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October 26, 1998

To: Faculty in the College of Liberal Arts
From: Linda Maxson, Dean
         Raul Curto, Executive Associate Dean
         Frederick Antczak, Associate Dean for Academic Programs
Re: Creating a Vision for the College

Over the past year, we have found a shared resolution among Liberal Arts faculty to renew the College's leadership and innovation in undergraduate education and a recognition that the College must redouble its efforts to provide the resources needed for scholarship and teaching.

We ask you now to help us perfect and then accomplish a vision that will inform our activities as a College and allow us to use our (limited) resources to create areas of excellence. This discussion will continue during the next year as the College works towards the revision of its strategic plan for the years 2000-2005.

We have drafted the following initial sketch of that vision. Over the next few weeks, we hope to engage you -by means of an electronic colloquy -in a dialogue concerning how the vision outlined here can be developed and implemented. Please consult the bulletin board on the College's website (www.uiowa.edu/~libarts/faculty) where this vision statement is posted and where you can post your comments and suggestions, to be read and responded to by your colleagues. Please be sure to check the bulletin board periodically, to read what others have suggested. If you prefer, you may also e-mail the deans directly (linda-maxson@uiowa.edu; raul-curto@uiowa.edu; frederick-antczak@uiowa.edu). We would very much like to hear from you by November 18.

The College's strategic plan for the beginning of the 21st century will be built on a few achievable goals that are central to the culture of the College of Liberal Arts:

• articulating, with pride and confidence, a vision of the liberal arts that is intellectually driven and that demonstrates the contribution of our research to our teaching,
• building our undergraduate and graduate curricula while making the best use of our existing faculty resources and of developing educational technologies,
• creatively supporting excellence in faculty hiring and sustained faculty development,
• designing initiatives to support diversity, international education, and interdisciplinary opportunities, and
• developing new administrative structures and restoring a culture of collegiality, service, and good citizenship.

To achieve these goals we propose (and in some cases have already begun implementing) the following initiatives.

Our Curriculum

The skills long associated with the College's vision of the Liberal Arts -critical reading, written and spoken expression, analytic thinking, and problem solving -demand a better integrated curriculum, both in the General Education Program and in the majors.

General Education. We would like to shape a General Education curriculum that more effectively achieves the goals we have long had for this Program, by offering more courses that are specifically developed for and tailored to those goals and that closely involve our faculty in General Education instruction. In addition, the Educational Policy Committee is working on a proposal for a new method of reviewing General-Education-approved courses that will give more responsibility to departments and reduce the need for large numbers of faculty to devote their time to routine reviews.

We will call for the development of courses designed specifically for the General Education Program across the College's curriculum. We will also give faculty in the natural and mathematical sciences the opportunity to develop additional courses for non-science majors and continually improve existing courses -particularly interdisciplinary courses -that will ensure our students become "science and math literate."

Interdisciplinary and International Opportunities in the Undergraduate Curriculum. Among the greatest strengths of the College are its longstanding commitments to interdisciplinary teaching and research and to international programs. We will support the development or renewal of courses across the curriculum that build on these strengths.

Capstone Course in the Major. We encourage departments to design capstone courses for their undergraduate majors, which integrate the students' education in the discipline retrospectively and help ensure that research skills, analytic thinking, problem solving, and writing skills are fully incorporated with discipline-specific knowledge and traditions.

Allocation of Teaching Assistantships

The College is using the TA allocation for 1999-2000 to promote development of the curriculum in the direction outlined above. We have already announced (in a September 30 memo to DEOs) that teaching assistantships will be set aside for the following purposes:

• to support existing or new capstone courses in the majors that can profitably use teaching assistants;
• to increase the number of educational experiences that have an international focus,
• to support our new "Interdisciplinary Fellows" program of assistantships, which will be allocated to two or more departments working together who nominate a specific graduate student who could teach in more than one area of the College's curriculum. We expect these assistantships to promote communication between the appointing departments and broaden the support available to graduate students.

If these programs are successful, the College will increase the number of lines allocated to them in subsequent years. We would appreciate your suggestions for other creative and flexible ways of allocating funds for teaching assistantships.

Faculty Initiatives

Strategic Hiring. We explicitly encourage diversity, innovation, strategic planning, and cross-disciplinary thinking in the proposals for faculty searches submitted each year. With the help of the College's elected Executive Committee and Educational Policy Committee, we have specified priorities and criteria for faculty searches in 1999-2000.

We are adjusting the form and the process for requesting faculty lines. In November, we will invite departments to submit brief pre-proposals. These pre-proposals will be due in the Dean's Office February 1. The two elected committees will advise on the pre-proposals that seem to have the most promise, and the departments submitting these will be asked to respond to questions and issues raised by the committees.

