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Dean Linda Maxson

The State of the College, Spring 2000

At the invitation of College of Liberal Arts Faculty Assembly, Dean Maxson attended the Assembly's April 5, 2000 meeting and delivered the following "State of the College" address.

This afternoon I will address the question, "What is the state of the College?"

Not an easy question to answer since, like the Iowa weather, we sometimes seem to move between summer and snow on the same day. Often we struggle against forces, including chronically insufficient resources and aging infrastructure, that seem bent on stalling our progress.

While at this particular moment the future of the College may look precarious due to our budget uncertainties, I want to remind you that our College has always been underfinanced in performing our basic mission. We have been operating far too long with far too few resources to support many legitimate and deserving programs in the service of our many thousands of students. In framing the Strategic Plan for the College for the next five years, we recognized this historical reality and pledged to reallocate to support "units that have achieved or are on the brink of achieving national visibility because of excellence" in teaching and scholarship.

To achieve our desired national prominence, we will need to reallocate our resources and remember that for every sunrise there is a sunset. The growth of new programs and interests must be balanced by the reconfiguration and rethinking of other programs. With this commitment to reallocation and managed growth, I am confident of our essential health and strength and most importantly our enormous potential. We have seen significant changes in the College in the past few years and, despite many challenges, we also have embraced new opportunities. The State of the College is strong because as a faculty we are strong in our passion for excellence, our dedication to our students, and our commitment to change and progress.

At every level, from the College, to the department, to our individual professional lives, we accept and work within a constantly changing environment. As academics, we are committed to a belief that change is something we learn from and adapt to. As an evolutionary biologist, I can assure you that change is inevitable and that with change comes opportunity for progress! It is in our nature as academics to seize the changes around us as opportunities for creativity and growth.

I know that I have been changed by my experience at Iowa. In almost three years here, I've come to value the advice I receive from faculty consultative groups. The College's elected policy-making faculty bodies-our Executive Committee, Educational Policy Committee, and Faculty Assembly-have far more prominence here than at the other institutions where I have served as a faculty member and administrator. In working with these groups and with the College's Committee on Faculty Promotion and Tenure and departmental review committees, and in working with excellent DEOs, I've had the opportunity to benefit from the advice and insight of many thoughtful faculty. This consultative process has informed my approach to administration and, I assure you, will continue to do so.

The College of Liberal Arts, too, has changed and grown enormously in response to external pressures that have dramatically increased the expectations for college study among America's youth. For more than a generation following World War II, the Federal Government invested heavily in universities, through direct aid to students and through the development of the great governmental funding agencies. The increasing numbers of students brought new energy and new demands to academia, and a new type of faculty member evolved who could serve the enlarged research mission integrated into our enlarged teaching mission. The features of the university changed-it became not merely larger but more diverse, more dynamic, more reliant on public funding, more than ever conscious of its relationship to the state and nation it serves.

These changes continue today, even as we find ourselves in the midst of major changes in our economic and social structure. These changes are not merely "the Internet" or other new technologies in and of themselves, but the speed with which we now learn and share knowledge. Underlying our strategic planning is our desire to ensure that the College-and its students-can respond to these changes.

I have organized this report on the State of the College around the five planning goals that were first formulated in our Fall 1998 vision statement and that are elaborated in our new Strategic Plan. This afternoon, I would like to describe where the College is as we approach the conclusion of the spring 2000 semester, and also to share with you a vision of where we are going and what challenges we must meet to get there.

In our Strategic Plan, we announced, as our first and most important goal: "To articulate, with pride and confidence, a vision of the liberal arts that demonstrates the centrality of our research to our mission." Now, some people may be skeptical that "articulating a vision" can or should have first place among our strategic goals. But the College's Executive Committee and many of our DEOs have argued that articulating this vision is essential to meeting the College's tangible needs.

In articulating this vision, we must also articulate our aspiration to be nationally and internationally recognized as a College for the creation and dissemination of new knowledge and new artistic work. This goal can be achieved by a faculty respected for the excellence of our research, the depth of our scholarship, and the superior education that we provide our students.

In the College's elected Executive Committee, we have worked this year to assert the centrality of the College to the University and the centrality of our scholarly and creative work to our teaching. In finalizing our strategic plan and in planning for the comprehensive fundraising campaign, the Executive Committee has taken it as a given that the Liberal Arts are the heart of the University, the center from which the University's research and teaching radiate. President Coleman's Strategic Plan for the University proposes goals that can be achieved only through the College of Liberal Arts.

