Dean’s address to College faculty



Address to College of Arts and Sciences faculty

Paul H. Benson, Dean

September 12, 2008

Attending to Our Faculties

1. Introduction

In a recent review[1] of Jay Parini’s latest book, Why Poetry Matters (Yale, 2008), Denis Donoghue cites Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s claim that poetry has the property of “exciting a more continuous and equal attention than the language of prose aims at” (italics added; Biographia Literaria [1817]). Fear not: this is not an opening line that will lead to a dean’s presenting an annual address in the form of verse. Nor do I invoke Coleridge’s line to suggest that the following remarks will be poetic in any meaningful sense or will argue for a particular account of the nature of poetry. (While it could be amusing to witness this amateur tackle literary theory, it would hardly be illuminating.) Rather, I want to take the opportunity your presence this afternoon provides, early in the Fall Term, to grant some moments of continuous and equal attention to the role of the College of Arts and Sciences’ faculty in our joint academic endeavors. In particular, I will discuss the central contribution of faculty members to the primary initiatives underway in the College and the support that the College seeks to provide for faculty involvement.

My dean’s address last fall aimed to engage our imaginations as faculty members, both in thinking about the collective identity of the College of Arts and Sciences as an academic community of teacher-scholars devoted to education in the liberal arts and sciences and also in considering our main strategic priorities as a college. For those who have not devoted the past twelve months to study of my words last year, I suggested that a college of the liberal arts and sciences fundamentally concerns translations of imagination in a unique kind of communal context and that the collective project of being a college also draws in important ways upon how we exercise together our imaginations as teachers and scholars.

This afternoon’s talk will be much more concrete, focusing on faculty development activities in the College in support of academic departments and programs, as well as in support of our leading initiatives.

Over July 4 this summer I visited my parents at their cabin in Michigan. One morning my mother was tackling a Will Shortz crossword puzzle from the New York Times. One of the puzzle’s clues was, “have control of their faculties”; the answer was “deans.” No doubt, my mother and Will Shortz both knew that this clue and its solution contained at once a joke and an irony. The joke is clear: no dean controls faculty members in a college in any straightforward way. The irony is that the term “faculty” in the English language, derived from the Latin “facultas,” concerns power and ability. This etymological reminder draws our attention to the fact that, in a college, the power and capacity to accomplish major academic ends collectively reside in the faculty members, not primarily with the dean or other administrative positions.

The dean’s office has certain significant areas of authority—in hiring, tenure and promotion review, and budget—but otherwise serves planning, coordination, and support functions. The dean’s office is not like I imagined the principal’s office to be when I was in junior high, the terrifying locus of total control over a seemingly totalitarian institution. O’Reilly Hall is not “central command,” even if we do share our quarters with our colleagues in the ROTC.

There is a broader point in observing this than simply to note that most people outside of dean’s offices do not really know what deans’ offices do. The point is that deans’ offices are—and ought to be—centers of institutional community service and facilitation more than loci of control. Outside of an overriding commitment to support students’ educational progress as best we can, the primary commitment our office makes is to support the development of faculty members, in the conviction that faculty work requires significant administrative assistance and coordination in order to be effective, and that faculty work is the key to the quality of any university.

The remainder of these remarks, then, will devote attention to the ways in which, as dean, I am supporting high-quality faculty work in the context of our strategic initiatives.

2. Faculty strength

It is important to observe that, over the past two years and extending into the current year, the College has enjoyed a significant increase in tenure-line faculty hiring. Since 2006 and continuing into the present academic year, the College has hired or is hiring for 11 new tenure-line positions. New lines have been filled across the College, and the new positions have been designed to strengthen majors programs, key research areas, and General Education goals. There has also been substantial growth in the number of full-time, non-tenure-track lecturer or visiting positions, in order to improve compensation for and the quality of non-tenure-line faculty.

It is noteworthy that, in both the present year and next year, the Provost increased the minimum starting salary for tenure-track faculty and provided substantial equity funding to raise average salaries for particular ranks and divisions of the College to be more in line with norms for our peer institutions. For the current year, the Provost contributed $240,000 of base funding, in addition funds for annual merit increases, to raise salaries of well-performing full Professors.