Rewarding Departments for Interdisciplinary Teaching. We welcome your suggestions on how the College can increase the incentive departments have for encouraging their faculty to participate in interdisciplinary teaching and research. We will work toward ways of counting interdisciplinary teaching as "on-load" without weakening the departmental majors.

Support for Faculty Achievement

Dean's Scholar Awards. In September the Dean's Office sent to eligible mid-career faculty (associate professors at their third, fourth, and fifth years at rank) a call for proposals for this new faculty development award, made possible by the Alumni Association's endowment of a Dean's Chair in the College of Liberal Arts. Three faculty members who excel in both teaching and scholarship or creative work will be designated each year as Dean's Scholars, a two-year award that carries an annual grant of $5,000 for equipment, travel, supplies, and other support for teaching and research initiatives.

Planning for New Technologies in Our Teaching and Research. Last summer the College established two task forces whose recommendations we expect to be central to the our planning for and response to the rapid emergence of new instructional technologies. The Task Force on Faculty Use of Learning Technologies will report this fall on how faculty are currently using the new technologies in their teaching and what support they need to further implement these new instructional technologies. The Task Force on Professional Implications of Learning Technologies will report on how we can evaluate faculty members' use of these technologies in their research and teaching.

Public Recognition of Faculty Achievement. We know that there is enormous achievement among our faculty -but public acknowledgement and recognition of that achievement is often missing. We are continuing to work on avenues for publicizing and applauding the faculty's achievements, and we would appreciate your suggestions for means of collecting this information and placing it before the University and our wider publics.

Infrastructure and Material Support

With the support of the University administration, the College is seeing continuing progress on building and renovation and on renewal of equipment. With the new Biology Building still under construction, the University is now in the first stages of planning a new building for the School of Art & Art History. A new home for the School of Journalism & Mass Communication will be the next priority for the College.

We are improving our service to faculty and departments in the crucial area of computer support. The College's new Director of Information Systems, Steve Troester, has begun developing a staff to serve specific buildings on campus. The three computer consultants hired so far are serving the departments in EPB, the Chemistry Building and Trowbridge Hall, and the performing arts departments. Steve is working with ITS to improve support for instructional computing clusters in the College and to establish criteria for replacement of faculty computing equipment. We have provided very good equipment for newly hired faculty in recent years and must now establish a process for deliberately renewing these resources.

The College's next initiative will be to repair the General Expense Budget. We will ask each unit to provide information on their expenses that will help us develop parameters for what general expense budgets ought to be. In addition, to promote interdisciplinarity, the College plans to give bonuses in the subsequent fiscal year to departments that use their general expense budgets for cross-departmental initiatives.

As with other issues raised in this letter, we would like to have your comments on other infrastructure issues the College needs to address and on ways of addressing them.

Collegiality and Collegiate Governance

Administrative Structure and Support. The range and variety of disciplines and teaching-research areas in the College are its greatest strengths and the most important source of its potential for further achievement. However, our faculty are being exhausted by the burden of administering our many units and programs, particularly given the recent increases in reporting requirements that apply equally to all units, large and small. This fact was certified in a survey of DEOs conducted last year by the College's Executive Committee.

The College is working to reduce these demands where possible -for example, in a simplification of the procedures for peer review of tenured faculty initiated by the Executive Committee this semester -but some administrative restructuring is also necessary to consolidate and reduce this burden. We are working with selected groups of departments to form divisions that will link them administratively while ensuring that they retain their names and disciplinary identities. These divisions will group departments that have similar disciplinary interests and similar administrative challenges facing them.

We are optimistic that a divisional arrangement can maximize the job satisfaction and minimize the reporting frustrations for at least some of our DEOs, allowing them to focus on faculty building, program building, graduate student recruitment, and communication with related departments -areas where they can make the biggest difference to their own departments.

The Culture of Collegiality and Service. The culture of this College and the University -more so than at many other public research institutions -is one of faculty governance and democratic decision making. This culture is one the faculty have voiced their support for again and again, and it has been a source of enormous strength and vitality. But it creates a strenuous demand for faculty service, and service is a norm that new faculty must be mentored and socialized into.

We would appreciate your suggestions for ways we can preserve this culture of faculty governance without exhausting our faculty through service on committees and for ways we can acclimate junior faculty gradually into this culture, so that the expectation of future service to the department, College, and University is one they are prepared to meet as tenured faculty.

Please Respond!

Now that you have read this draft of what we plan to accomplish in the next three years, please participate in the bulletin board or write to us personally at linda-maxson@uiowa.edu, raul-curto@uiowa.edu or frederick-antczak@uiowa.edu. We look forward to hearing from you and to working with you on the initiatives described here and on other initiatives that arise out of our strategic planning process.