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The State of the College, Spring 2001

"Work Worth Doing"

Dean Linda Maxson

Delivered at the May 7 DEO Meeting, in the Old Capitol Senate chamber

This summer will mark the end of my fourth year at the heart of The University of Iowa as Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. It will be an extra pleasure to honor our undergraduate degree candidates at Saturday's commencement ceremony, knowing that many of them arrived on campus at the start of my first year here. It is from this vantage that I wish to share with you my perspectives on the state of the College. These perspectives are built on four years of working with a great team of associate deans and staff in the College offices. I welcome and encourage you to share your views with me and the associate deans in the coming weeks and months.

I am delighted that in our centennial year the faculty and the Regents approved our new name: The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Our new name fully recognizes the breadth of our teaching and research, which includes a long and proud tradition in the social sciences, mathematics, and natural sciences, as well as in the arts and humanities. The mission of the College is the cultivation and enrichment of the human mind and spirit--we are all deeply committed to the development of the whole individual and thus to the development of society. Our new collegiate name emphasizes this comprehensive mission and the increasing importance and sophistication of the programs in science and technology that are part of our mission. Our mission is accomplished through teaching, scholarship, research, artistic creation, outreach, and professional practice. Our breadth enables us to foster interconnections among diverse disciplines, to educate our students broadly, to bring them in contact with many modes of inquiry and expression, and--above all--to help them prepare to live fulfilling lives. This is work worth doing!

All of us are aware of the difficult budget situation that the University, like other state-supported institutions and agencies, faces in the next year. Our situation is rendered more difficult because our budget is so close to the bone every year. I want to say how grateful I am to all of the DEOs who have found ways to conserve funds while fulfilling your department's teaching obligations, even with less than optimal class sizes and teaching schedules. I am also grateful that the Provost is committed to supporting the College's teaching mission to the greatest extent possible, though even now we do not know with certainty what the extent of our shortfall will be. Now more than ever, it is imperative for us to consider how we can make a very good college even better. Regardless of the financial outlook, we shall continue to ask what we can do with available resources, not merely to fulfill our responsibilities to the University and our students, but to excel beyond expectations.

Iowa has a long tradition of supporting public education. But the general public knows very little about what University faculty and administrators really do. Iowa citizens and lawmakers, like others across the country, sometimes view education as the acquisition of technical and professional skills that enable a person to get a job. Many see liberal learning as a costly luxury, irrelevant to everyday life. It is our responsibility--and it is in our self-interest--to better inform them. Liberal education is essential to life-long learning, to educating an informed citizenry, to preparing individuals for rewarding personal, professional, and civic lives. We must effectively communicate to the public, especially in the coming year, that we work hard at work worth doing.

We must keep in mind that education is not only teaching, but learning. Most of us who have spent our careers blending teaching, research, and service, take it as an article of faith that teaching and research are not only compatible, but are necessary complements to one another. Based on our personal experiences as teacher/scholars--in my case, 37 years of experience--most of us know without a doubt that research and creative practice reinforce the teaching process and that teaching can lead to new ideas for scholarly inquiry and creative activity. Classroom teaching is but one input in the process of education, a process that extends beyond the classroom to other interactions through which students develop as independent, self-directed learners. When faculty work side by side with students outside of the classroom--in the laboratory, in the studio, on thesis projects--research and teaching are occurring simultaneously. And, more important, learning is occurring.

However, we can no longer take the essential interrelationship of teaching and research as an article of faith that is understood and embraced by people outside the university. Once again, the compatibility of the teaching and research missions of Research I universities is being challenged. Now with tightening budgets, it is more important than ever that both remain of equal importance in the equation of liberal learning.

The principal mission of our College is to educate students--not simply to impart information and knowledge, but to motivate and excite our students about intellectual activities, and inspire them to understanding and wisdom. Ultimately, we teach students to think, and show them how to learn. I would like to affirm that for this to happen, faculty must have at least three characteristics:

• First, enthusiasm and excitement for the subject matter we teach. I believe the best way to remain enthusiastic and excited about a subject is to be engaged in helping create the subject through research.
  
