Address to College of Arts and Sciences faculty
Paul H. Benson, Dean
September 12, 2008
Attending to Our Faculties
1. Introduction
In a recent review1 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.
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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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.