity here is mirrored by the types of students who are attracted to us and by their outcomes - the places they go and the breadth of their imagination.
A second, strong distinction is public service. It is unusual to find this degree of commitment to work for the greater good, to find so many students, faculty and staff giving back to others.
I ask candidates if they consider their own work through the perspective of other disciplines. I look for individuals who are curious about other people and cultures and who have the humility that comes from the realization that not all wisdom or beauty can be found in their own area of expertise. This is an unusual trait in faculty members just starting out because they have worked extremely hard to master their own area. Now I am asking them to stretch even further.
These traits can be difficult to gauge, especially during an interview with the Provost, because candidates come primed to prove that their scholarship is rigorous, coherent and important within their discipline. Sometimes I ask what they read for pleasure or, if they could return to graduate school, would they pursue the same field. I look for indications that their learning will grow while they are here, just as it will for our students.
I look for faculty who are singularly dedicated to undergraduate
education,
who are willing to forego the excitement of working with graduate
students for the greater reward of teaching students who are still in
their formative academic years. They must be deeply engaged in the
vital exchange of ideas in their field, and they must be saying
things that matter in those conversations. I look for faculty with a
sense of humor because the job is a demanding one, and its rewards
often are hidden or experienced in the future. For example, an
initially reluctant student who then becomes motivated may, ten years
later, remember with deep gratitude a professor who challenged him
… and the professor may never know it. I also seek faculty
with an interest in global issues and a commitment to service because
they are most likely to care deeply about this place and invest
themselves in its future.
Economics is the art of allocating scarce resources among competing needs. I do that all day long! Another area in which I have published is the experience of women and people of color in the labor market. I have a fairly full understanding of the challenges that historically underrepresented groups face as they attempt to enter academe and how difficult it is for the professoriate, structured as it has been, to diversify - but also how essential it is. The faculty needs to be diverse in order to provide intellectual breadth and to attract and serve a diverse student body. For the Colleges, whose intellectual hallmark is interdisciplinarity, it is simply vital that we create a campus community that celebrates diversity of intellectual and personal experience.
Change is more rapid now than ever before - technological change, scientific change and the rapid dissemination of culture. A liberal arts curriculum that trains students how to learn rather than transmits static content is the best education for our time. The Colleges' open curriculum invites students to think deeply about their individual goals and then seek to realize them through the insightful application of knowledge gained from coursework. As a result, our graduates are flexible and better able to manage and even maximize change. The curriculum is demanding because it asks our students to be more intentional and it requires a greater commitment from faculty advisors, but you can see the payoff as graduates fan out across the globe and across fields of human endeavor in very broad-ranging, inventive ways.
I would not describe these as enrichments- they are three powerful ways of learning. We always have had global education, internships and community service in American education. For centuries, we have taught Greek and Roman culture, incorporated internships (then called practica or apprenticeships) and trained students for service as ministers and teachers, and we have long understood that travel to another place is educational.
That these are now structured in a liberal arts framework is part
of a larger movement from teaching individual classes to
conceptualizing semester-long courses, and from teaching
individual courses to envisioning the larger goals of the degree. A
course is now much more than meeting three times a week with a
faculty member in a classroom. The communications revolution has
given us a 24/7 learning environment where students engage in chat
rooms along themes set out by their professors and much of their work
happens in residence halls, community centers or other locations here
and abroad. As these changes take learning out of the classroom,
education becomes much more powerful. It is more broadly experiential
and of greater duration, and it asks students to translate knowledge
from one setting to another.
I hope that we will have a significantly more diverse student body, faculty and staff, and a campus that embraces the intellectual breadth that diversity makes possible. I hope to find students and faculty working in groups on complex and capacious problems and collaborating on creativE endeavors.
Some of the most important intellectual advances today are coming at the interstices of disciplines and in settings where people from diverse backgrounds create collaborations that seek the common good. For instance, biology, computer science and psychology have come together to create a new field, neuroscience, to help us understand the human mind, and economics, biology, geoscience and philosophy, in combination, help us address the problems of climate change. I think that this next stage of interdisciplinarity will create a new set of advances in our capacity to understand the world. Hobart and William Smith is uniquely situated to contribute to these advances because of the academic excellence, collaborative spirit and broad perspectives of our faculty and students.
The Office of the Provost
Coxe Hall
Second Floor
Phone: (315) 781-3304
Fax: (315) 781-3334