  
• Second, faculty must have an understanding that education is more than the acquisition of facts and information. Education involves developing an ability to think critically, to integrate and synthesize information from different fields, and to use information and knowledge to create new ideas. Research by its very nature teaches these other facets of learning.
  
  
• And third, we as faculty must have a thorough appreciation for and commitment to lifelong learning. Our students must understand that a college degree does not make one a "fully educated" person and does not obviate the need for continued learning. By its very nature, research is a commitment to lifelong learning and I know of no better model of a lifelong learner than a faculty member who is an engaged teacher/scholar.

It was Theodore Roosevelt who said, "Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing." We all know that we have work worth doing. We are privileged to be part of the most exciting of endeavors--teaching within a Research I institution, immersed in the tradition of liberal learning in the arts and sciences. We know the excitement of working with world-class colleagues and eager students, of pursuing our scholarly inquiry as we teach, of creating new knowledge and ways of knowing through our research and artistic activities.

In this difficult financial period, we remain committed to the goals that we have repeatedly enunciated as a College, in our planning documents and other statements. These are:

• to sustain faculty and staff excellence,
  
  
• to support interdisciplinarity and diversity,
  
  
• to serve our students through our core teaching mission, and
  
  
• to improve the infrastructure that supports our teaching and research mission.

These goals will also guide our decisions over the difficult year ahead, during which we will continue to seek the advice of the faculty through elected and appointed committees and through consultation with DEOs.

Faculty and Staff Excellence

The first of the College's priorities remains to foster, sustain, and reward the excellence of the faculty and staff on whom our academic programs and the welfare of our students depend. A key aspect of enhancing this excellence is our continued leadership in diversifying the University's faculty. Today I can report that in the 25 faculty searches successfully completed this spring, we have appointed to our faculty 13 women and 6 members of underrepresented minorities. Our College leads The University of Iowa in faculty diversity.

The strength and commitment of our tenure-track and clinical-track faculty is the resource we will rely on during the coming year. We will have fewer visiting faculty next year, and our departments are making difficult accommodations in order to offer necessary courses. Innovations we have made over the past several years will help us help departments through the year ahead.

• Most importantly, our Equal Shares Policy will continue, though it may not be 100% implemented. Under this policy, the College returns half the value of a vacated faculty line to the department. These funds have already given many departments the flexibility and certainty they need to plan for instructional support under reduced visitor funding.
  
  
• While the size of the College's Professional and Merit staff has not increased, we have reallocated within the College's staff budget as positions have come vacant. As a result, we have been able to create and maintain lines for advising staff in heavily enrolled departments, instructional computer consultants, and staff to assist with accounting questions and the implementation of the HRIS system. We anticipate that these shifts in staff structure in response to new demands will benefit all departments as we strive to maintain our instructional programs in the face of budget cuts.
  
  
• In addition, we will protect as much as possible the increased departmental general expense budgets and increased allocations for professional travel that we have achieved over the past few years. We recognize that these funds are fundamental to the productivity of our faculty.

We have also been working hard to make the excellence of our faculty, our staff, our alumni, and our educational mission better known and better supported. Gifts from our alumni and friends have been very valuable to these efforts. For the past three years, as the result of the gift by the Alumni Association of an endowed Dean's Chair, the College has sponsored Dean's Scholars awards to mid-career faculty, which help fund their research and teaching initiatives, and to provide flexible research funding for faculty retention efforts. The same endowment supports our Alumni Fellows Awards, which bring distinguished alumni to campus to participate in departmental programs and be honored by the College.

The Dean's Chair also underwrites our very successful Saturday Scholars outreach presentations, which give visitors and members of the community the opportunity to attend informal presentations of faculty members talking about their exciting scholarly work. It also supports a new series of luncheon meetings that initiate conversation among our newly re-appointed faculty, newly promoted faculty and the College's deans. These luncheons create connections between individual deans and individual faculty members at important milestones in their careers, and demonstrate that the College exists to support them; the luncheons also create connections among faculty who are at similar career stages.

