Ding dong

Well, it's dead...

"First of all, the EC thanks the CRTF for the enormous amount of time, concern and effort that has gone into every phase of this review process. Regardless of the outcome of this review, there is no question of our appreciation of your work."

...two years in, comprising thousands of hours of work spent reading, writing, discussing, debating, data collecting, assimilating, analyzing, synthesizing, scrutinizing every corner of the curriculum and every corner of other colleges' curricula...

"So here’s the thing: you have all seen the results of the survey, and some attempts to organized the responses in helpful ways. The [Senate Executive Committee's] take on the survey is this:

-       It does not provide a ringing endorsement

-       There are many significant and thoughtful concerns that it would be better to address before the proposal comes to [the Senate's Academic Policy Committee] and senate formally

-       The level of opposition is high enough that it signals that there is not enough support for the proposal for it to simply move forward"

...we lost steam somewhere around the time that the subgroups first came together, my Curricular Sustainability Subgroup colliding with the Big Picture Subgroup, a body which had lost sight its goal of providing large-scale parameters for change and instead decided to promulgate its own specific (and, I believe, peculiarly short-sighted) proposals for curricular change...

 

"The [Executive Committee] believes that it would be wise not to try to push forward a change when the campus seems this ambivalent about it. Further, given that documents cannot be brought that would enable changes before fall 2014, at this point it makes sense to consider what can be done to address the concerns that have been brought forth."

...the wheels came off completely by the time the full task force came together again, trying mightily to put together a consensus proposal, passing that job off onto my group over the second summer of the project. Everyone was asked to give something up; it was a true compromise, and no one left the table completely satisfied, but everyone left feeling good about the job they'd done...

"We recognize, of course, that this is frustrating and disappointing to many people, and we are sorry for that. However, it is the [Executive Committee’s] recommendation on the basis of our best judgment about what makes sense for the institution."

...of course, once word got out to the full faculty, everyone asked for their piece of the pie to be put back. The backers of the Humanities Program gave no ground, the natural science departments with laughably large majors insisted that their students needed every last credit...academic nimbyism won out.

Regular readers know well that I myself became disenchanted with our work the proposal it led to, so I can't say I'm entirely disappointed with the outcome, but I'm tremendously disappointed by the way in which some of my colleagues acquitted themselves throughout the process.

Well...onward and upward. Right now I've got the General Education Council to worry about, and about 7 or 8 papers to wrap up over the summer...avanti!

Looking forward/looking back

I’m more sure than ever before that we’re making a mistake, but I feel powerless to stop it.

I’m returning now from a brief visit to Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. There, at the request of my colleague Katarina, I took part in a day of faculty development workshops. That small school’s entire faculty spent two days together in sessions designed to help them craft innovative classroom activities, manage assessment, direct undergraduates in research, and understand the school’s current proposal for curricular change. I’d been invited to give the second day’s keynote, focusing on writing as a means of critical thinking, and to lead two iterations of a brief workshop on mentoring undergraduates in research. Both of these went well, owing more than anything else to Morningside’s very engaged faculty than to anything else. There are a large number of young, as-yet-untenured, faculty at that school, many already making use of progressive pedagogies and eager to learn more.

Most eye-opening for me was the session I attended during the time I wasn’t busy leading my own. The session was led by several faculty who were charged with describing their work in crafting proposals for specific curricular reforms. One faculty member spoke of the school’s new plan to enhance students’ critical thinking. Another spoke on their plan to more intentionally develop students’ communication abilities through a sort of CAC (communication across the curriculum) program. A third focused on the plan to build students’ quantitative literacy. I should note that here, the word “plan” should not be read simply: these plans are robust and elaborate. They include careful vertical integration, course design methodologies, articulation of learning goals, and plans for appropriate multi-stage assessment.

It was the last presentation that struck me most, for it is in stark contrast with particular components of my own school’s current plans for curricular reform. Among the several specific changes the summer working group (SWG) of the Curriculum Reform Task Force (CRTF) has put into its proposal is the out-and-out elimination of a pair of the intensives, including diversity-intensive courses and quantitative-intensive courses. (The information literacy-intensive courses and writing-intensive courses are sliding out from under the axe, receiving a shave but not a grisly end: both of them survive as assessment-driven departmental competencies and not courses approved and overseen by faculty committees.) These intensive programs are victims of our desire to reduce faculty members’ quasi-administrative functions (functions which we see contributing to extraordinarily heavily service expectations) and our attempt to reduce the complexity of the Integrative Liberal Studies (ILS) curriculum, which is indeed very convoluted.

Yet…though I’m all for reducing ILS’s complexity, I worry that the SWG’s strayed too far from our liberal arts ideals. As my wonderful colleague Lexi (also a member of the SWG) pointed out in an email I received while taking part in the listening session at Morningside (oh, irony!), our removal of the DI and QI courses, coupled with our elimination of the ILS’s Topical Cluster requirement and our scaling back in the longstanding Humanities program (requiring only 12 instead of 16 hours of this core common experience), moves us closer to a more generalized model for general education which brings us more in line with the UNC system’s non-liberal arts member schools. What is to distinguish our core curriculum from that of, say, Western Carolina University, or Appalachian State University, the two much larger schools with whom we share the mountainous western region of our state?