Most importantly, I am pleased that the quality of faculty scholarship has continued to improve as we expand the size of the tenure-line and full-time faculty. Our new hires bring strong academic credentials, impressive talent, and evident enthusiasm for the University of Dayton. Two of the new faculty hires that deserve special recognition are the senior-level appointments we have made for new department chairs: Sharon Davis Gratto, who was music education coordinator in the Sunderman Conservatory at Gettysburg College, before coming to UD to chair our Department of Music; and Jon Hess, who came from the Director of Graduate Studies position in Communication at the University of Missouri to chair our Department of Communication. We are pursuing more senior-level hiring in general. We have launched searches this year in Biology and English that would permit hires at the Associate Professor rank and two searches in Religious Studies anticipated at the rank of Professor, in addition to a search for a new University Professor of Faith and Culture.

3. Faculty development support in 2007-08

Before discussing faculty involvement in specific College initiatives, it would be useful to describe the general level of support that the dean’s office has expended in support of faculty projects over the past twelve months. Here are some illustrative examples:

• The College spent $25,000 to send faculty teams to special conferences on undergraduate research and internationalization, as well as to support participation in unique scholarly institutes, in addition to normal travel funding.

• We spent $30,000 to fund faculty and student travel for presentations at conferences, covering 96 faculty trips, of which 19 were international.

• We spent over $50,000 in funding for faculty research grants in the Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (SEE) initiative. The College also spent $4,500 in support of SEE guest speakers and curriculum development. I have contributed another $50,000 for SEE, and we have acquired an additional $60,000 from the VP for Research and Academic Excellence funds.

• The College contributed $30,000 in support of the Academic Excellence proposal to construct a strategic plan for the UD Rivers Institute and in support of the on-going Academic Excellence project to develop a university-wide model for service- and experiential learning on campus.

• The College spent almost $10,000 to fund faculty development activities last summer for pilot versions of a potentially new English composition sequence.

• We also spent $15,000 for faculty development work over the summer for first-year learning-living communities, in addition to the funds used to support programming and faculty costs for learning-living communities during the academic year.

• The College spent $37,000 to support events and workshops for the Humanities Base and Thematic Cluster Programs in General Education.

• We also funded development of a pilot interdisciplinary field experience for non-science majors in the Integrated Natural Science Sequence at Mountain Lake, Virginia at a cost of $11,000.

These expenditures, totaling $322,500, were made in addition to other funding through the Jacob Program for Professional Ethics and the Humanities Fellows Program, as well as through other Academic Excellence initiatives. Most significantly, these figures include none of the funding for faculty start-up, facilities renovations, or for special research ventures. Nor do they include monies devoted to special visiting positions, such as Distinguished Visiting Professor we funded in Religious Studies last winter and will fund again in the coming winter term.

The inference to be drawn from these examples is not that the College’s coffers are open to anyone looking for additional funds—although our disposition to respond affirmatively to faculty or departmental requests far outstrips the occasions on which we cannot support a request. The central point, rather, is that, where there are important academic priorities at issue, we seek to fund faculty development requests generously, if they are presented along with strong evidence that they will be used to good effect and will increase academic quality with proper depth and scale.

4. Research and creative scholarship

I turn now to five selected initiatives that the College is working to advance at present. These five initiatives by no means exhaust the field of our priorities. They reflect goals, however, that may not be sufficiently well known or understood. Moreover, they should be of interest to faculty across the College. The first initiative concerns support for faculty research and creative scholarship.

I hope that work in your departments over the past year on revised and clarified tenure and promotion processes has given you a valuable opportunity to reconsider how best to establish and communicate appropriately high research expectations in your disciplines and how best to evaluate faculty members’ progress toward meeting those expectations. Special thanks are due to the members who were elected to the College’s new Tenure and Promotion Committee last winter and who continue to work hard to review and approve revised departmental policies.

At the request of the President, the College and each of the schools have developed specific goals for funded research for the coming five years. The College’s goal is to increase funded research by 30% over that period. Our first step in implementing this goal is to provide ready and widespread support for proposal-writing. Some of this support comes in the form of the assistance available from Associate Dean Don Polzella to identify research grant opportunities and give advice on proposal development, in addition to extensive support for budget development from Associate Dean Mary Brown. The grants handbook that the College completed last year is an outstanding resource for proposal-writing. We hope that it quickly becomes a standard reference for all College faculty.