We have numerous programs that are among the very best in their disciplines. The recent US News and World Report rankings have reconfirmed our excellence in the studio arts, in creative writing, and in speech pathology and audiology and our high standing in theatre arts, political science, and social psychology. Other programs, with proper nurturing and focusing, are poised to be among the very best. The "writing university" initiative, which the President is about to launch, identifies the University as a whole with programs central to Liberal Arts and with our commitment to expression and communication as the heart of a liberal arts education.

The College will continue to insist on our centrality to the University and the centrality of our research and creative work to our teaching. Our importance is due in part to the very nature of the disciplines that compose the Liberal Arts and in part to the vigor of our faculty and their passion for their work. It is each of you who motivates our students, shapes our academic programs, and creates progress within the disciplines we represent. It is the role of the College to be an animating force and the locus within which you interact as an intellectual community-collaborating in service as well as in research and teaching.

We must also continually remind our constituencies that the College is an intellectual community, not merely an administrative entity. For those who administer the College-Raúl Curto, Fred Antczak, Mike O'Hara, your DEOs, and myself-our jobs are meaningful because we are advancing an intellectual endeavor, the development of knowledge, critical intelligence, and creative expression. You, and we, know that the liberal arts represent a set of core values and have a life that is independent of this College or your department. It is the duty and privilege of the College---and of each of our faculty members---to articulate those values for our students, our colleagues outside of the liberal arts, and the people of Iowa and the surrounding region who have a stake in our welfare.

The very comprehensiveness of our College is its strength-to fulfill our basic mission, we must have strength in the humanities, strength in the fine and performing arts, strength in the social sciences, strength in the natural and mathematical sciences. These comprehensive strengths allow us

• to provide the General Education Program to over 16,000 undergraduate students,
• to create opportunities for the 11,000 students in our undergraduate degree programs and nearly 2,500 students in our graduate programs·
• to confer more than 70% of the University's undergraduate degrees and educate the students who receive nearly 50% of all graduate and professional degrees, and
• to have the dynamic interdisciplinary interactions that are the hallmark of our College and University.

The second goal of the Strategic Plan refers to our most important activity as a College: "To shape, strengthen, and develop our undergraduate and graduate curricula, making the best use of teaching resources and emerging technologies." Our teaching, grounded in our research and creative activity, is the expression of our faculty's strength and vigor. Each departmental program evolves to reflect the faculty expertise that emerges from our research programs. One of the most visible signs of academic evolution is the creation of new degree programs. Let me just mention the programs that have achieved fruition only in the last year or two and those that will be launched in the next year:

• Women's Studies, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary, has a new doctoral degree program, that is now in its second year.
• A new interdisciplinary doctoral program in Second Language Acquisition, is now admitting its first students. This program builds on important strengths in our modern languages and literatures, in Linguistics, and other units.
• The School of Social Work has a new off-campus teaching center in Sioux City, added to centers that already exist in Des Moines and the Quad Cities. These off-campus centers, and the School's new doctoral program, reflect the importance of the School's graduate teaching mission to the state of Iowa.
• Three programs, all with strong interdisciplinary traditions, have been newly designated as departments of the College, in recognition of the faculty size and the complexity of their teaching and research missions. Beginning in fall 2000, the College will have Departments of African American World Studies, American Studies, and Women's Studies.
• The Program in Comparative Literature has been reconfigured as the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature. As a result of this new configuration, we expect that interdisciplinary activities and opportunities for students will increase. I particularly want to thank Steve Ungar, chair of Comparative Literature, and Randy Hirokawa, chair of Communication Studies, for their hard work on behalf of faculty and students affected by this change.
• Our interdisciplinary curriculum has continued to develop. In the last year, we have added an interdisciplinary Medieval Studies certificate, under the leadership of Jon Wilcox (English). Just last month, a new interdisciplinary minor in Global Health Studies was approved in this body, and is now being considered for approval by the Provost and the Regents. And our Museum Studies Program, the oldest such program west of the Mississippi River, has been undergoing reexamination and revision by an energetic, interdisciplinary committee of faculty and staff.
• Two initiatives that benefit our first-year students in unique and complementary ways also deserve mention. Our First-year Seminar program has diversified our curriculum and given incoming students the opportunity to choose each year among 30 small, discussion format classes led by our faculty. And OnLine at Iowa, an innovative course that enlarged our ability to serve students within the constraints of our faculty size, teaches electronic literacy in an electronic format. Thanks are due to Bob Boynton (Political Science) for his leadership of OnLine at Iowa over the past three years, and to David Eichmann (Library & Information Science/Computer Science) who will introduce Version 2.0 of the course to incoming students this fall.