This year, another large undesignated gift to the College has enabled us to establish the Collegiate Fellows program. These Fellowships, which the College considers to be highly prestigious appointments, comparable to a named professorship, recognize senior faculty for their excellence in all areas of our mission--teaching, service, and research. In addition, the College's Teaching Awards Committee has worked to increase the nominations from our College for these University-wide awards and, for the first time this year, five Collegiate Teaching Awards were made in our College.

And, as a result of another generous endowment, the College has for the first time this year been able to fund recognition and professional development awards for the excellent staff who support our instructional mission. This gift was made by Alice Kelley in honor of her sister Mary Louise Kelley, who was secretary to Dean Stuit for nearly 30 years.

Interdisciplinary Interactions

Let me assure you that even in difficult times we will not be restricted to "business as usual" but will dare to do new things. One recent innovation will advance our ambitious goals for the interdisciplinary interactions that are fundamental to this comprehensive college of arts and sciences. More than a year ago, long before next year's fiscal constraints became known, the College, in consultation with the Executive Committee, had begun developing plans for a Division of Interdisciplinary Programs. In so doing, we demonstrated the College's leadership in designing creative means of supporting faculty and students.

With the cooperation of faculty affiliated with a number of interdisciplinary major and certificate programs, this Division has now become a reality. We especially owe our thanks to Professor Helena Dettmer, who served as administrative fellow organizing the Division during the past year. Provost Whitmore has just made a three-year commitment from a special strategic planning fund to support the Division. He also funded our program of seed grants for interdisciplinary course initiatives, which will add eight new crosslisted courses to our interdisciplinary programs next year.

The Division will support at least three BA programs (Environmental Sciences; Literature, Science & the Arts; and Interdepartmental Studies) and four certificate programs (Aging Studies, American Indian and Native Studies, Medieval Studies, and Sexuality Studies). The kind of support each program receives will be tailored to the needs of that program. We aim to give these programs greater visibility among students who may be interested in their offerings, better structured support for advising, help in developing their curricula, and an administrator who can work with discipline-based departments on behalf of faculty with interdisciplinary teaching and research interests.

Our creativity in supporting new administrative structures that foster faculty and student interests is demonstrated by other organizational changes over the past four years. For example, the Division of Performing Arts, established a year ago, promotes inter-arts collaboration and the sharing of resources among Dance, Music, and Theatre Arts. Most recently, the Martha-Ellen Tye Opera Theatre's production of Tartuffe marked the first time opera has been performed at E. C. Mabie Theatre. And another administrative innovation--the new Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature--now supports faculty and students across the humanities who have interests in film studies.

Core Academic Mission

Our efforts to support the excellence and diversity of our faculty and staff, and to promote interdisciplinarity, extend and advance our core academic mission. Each year in reviewing the promotion records of our faculty, the College's Promotion & Tenure Committee looks first at the teaching record. Each year the classroom observations and peer evaluations speak with eloquence and enthusiasm about the quality and creativity of the candidates' classroom teaching. These positive reports say a great deal about the College as a community dedicated to excellent teaching, which is fostered within departments during the hiring process, during the mentoring of junior colleagues, and through the high standards set by departments for continuous development of teaching. We are proud to have a faculty to whom teaching is work worth doing. In addition to their departmental teaching and their advising, faculty have demonstrated through a number of recent initiatives that teaching matters:

• Our commitment to training the next generation of university-level faculty is fundamental to our mission as a College. Under the leadership of Fred Antczak and Jim Marshall, our faculty have been reviewing and renewing their methods of teaching assistant preparation through intramural training grants and faculty workshops. The new program of TA training grants, offered in partnership with the Graduate College and the Provost's Office, has already begun to change teaching culture in several departments. Last summer, the five faculty members whose proposals were funded for the current academic year participated in the Workshop for Faculty Preparing TAs. This weeklong workshop furthered the aims of sharing best practices, discussing current pedagogical literature, and creating interdepartmental and interdisciplinary cooperation in the preparation of graduate students for teaching. Three new training grants were approved this year, and the faculty who submitted the proposals are participating in this summer's Workshop.
  