It has been gratifying over the past year to see more activity in proposal writing and funded research in the areas of the College whose academic cultures often have not attended to external funding. Moreover, the College has made special efforts to support faculty members who have no graduate students or staff to assist them but who are well-positioned to construct major grant proposals. For example, we gave course releases to two faculty members this year to write proposals for high-priority projects.

Faculty development efforts such as these, both in the College and in the professional schools, have begun to bear fruit. There was a 17.6% annual increase in funded research at UD in the academic units in fiscal year 2008. This comes on top of a record year overall at the University for funded research, with a total reaching $81 million. Leaders in funding for single academic projects came from the College: the TREND Center and the Department of Mathematics.

While efforts to increase funded-research support are imperative if we are to be able to afford the space, equipment, materials, staffing, graduate and undergraduate student stipends, faculty time and travel necessary to conduct research and creative artistic activity of the highest quality, faculty research and artistic activity have value for the College that extends far beyond efforts to gain external funding. I would not want the emphasis on externally-funded research to dominate the overall importance of scholarly activity in our college. We cannot be the teacher-scholars we aspire to be unless we are scholars who both inspire and challenge ourselves and one another to excel in our research.

5. Diversity, conceived in academic terms

The second College initiative I want to consider today concerns an integrated, academically grounded approach to diversity, or inclusive excellence.

In January, after discussion with the College’s chairs and program directors, I requested the construction of department-level diversity plans concerning faculty hiring, retention, and development, and also addressing diversity outcomes in student learning, such as that which now appears in the University’s assessment plan and was proposed in the “Habits of Inquiry and Reflection” report. In addition to Presidential-level diversity initiatives that are on-going, it is critically important to the College that we make academic commitments, rooted in our own disciplinary fields and expertise, to inclusive excellence—that is, to the integration of increased academic quality with the diversity of our academic community across meaningful scholarly, curricular, pedagogical, and demographic parameters. Our quality as a university depends on bringing faculty and students with a wider range of perspectives, cultures, ideologies, orientations, and experiences to this community and then supporting their capacities to thrive at UD. The scholarly quest for truth, beauty, and justice at a university—and especially in a college dedicated to the liberatory and transformative mission of study in the arts and sciences in the Catholic and Marianist traditions—positively demands a clear, academic commitment to inclusive excellence. Too often diversity initiatives have been presented or pursued as extrinsic to our academic work and, therefore, as inherently in competition with primary academic aims and values.

As part of each departmental diversity plan, I have asked departments to indicate the sorts of resources they will need to advance the diversity goals that would be most academically meaningful for their disciplines. This should position the College well both to approach diversity through our respective academic cultures and curricula, and to argue effectively for new resources to support these efforts.

In order to advance this work, I am also investing in faculty time to consider what we can learn from other universities who are considered national leaders in inclusive excellence. Last year, the School of Engineering and the College supported a semester-long faculty workshop, facilitated by Dr. Peggy DesAutels, to examine issues concerning women faculty and students in the science, engineering, and mathematics fields. This group presented then-Dean Saliba and me with specific recommendations about how to improve the recruitment and retention of women faculty in our STEM programs. It also led to UD participation in a major NSF proposal with Wright State and Central State Universities for a five-year, $500,000 ADVANCE grant to pool resources regionally for recruitment and retention of women faculty in the sciences and engineering. We learned last week that we have been awarded the grant.

This fall, I have asked four faculty members, one from each division of the College, to attend, along with Dr. Jack Ling, a conference sponsored by the Association of American Colleges and Universities on diversity and inclusive excellence. This team will subsequently meet with each sub-council of the College as departments consider how best to revise their draft diversity plans in order to disseminate practices that have proven to be effective at other leading universities.

I have also added steps to the faculty recruitment and hiring process, building in part on the recommendations of the women-in-STEM workshop last winter. First, I am requiring all departments to review position descriptions, search committee composition, and advertisement strategies with Jack Ling in Human Resources before I approve the initiation of a search. Second, I am requesting to see the CVs of all candidates to be invited for on-campus interviews as finalists for faculty positions before the invitations are approved. Applicant pools that are insufficiently diverse, given availability in the particular field, or sets of finalists that do not reflect serious efforts to diversify faculty and curriculum may lead to delay or discontinuation of a search. Attention to Catholic, Marianist mission in hiring continues in part through our participation in annual Hiring for Mission retreats led by Fr. Jim Heft. In the spring, we will offer a new retreat for tenure-track faculty to discuss how UD’s Catholic and Marianist commitments can be stimulating, fruitful resources for innovative and inclusive scholarship, curriculum, and pedagogy.