These new and reconfigured programs and courses hint at the extent to which our faculty shape our College and the programs we offer. They reflect the leadership and innovative energy of individual faculty, department chairs, and the College's Educational Policy Committee.

The College is continually challenged to support new initiatives and to collaborate with departments in reallocating funds from endeavors that no longer attract the best energies of our faculty or the interest of our many students. This challenge is compounded by the larger challenge of meeting student demand for courses basic to the successful completion of the General Education Program and of our degree programs. The College's new General Education Curriculum Committee has been constituted to review courses for General Education and ensure that the goals of the program are achieved.

The size of our student body has long been out of proportion to the size of our faculty. For this reason the College has been vigilant in monitoring low-enrolled courses and has urged departments to reorganize their curricula and the way in which they use faculty resources. Under the leadership of outstanding DEOs, we have had successes in this area. The Geoscience faculty, led by Nancy Budd, have developed a streamlined and coherent undergraduate curriculum that allows them also to serve the interdisciplinary Environmental Sciences BS Program. The English faculty, under the leadership of Dee Morris, rethought their traditional mode of classroom instruction and partnered with the College to offer more lecture-format courses in exchange for additional faculty lines. As a result, the Department relies far less on visiting faculty to provide sufficient classes for their very large number of undergraduate majors.

We will continue to find ways to make the best use of existing resources to meet the increasing numbers of students we serve. The College also continues to make the case to the University that we need additional faculty and other resources. I am proud of having worked with the Provost last year to stabilize the College's budget, so that $3 million formerly allocated to us throughout the fiscal year is now in our recurring base. In my budget proposal to the Provost last month, I outlined our three most serious needs:

• to support faculty salaries,
• to improve our instructional computing resources, and
• to repair our crumbling infrastructure and general expense budget, including funds for equipment and travel.

The needs of our faculty and students for adequate access to educational technology are very great. I am proud that the President's Award for Technology Innovation, in existence for only two years, has in both years recognized the pioneering work of Liberal Arts faculty members-Diane Davis (Rhetoric) in 1999 and Bob Mutel (Physics and Astronomy) in 1998. But the increasing sophistication of our faculty and students in the uses of instructional technology challenges the College and the University to provide staff support and equipment renewal. The College has established a Computer Fee Committee, led by Joe Kearney (Computer Science), to advise on how the College's share of funds from the University-wide student computing fee should be allocated to departments. The College has also reallocated its own funds over the last two years to support three new computer consultant positions that each serve multiple departments. I know this is not enough! We are working with the Office of the Provost to establish a computing fee specific to our college, to staff and equip the instructional labs and classrooms that cannot be supported by the central fee.

We are also challenged to provide even more basic infrastructure-sufficient, high quality classroom space in which to perform our graduate and undergraduate teaching mission. The University has made space for the Liberal Arts a priority over the last five years, and we are seeing the results in the completion of the new Biology Building and the renovation of the third floor of IATL building to accommodate our chemistry faculty. The College will also have, in five years, a new building for Art and Art History and, thanks to the energetic leadership of John Soloski in fundraising to support a new building, we will have a new home for Journalism and Mass Communication.

But, in a College that serves as many students and faculty as we do, the need for adequate teaching and research space exceeds the construction already underway or in the planning stage. Last fall a wing of Seashore Hall was condemned, and the College desperately needs a replacement for this century-old building that houses the departments of Psychology and Sociology. The Chemistry Building needs extensive remodeling, and Phase II of the Biology Building project is yet to be completed. We need to renovate and remodel classrooms and offices in other buildings as well, including the large auditorium in Phillips Hall. The quality of our space and equipment has a direct impact on our students, faculty, and staff. We pledge to redouble our efforts to obtain state funding for these purposes, since this is the area where looming state budget cuts are likely to hit the hardest.