  
• Another innovation is Learning Links, a mechanism for helping students find courses with interrelated themes, which made its debut last fall during registration for spring 2001 courses. Nearly all of our departments participated in this endeavor by proposing a total of over 400 courses to be listed in a "links" category, ranging from "After Colonialism" to "Theatre Criticism." We expect the number of courses listed, and the usage of the site by students seeking course advice, to continue to increase from its very promising beginnings.
  
  
• Among the recent developments in our undergraduate curriculum, we are especially proud of the continuing success of our First-year Seminar program, which gives incoming students the opportunity to choose among small, discussion-format classes led by our faculty in their areas of scholarly inquiry. Student evaluations are enthusiastic in their praise of these seminars. Students repeatedly mention how much they have grown in a multitude of ways--in self-awareness and self-confidence, in critical thinking and cross-cultural understanding, and in understanding how to explore the resources of a liberal arts and sciences curriculum. Let me quote from an evaluation of a recent seminar, in which the student said, "This is an 'easy' course but it is also very hard, because you cannot attend this class without being forced to ask, Who am I? What do I want to be? How do I get there?" Even provosts and deans teach in this program, as Jon Whitmore and Fred Antczak did last fall. This fall I will follow their lead, by offering a First-year Seminar on Genes and Human Origins.

Infrastructure for Teaching and Research

To perform our core academic mission, we must continually renew the College's infrastructure for teaching and research. As funds have become available at the end of each academic year, we have partnered with the Provost to renew departmental instructional equipment, particularly in science laboratories and in computer and video technology. Next year, when budget realities will make equipment purchases rare, these past investments will prove especially valuable. We also look for administrative efficiencies that will free resources for our teaching mission. For example, we have increased our web presence and now publish many of our communications, announcements, and collegiate forms on our website and through our electronic DEO mailing. Beginning this spring, we have also moved to an on-line Faculty Assembly mailing. All the College's policies and procedures are published in the web version of our Handbook for Faculty and DEO Administrative Manual, which will be updated on-line this summer. E-mail is also helping us to assist departments promptly.

In spite of the severe reduction this year in our annual state appropriation, the State has so far maintained its commitment to new buildings for the Liberal Arts and Sciences. The Governor's budget would continue the planning funds for an additional building for Art and Art History, to be constructed across Riverside Drive from the current Art building. The University is also going ahead with plans for a new home for Journalism and Mass Communication, to be constructed north of the Becker Communication Studies Building. The University has invested in renovation of space for our departments in Trowbridge Hall, Seashore Hall, Iowa Advanced Technology Laboratories, and the Field House. The College's and the Provost's next priority for building will be a new home for the Department of Chemistry, which would join the new Biology Building in providing up-to-date classroom and laboratory space for modern science instruction and research.

In an environment of decreasing state funding, our recent efforts to improve our external friend-raising and fund-raising are also important investments. This work supports our core mission by funding student scholarships, building improvements, instructional equipment, distinguished professorships and Collegiate Fellowships, research subsidies like the Dean's Scholar Award, and important initiatives within departments. In preparation for the Comprehensive Campaign about to begin, the Foundation has appointed an additional development officer in the important area of arts fundraising. The College's Alumni Advisory Board is actively advising us on issues related to our preparation of students and our communications with alumni and other external constituencies.

The 100-year past of the College of Liberal Arts is prologue to our future as the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences--a future that we must create together. I look forward to another year in which we will re-affirm our commitment to learning and demonstrate anew that ours is truly work worth doing.

linda-maxson@uiowa.edu