These are but a few of the efforts that the dean’s office is making to further faculty work on diversity. Many specific faculty projects, such as Dr. Judith Huacuja’s innovative arts and activism project, which incorporates both student and faculty art-historical scholarship on artists-of-color in the Dayton region, continue to derive support from the dean’s office.

6. Global and intercultural education

The third strategic area to be addressed is global and intercultural scholarship and education. As you know, one of the five pivotal goals set out in the University’s 2006 Strategic Plan is to advance our students’ international and intercultural citizenship and engagement. The President has funded many new initiatives through the Center for International Programs, and both international partnerships with other universities and student participation in education abroad have grown substantially over the past five years.

It is worth reminding ourselves that our work to advance global and intercultural education and research is not distinct from our planning for inclusion and diversity in our faculty and curriculum. These are complementary, mutually reinforcing endeavors. Regarding them as symbiotic, if not fully coextensive, underscores the importance of viewing the significance of diversity in gender, race, ethnicity, religious creed, ideology, and the like in our university’s particular corner of the midwestern United States in relation to the broader global realities characteristically signaled by the term “internationalization.” Inclusive excellence and global education are inextricably intertwined frameworks. We will make more rapid and meaningful progress in both areas if we attend to them together rather than separately.

The College is making three immediate commitments to support the work of faculty in global education. First, we are preparing to bring to the Academic Affairs Committee a modification of the Liberal Studies requirements for the Bachelor of Arts degree that would fully require proficiency in a foreign language by closing the longstanding loophole in those requirements. Among all of the international initiatives that have been discussed in recent years in the College, no item emerged as more important to faculty than institution of a genuine foreign language requirement for all B.A. degree students. The Department of Languages already has revised its proficiency requirement in order to increase the efficiency of its delivery and to permit the expansion of the role of intercultural education in the requirement. The new proficiency course-sequences have begun to be offered this fall. The College also has begun to invest in the new faculty lines, both tenure-track and full-time lecturer positions, as well as in the equipment and materials for the Language Learning Center, that will be needed in order to implement the new requirement, if it is approved. Dr. Francisco Penas-Bermejo, chair of the Department of Languages, will brief the College chairs and program directors again next week on the latest plans for a meaningful B.A. proficiency requirement. Once a formal proposal has been submitted to the AAC, I would encourage all faculty members interested in contributing to review of the proposal to contact their representatives on the AAC and department chairs. This process will require significant departmental involvement and cooperation.

Second, last winter, I urged the University to join the American Council on Education’s Internationalization Collaborative. The College sent a team of four faculty members, in addition to Amy Anderson, Director of the Center for International Programs, to the annual meetings of the ACE Collaborative which focused on faculty development systems in support of internationalization on university campuses. The team included, as representatives of their divisions, Professors Kristen Cheney, Andria Chiodo, Roger Crum, and Dan Goldman. These faculty produced a thoughtful and well-crafted set of recommendations for the College based on what they had learned at the conference and framed by UD’s international strategic plan. Reflection on those recommendations led me to decide that the College can generate and sustain new work in global education only if we identify a faculty member with strong background in research, teaching, and education abroad who can give priority to the faculty support such work requires. Hence, I appointed last month Dr. Roger Crum in Visual Arts as the College’s Liaison for Global and Intercultural Initiatives for a two-year period. While this is only a part-time appointment, Roger will now be able to devote one-quarter of his time during the academic year and half of his summer work to faculty development in support of global and intercultural education.

Dr. Crum will work with Associate Dean Don Pair to form a College faculty advisory committee on internationalization; he will draft a College-wide plan to implement specific, high-priority, near-term goals for us in global and intercultural education; and he will aid in coordinating the College’s communication and planning with the Center for International Programs, especially concerning the development of new offerings in education abroad. Roger will also assist our office in identifying and applying for major grants or foundation gifts to fund the College’s work in this area.