These priorities also reflect our third Strategic goal: "To creatively support excellence and diversity in our faculty and staff." The attainment of gender and racial diversity is an issue in which we all have a stake, since it is central to our aspiration for excellence. No other college at this University, and none of our peer colleges in the Big Ten, can claim the gender diversity that we have achieved. We can be proud that, in a University which aspires to have 15% female faculty by 2005, women already represent 31% of the faculty in the College of Liberal Arts. In our new Strategic Plan, we have established a goal of increasing the proportion of women on our faculty 40%. We are confident that we can achieve this ambitious goal.

We are also vigorous in our efforts to diversify our faculty racially and ethnically. In 1998 and 1999, we welcomed 6 faculty members to our College from underrepresented US minorities, and 7 new colleagues who further internationalized our faculty. This is only a start, and we are committed to making progress in this area.

I am proud of the fact that more than one-fourth of our academic departments are led by faculty members who are women and/or members of underrepresented minorities - placing these faculty in leadership positions in a proportion approaching their representation on the College's faculty. The College's women and minority faculty are also prominent in other roles that diversify and strengthen faculty leadership-including collegiate and University faculty governance, academic administration, and service to the institution and their professions.

I thank the DEOs and faculty whose generous work on search committees and in mentoring junior colleagues is at the core of our ability to recruit and retain an excellent and diverse faculty. In my Office, I want particularly to thank Raúl Curto and Mary Lou Doyle, our Assistant to the Dean for Faculty Issues, both of whom work tirelessly to support faculty searches and to provide orientation and developmental workshops for our faculty and DEOs.

Our commitment to diversity is also expressed in our recruitment of graduate students. Our Mathematics department was recognized this year with the University's Catalyst Award for the diversification of its graduate student body, an initiative that was also recognized with support from a federal training grant. The Mathematics faculty has recruited a graduate student population that is 20% minority students-a larger proportion than in any other mathematics department in the country. I am also proud to recognize our Theatre Arts faculty for maintaining a diverse graduate student body, in which minority students have consistently represented 20 to 25% of the students for the past five years, and for selecting and producing plays that reflect both the department's diversity and its commitment to new works.

Foremost among our challenges is replacing the roughly one-third of our faculty who are now over 55 and who are projected to retire in the next 5 to 10 years. These retirees will include many of our most distinguished colleagues-outstanding scholars and dedicated teachers whose accomplishments have contributed to the reputation and visibility of our College. The departure of these colleagues poses challenges for us, but also provides opportunities to rethink and explore in directions appropriate to a new century and a rapidly changing future. The 80 new faculty members we appointed in 1998 and 1999 represent more than 12% of our total tenure-track faculty! These new appointments and the new interactions they generate are a means of continuous renewal within the College.

Just as important and demanding as the work of hiring colleagues is the work of supporting their potential for excellence. The College continues to partner with the Office of the Provost and the Office of the Vice President for Research in promoting intramural developmental and grant awards to our faculty. Our success in this area is impressive. This year, all six of the University's Faculty Scholar and Global Scholar Awards went to Liberal Arts faculty; 90% of the funds set aside for the Arts and Humanities Initiative go to Liberal Arts faculty. Our faculty have earned 7 NEH awards over the past two years-more than any of our peer colleges. More than 260 of our faculty members received some outside grant funding last year, representing 58% of all external awards to the University. And we are delighted to celebrate our faculty's successes: next Monday, April 10, we are holding our second annual Faculty Honors Reception in the Senate Chamber of the Old Capitol. I invite all of you to be present to congratulate the many colleagues who will be honored there.

While the sheer number of grants and awards that our faculty receive is impressive, the scholarship they produce is what we are proudest of. We continually see the scholarship and creativity of our faculty and students having an impact on the world. You change the world we live in through your scholarly and creative publications, your performances and artistic productions, your experimental discoveries and research findings. In dozens of ways every day, the people of Iowa benefit from your service-in our on-campus psychology clinic and speech and hearing clinic; in consultations provided by our faculty to school districts, museums, and other public agencies; and in the preparation students receive for their professional and civic lives. And the state recognizes this excellence-most recently, in naming Marvin Bell, holder of the Flannery O'Connor Chair in Letters, as the State of Iowa's first Poet Laureate.

It is an important part of my job to see that we are using our budget responsibly to support the excellence that I have merely sketched here. I am particularly proud of the creative reallocations we have made in the past three years to achieve this goal. In the past year alone, we have increased departmental general expense budgets for the first time in over a decade; we have reallocated funds for computer purchases and computer support staff for which Central Administration could not supply funds; and we reallocated $300,000 for major equipment needs in undergraduate science labs, in music, and in Journalism's media laboratory and to purchase urgently needed "small equipment" in a wide range of our departments.