Finally, the College will make a special effort to support faculty in developing scholarly relationships with faculty and programs at foreign universities and in pursuing visiting teaching appointments or teaching exchanges. This support will come in the form of increased attention to fellowship opportunities as well as increased funding for international travel and curriculum development. I have already noted that we supported international travel for almost 20 College faculty members to present their research last year. I am willing to supplement UD Research Council seed grants, which limit funding for travel requests, in order to create incentives for international research. With Dr. Crum’s assistance, we will also announce other forms of faculty development support, in addition to those already available through the LTC and CIP, for high-quality curricular projects in the areas of global and intercultural learning. Alignment with the University’s decisions about priority areas of geographic interest or partnership agreements with other institutions will influence the College’s support.

The College’s faculty are to be applauded for their enthusiasm for UD’s global initiatives. When I sent out a request in June, for instance, for faculty members who might be interested in a brief teaching or research visit to Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou Province in southern China—where Juan Santamarina of our Department of History is currently a visiting faculty member—I received responses from 30 interested faculty which we are now reviewing with Sun Yat-Sen. And when I was giving one of my weekend Admissions talks in northern Ohio last February, I could not have been more pleased when the College student who accompanied me began his remarks to the prospective students and parents by saying that he had conducted research on four different continents with UD faculty. Our energy for internationalization is high; now we must build the foundations to support and sustain this work.

7. Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (SEE)

The fourth initiative that calls for special attention this afternoon, the initiative in Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (SEE) which was begun in 2006, also manifests powerful faculty enthusiasm and commitment. Dr. Bob Brecha, currently beginning the third year of his appointment as the Mann Chair in the Natural Sciences, has taken the lead, in cooperation with Associate Dean Don Pair in the College and now Interim Dean Malcolm Daniels in the School of Engineering, in fostering interdisciplinary research, curriculum development, co-curricular campus projects, and community engagement activities related to SEE’s themes. Signs of the high level of faculty interest in advancing the SEE initiative are abundant: from the overflow crowd at Bob Brecha’s Mann Chair lecture on climate change at the end of the Winter Term, to the creation of the new first-year SEE learning-living community, which filled more rapidly than any other first-year community this fall; from the scope of SEE research proposals submitted last spring, which sprung from every division of the College, to faculty hiring across the College last year that reflected growing departmental support for environmental scholarship and teaching; and from the priority that emerged in the Campus Master Plan for a new, sustainable learning-living residence hall in the student neighborhood, to the expansion of student research on sustainability, as evidenced by the impact and quality of the community-based research projects in Dr. Dan Fouke’s and Sukh Sidhu’s Humanities Fellows course-sequence on sustainability.

To expound in this talk on the urgency of humanity’s decisions, policies, systems, and customs for obtaining, storing, transporting, and consuming energy should be unnecessary. If our students are to confront the pressing issues of our day and the earth’s future—to read and respond with wisdom and imagination to the signs of our times—nothing could be more important than the sort of education that can be developed through SEE. Moreover, there is little question that the concept of sustainable environmental practices, while a contested concept, will be one of the leading integrative notions for a 21st century education in the liberal arts and sciences, especially one dedicated to the aims of adaptation and change, service, justice, and peace, in the traditions of Marianist education. When Emi Hurlburt, the new President of the Student Government Association, spoke to the President’s leadership retreat in August, her comments centered on one theme, students’ passion for elevating the study and practice of sustainability at the University of Dayton.

It bears noting again that faculty work in SEE is not independent of other faculty initiatives in research, in diversity and intercultural education, and in global engagement. SEE’s value, in part, is reflected in its multiple intersections with all of our priorities.

As mentioned earlier, the College has already spent $50,000 in the past year on SEE research projects, has committed another $50,000 in support of SEE, and has garnered over $60,000 of additional funding from the Vice President for Research and Academic Excellence funds to support SEE projects. Additional funding has been provided for closely related projects, such as the University of Dayton Rivers Institute and River Stewards program, housed in the Fitz Center, the interdisciplinary, team-taught Perspectives on Cities courses, and various symposia and colloquia, such as those organized by the Alumni Chair in the Humanities, Dr. John Heitmann. A second round of SEE research grants is forthcoming, and work on the curricular arm of SEE is expected to advance this year. The College is committed to supporting vigorously faculty work in this area.

8. Arts strategy and campaign priorities

The fifth initiative to be considered this afternoon is the College’s work to advance our arts division and, especially, to raise the funds for a new University Center for the Arts that would house all of our academic programs in the fine and performing arts. Some people mentioned after last week’s general faculty meeting that they were concerned that the Center for the Arts was not mentioned among the University’s current facilities projects. The projects mentioned by President Curran were ones that had just been completed this summer or are scheduled to begin in the coming year. We do not currently have the funds to begin construction of the Center for the Arts. The Board of Trustees rightly insists that we must have nearly all of the funding in hand before construction can begin. However, Dan Curran has made the University Center for the Arts the number one priority for building projects to be funded through the new campaign. This has remained the case over the last two years of campaign planning, even as the size of total campaign priorities has been reduced. The College’s Advisory Council has vigorously affirmed this priority.

Accordingly, a full-time development officer, Sara Woodhull, has been assigned to the College to work on advancement for the arts, and I have devoted a significant proportion of my efforts in fundraising to the arts. As many of you can appreciate, the UD alumni of the 1950s and 1960s who would now be notable prospects for major gifts to the University often had little involvement in the arts during their student years here. UD gave relatively less attention to the arts at the time, trying to build its reputation in science, engineering, and technology fields. Moreover, the University’s national reputation, as measured by standard indices, has not been closely associated with its arts programs. Except among those who have been intimately involved with our arts programs, perceptions of the University’s commitment to the arts, at the present time, often do not correspond with the actual quality, distinctiveness, and scope of our faculty and students’ work in the arts. While ArtStreet has become an exceptionally valuable demonstration of the University’s interest in the integration of learning and living through the arts, and has promoted both increased collaboration among arts programs and increased visibility for the arts on campus, it is sometimes believed by external constituents to mean that academic art-making facilities at UD are in good order. Sara Woodhull and I are working hard to reverse this perception and to highlight the ways in which the University’s aspirations to be among the very best Catholic universities in the country depend, in part, on both the quality and the extent of our commitments to the arts as essential to the education of all UD students. The Vice President for Advancement, Deb Read, has significant experience in funding for major arts building projects and remains optimistic that the UD campaign will succeed in raising the funds necessary to build the arts center.

As part of this work, the College has requested an integrated, prominently placed website that could be updated multiple times each month with the schedules of artistic and cultural events on campus. We are also funding production of a high-quality video that will be used to promote our arts programs among prospective donors for the new arts center. More importantly, we will be reviewing in the coming year needs for more faculty members, more artists-in-residence, and more programming support across the arts division in an effort to increase visibility, quality, and cross-disciplinary innovation in our arts departments. In addition, I am in the process of assembling a faculty leadership group, to be chaired by the new Graul Chair in the Arts and Languages, Professor Sean Wilkinson, that will cultivate greater collaboration among our arts programs and stimulate curricular innovation. This group will seek to identify ways in which the visibility of UD art-making and new, interdisciplinary projects among the arts programs can be promoted as we work toward defining the imaginative vision and inspiration that will shape the new arts center.

The College is also committed to extending UD’s collaborations with area arts organizations and to serving unaddressed needs in art education in our region. I have been meeting with Jan Driesbach, the new director of the Dayton Art Institute, to explore ways in which UD can make greater use of the Art Institute as a powerful educational resource. Likewise, the Art Institute is drawing readily upon UD faculty as collaborators for its future programs. I am also seriously exploring the possible relocation of a unique summer arts residency program, the Blue Sky Project, from the Chicago area to UD. This would benefit both our students and faculty and could become a signature arts residency in the country. Finally, the President’s Office and the College have invested nearly $200,000 in support of the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company as part of the on-going work to determine whether a permanent partnership between UD and the world-class DCDC can be born.