We also reallocated to substantially increase budgets for professional travel. It has been a very long-standing grievance of the faculty that their professional travel has been so poorly supported by this institution. When I arrived at Iowa, the College had a travel budget that represented only about $150 per faculty member. In fall 1999, through internal reallocations and with assistance from the Provost's Office, we were able to more than double this budget, to a level that represents nearly $400 per faculty member. Even with this infusion of funds, we are a long way from our eventual goal. At institutions which compete with us for faculty, the standard travel budget is around $1,000 per faculty member. We will do our utmost to see that, whatever budget reversions may be imposed on our College next year, we do not slide backwards just as we have begun to make much-needed progress in this key area.

Another initiative has been to reallocate time and money in ways that give our DEOs more opportunity for leadership and creativity. One aspect of this endeavor is simply to control the administrivia that DEOs face and to allow them to devote their energies to academic issues on behalf of the students, faculty, and staff. We have developed our website, made our weekly mailing to DEOs electronic, and tried to use the new technologies in other ways that give faculty, DEOs, and staff up-to-date information quickly and easily. We have made efforts to reduce paperwork by simplifying reviews of tenured faculty, streamlining departmental reviews, and providing departments and faculty with help from College staff in managing the demands of central offices.

An innovation of which I am extremely proud is the College's "Equal Share Policy," now in its second year-a policy which gives DEOs the budgetary flexibility to creatively support departmental needs and initiatives. The financial aspect of this policy is that, when a faculty member retires, resigns, or goes on unpaid leave, 50% of the funds in that salary line can be immediately returned to the department for one year. The most important effect of this new policy is that departments faced with faculty losses KNOW they will have funds to support visiting faculty appointments, saving the time and energy needed to apply for these funds. Once teaching commitments are met, departments may use the funds to meet other pressing needs-these may be purchases of equipment or support for faculty travel and professional development. Some departments have set aside part of their "Equal Shares" funds to support conferences. For example, in spring 1999, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese brought writers, critics, and scholars to campus for a conference devoted to the Argentine novelist Jorge Luis Borges. This spring, the Department of Political Science used "Equal Shares" funds to support a conference for undergraduates on career planning. In the past year, more than $1.6 million was made available to our departments under our "Equal Share Policy" in support of our academic mission.

The goal of excellence and diversity also extends to our staff, and their support for our teaching and research mission. We are working to support the efforts of all of our staff-in every department and program-who continually give us a full measure of energy, intelligence, enthusiasm, and persistence, in the face of increasing demands and changes in procedures. We are also working to explicitly recognize their contributions. Just last week, the College held its first staff recognition reception, at which we honored nearly 150 colleagues who were celebrating 10, 20, or 30 years of service to the College and our departments.

A mark of our faculty's excellence and diversity is the essential contribution you make to international and interdisciplinary education---no other College is as central as Liberal Arts in supporting the University's strategic goals in this area. Our fourth strategic planning goal is therefore "to design initiatives that support these contributions to interdisciplinarity and the internationalizing of our curriculum."

In working toward this goal, we have reallocated resources to develop the International and Interdisciplinary Teaching Fellowship program. This program supports the professional development of our graduate teaching assistants and assists faculty members in providing an international or interdisciplinary component to a class. The Teaching Fellowship program has allowed us to give TA support for the first time to Global Studies, Global Health Studies, and Environmental Science, as well as to give additional TA support to Aging Studies and to American Indian and Native Studies. The College plans to increase the lines in the Teaching Fellowship pool in each of the next three years, and is working with departments to increase the number of proposals for these positions.

In another initiative-spearheaded by Fred Antczak and by Jim Marshall (English/Education), in partnership with the Graduate College and the Office of the Provost-the College has initiated a TA preparation program that is interdisciplinary in design. This spring, faculty in Journalism and Mass Communication, in Music, and in Sociology received awards to develop innovative methods of promoting the professional growth of our graduate instructors. These faculty will participate in a summer Workshop to be attended by those faculty who provide pedagogical training that prepares our graduate students for their teaching responsibilities.