9. Design of the Common Academic Program

Finally, it will be vitally important that we include in our attention as faculty members this academic year the exciting and difficult work that will be entailed in review of a draft proposal for a new common academic program at UD, based on the student learning outcomes proposed in the “Habits of Inquiry and Reflection” report. After nearly a year of work, Associate Dean Don Pair’s subcommittee has submitted its draft proposal for the common academic program to the Academic Policies Committee of the Senate. It is anticipated that the APC, chaired this year by Dr. Chris Duncan, will release the report soon for focused discussion and evaluation. The faculty members who were elected by the APC last year to carry out this major project included, along with Don Pair, the following distinguished members of the College faculty: Sandra Yocum Mize from Religious Studies, Pat Donnelly from Sociology, Leno Pedrotti from Physics, and Roger Crum from Visual Arts. I want to extend special thanks to this group for the intensive, creative, and ambitious thinking reflected in the draft proposal. I urge all of you to take advantage of the forums for review and feedback that will be made available by the APC this term. The academic quality and value for our students of any new common academic program for UD undergraduates will depend upon the best thinking and active dialogue among all of you as faculty members. No comprehensive university achieves far-reaching revisions of its work in general education without facing challenging moments of compromise. Owing particularly to the cross-cutting, deeply interdisciplinary character of the student learning outcomes, it will be important for all of us to keep our eyes on our shared vision and care for our students’ education as 21st century global citizen-scholars and servant leaders if we are to make meaningful progress on a common curriculum.

I draw attention to forthcoming discussion of the common academic program not only for its intrinsic importance, but also because the learning outcomes espoused in “Habits of Inquiry and Reflection” and now presented in the approved University assessment plan reflect, in cohesive fashion, the faculty initiatives that I have reviewed this afternoon, including research and creative scholarship, diversity and inclusive excellence, global and intercultural education, sustainability, and support for artistic production and performance. Development of the common academic program reminds us that our work as scholars is intimately bound up with our aspirations for our students’ learning.

As an indication of the special impact of our work together on the common academic program, a member of the College’s Advisory Council has made a major gift that, together with funding through the College and the School of Engineering, will establish a faculty development program to create models of curricula that can advance the learning outcomes of practical wisdom and critical evaluation of our times. We expect that the first grants under this program, the Habits of Inquiry and Reflection Fund, will be made in the coming year.

10. Conclusion

I am all-too-aware that a presentation such as this can communicate only a very few of the College’s academic priorities and in a restrictive, monological setting. The fact that so many important projects which, for some of you, rightly carry fundamental value for your teaching and research cannot be discussed today by no means lessens their importance. I have done my utmost in my first year as dean to make myself available to faculty members to the greatest extent possible in order to learn more about your work, listen to your concerns, and share information as fully as I reasonably can. I believe that our office as a whole has done the same.

In order to foster still more communication and conversation, I will host two dean’s faculty luncheons each semester to permit me to meet with smaller groups of faculty who have questions or comments to share with me. Please look for announcements of these luncheons and RSVP requests. I will continue to hold a special dinner each year for women faculty in the College and have promised, in addition, to convene this winter a forum at which we can discuss issues of particular concern among women faculty.

I would like to return to Coleridge’s phrase, “a more continuous and equal attention.” The review of Jay Parini’s book on the value of poetry that I cited at the outset concludes by wondering whether “a more continuous and equal attention” offers not just a way of reading but of living as well. Whether or not one’s scholarly specialty touches upon literature, the idea that exciting a more continuous and equal attention is central to a life well-lived is something that all of us, as teachers and scholars, should cherish and be moved by in our work. For this is the life of a professor in the arts and sciences: to give prolonged and equitable attention to those things that matter in especially deep and enduring ways to the human condition and the state of the world . . . and then to share the fruits of such sustained attention with our students and colleagues, in the faith that their lives will be richer in character and impact for having done so. Please let me know how I can support you in this rare and noble way of living.

In the booklet that indexes scholarly productivity in the College for 2007, I wrote, “Faculty are the lifeblood of the College of Arts and Sciences. All of the College’s achievements and aspirations spring in some way from faculty members’ creativity, talent and dedication in scholarship, teaching and professional service.” Thanks are due to all of you for your continuing good work and your resolve to elevate the quality and influence of the teaching and research conducted through the College. On balance, the College is thriving, by my lights, and that is due primarily to the signal contributions and care that all of you invest in your students, your scholarship, and our communal life together as the faculty members of the College. May you sustain a more continuous and equal attention in your work this academic year, and may you cherish and exercise wisely both the power and responsibility that come with being faculty members in our college. Thank you.

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[1] Denis Donoghue, “Congenial Disorder: Why Should We Look for Comfort in Poetry?,” Harper’s Magazine, CCCXVII, 1900 (September 2008): 92-8.

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