The College has a long tradition of interdisciplinarity and of generating new programs out of interdisciplinary interests. I mentioned some of our new interdisciplinary efforts at the beginning of this report, in a discussion of new curricular initiatives in Medieval Studies, Global Health Studies, Museum Studies, and the new graduate programs in Women's Studies and in Foreign Language Acquisition. Here I want to mention initiatives to internationalize our curriculum that have earned the support of the College and the University.

• Under the leadership of Paul Greenough (History), our faculty have obtained Ford Foundation funding for an innovative program entitled "Crossing Borders: Revitalizing Area Studies." Crossing Borders envisions our scholarship and teaching in a global context, and graduate students appointed as Crossing Borders Fellows acquire research and language skills applicable in two or more foreign areas. Seven departments have committed their own resources to match the support offered by the Crossing Borders grant, the College of Liberal Arts, the Graduate College, and International Programs.
• Our Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, currently led by Bill Reisinger (Political Science), is completing its third year of funding under a National Resource Center grant, which supports curriculum development that reflects sweeping changes since the demise of the Soviet Union.
• Latin American Studies, under the leadership of Dan Balderston and with the help of the International Programs Office and the College of Liberal Arts, has received a two-year award from the Department of Education. This award will support curriculum development and provide partial match toward the appointment of a faculty member with expertise in Latin American politics.
• Jane Desmond (American Studies) and Virginia Domínguez (Anthropology) have established the International Forum on United States Studies to promote the enormous amount of scholarship on the US produced outside our borders. The Forum brings to our campus distinguished foreign scholars who specialize in US studies.

These initiatives have brought new resources to the College, at least during the period of grant support. All have also meant short-term reallocation of Collegiate resources and, even more importantly, all mean long-term reinvestment in curriculum and faculty support. And here is the crux, the continuing challenge to the College: to embrace these new opportunities while managing our growth, to carefully steward our limited resources while supporting the most promising programs at a level that will allow them to excel. Our resources, overall, are not expanding even though faculty interests and interconnections are. The College has tough decisions to make about how to sequester marginal resources and where to invest those resources to promote the strongest, most vigorous programs. Growth, as I said at the beginning of this report, is an opportunity, but this growth must be planned for and managed.

Our strategic plan commits us to revising and focusing our curricula, reevaluating our programs, and making needed reconfigurations, to promote the health and vigor of the College as a whole. We are not alone in this endeavor-colleges of liberal arts nationwide face the danger of merely growing by accretion and must be vigilant to ensure the intellectual coherence of the programs they offer. We will need to discuss these important issues and make the decisions in departments and in collegiate forums that will reshape our programs in ways that are sustainable and that continue to promote excellence and innovation. Departmental hiring plans and proposals for new faculty searches, for example, represent a unique opportunity to rethink a department's needs in ways that will affect students and programs in the long term.

I would especially like to thank our Liberal Arts Executive Committee, who spent all of last Sunday afternoon in a conference room in Schaeffer Hall discussing how the College can undertake the self-assessment that will guide us in allocating our limiting resources. The idea of service that this dedicated Committee embodies is integral to our academic community and to faculty governance. In fact, the final goal in our Strategic Plan is "to nurture a culture of collegiality, service, and good citizenship in the College."

As this report has both implied and stated, demands are increasing in the academy, which is today a very different place from what it was at the beginning of my own career. The new demands are due in part to a new level of accountability, which has the virtue of reminding us that we must constantly articulate our vision, explain our mission, and justify our activities to our constituents-the first goal in our strategic plan. But the new demands in the academic environment are also due to the high levels of energy that the academic life creates and exudes. The academy-and we as a faculty-are a good reflection of our society, in our intensity and drive. The many creative, capable people gathered on our campus create their own imperatives out of love of their disciplines and out of their innate drive to excellence. The faculty-all of you-shape the College of Liberal Arts far more than the College shapes the faculty. If the College is to truly reflect the energies and the aspirations of our faculty and staff, we must commit ourselves to being a community.

In closing, I am confident that we have seen significant and meaningful change over the past three years-change that has prepared the College to achieve even greater visibility and excellence. The College's leadership team-and I have to add that we are very fortunate in having such excellent and dedicated Associate Deans and support staff-joins me in our enthusiasm for achieving our Strategic Planning goals over the next five years. In a recent statement, President Coleman made a distinction between a good university and a great one. She said, "A good university helps its students imagine the future, a great university takes them there." You-the Liberal Arts Faculty-help our students imagine the future. Working with you and on your behalf, I pledge to help you take them there.

linda-maxson@uiowa.edu