Though our move might leave us open to criticism that the new curriculum will too closely resemble that of more “comprehensive” institutions, I’m not sure the political climate at UNC Asheville is such that we could “sell” anything less drastic. The faculty in several of the departments whose majors require a substantial number credit hours have lobbied strongly against the restrictions on majors which would have been necessary to free up the time to save some aspects of the ILS curriculum. Our ultimate decision to cap the size of majors at 60 hours is still unpalatable to members in four or five departments. (Their continued insistence that this number of hours is simply necessary for students to receive a robust disciplinary education is wholly unfounded, in my view, but that’s fodder for an entirely different post.) Mix these faculty members’ objections together with an overall sense that ILS is overly complicated, and you’ve got a recipe for dissent: any attempt to take more hours from the majors and give them back to ILS would send about a third of our faculty into open revolt.

So here we are, bobbing about between Scylla and Charybdis. We’ve got a couple of more details to hammer out (regarding the current and proposed requirements for health and wellness and for foreign [second] languages), but once those are forged we’ll be putting the proposal before first the full CRTF and then the full faculty. Buckle up, y’all. It’s gonna be bumpy.

Coming soon: the skinny on my first day of classes, tomorrow!

CRTF continues...

As the work of the Curriculum Review Task Force carries on, now well into its second year, I ask all of my colleagues, students, and friends to consider the parts they all play as citizens of the world...and the roles they all play in helping themselves and others fulfill those parts.

Someday (next summer, maybe, when the REU's direction is no longer chiefly my responsibility?) I hope to write at length about the curriculum review, for it's been a sometimes-trying, sometime-exhilarating, but ever-rich-and-rewarding experience. So much to say about it, so much to say.

And so much to say about my ever-changing perception of my part in it...and about my part in the school more broadly, and in society and humanity more broadly still. The reading I've done in the past month alone (Joseph Weizenbaum, Antonio Damasio, William McDonogh & Michael Braungart, and Martha Nussbaum, all tempered by the poetry of Marge Piercy, Ted Hughes, and Adrienne Rich) convinces me more solidly than ever before that we folks in the "hard" sciences constrain our roles too tightly: we tend to dive dangerously deeply into our disciplines. From our depths we lose sight of the stars.

More soon...

Whaddaya mean, "liberal arts"?

Last week I asked my MATH 179 students to reflect on what "liberal arts" meant to them. They were to write an ungraded page or two about what they thought it is that distinguishes a liberal arts institution from one of a different sort. Their responses to this exercise were uniformly astute. They've got a good grasp of what a liberal arts education entails already, so my goal for the next of the semester need not be so much to introduce them to this educational philosophy so much as it will be to help them investigate its subtleties and implications.

Many focused on the relatively intimate learning environment at liberal arts colleges, bolstered by their smallness: "Because of the small student-teacher ratio, students are closer to their professors and receive personal attention" and "I like the fact that it [UNCA] is a small campus, the students and teachers are very nice, and there are classes here that you probably would not find anywhere else," in contradistinction to "UNCW [UNC Wilmington, where] most of the lecture classes were very large. I had several hundred people in my Biology class and also in my Algebra class."

Some commented on the liberal arts curriculum, focusing on the curriculum's breadth as well as disciplinary depth ("Usually liberal arts colleges have more core classes than other colleges. I think this is because the college wants us to have a broader view of horizons rather than focus on the one thing that we like") and on the ways in which the curricular offerings are tied together ("Liberal arts colleges tend to look at education holistically, meaning the curriculum is usually intertwined and well-constructed relating certain areas of study") . They acknowledged that tackling this curriculum is not always easy, but should ultimately be rewarding: "Due to liberal arts requirements one must go outside of their comfort zone and take classes in topics that they are not the best at or comfortable with. Although can be cumbersome as a student at times it helps integrate all areas of study to further the student's knowledge in general."

What are the rewards? Employability, one would hope: "When I graduate I think all those requirements [clusters, writing intensives, etc.] will make me a more rounded person and make me look better to an employer" and "...a degree from a liberal arts school is better to find a job that is not specific, because it shows you have skills in many areas." There's also something to be said for the recognition of the "human" in human scholarly endeavors: "The liberal arts environment at the school has had a major impact on the way I am taught and how I learn here at the University of North Carolina Asheville. [...For example, the Newton v. Leibniz project in Calc I] seemed so absurd but it really helped me realize that the topics we were being taught and the rules that we were learning were not just things that appeared out of thin air. Every subject, every theory, and every idea has a back story, a history, a time, a place, and a brilliant mind who thought it up."

Several students expressed (sometimes extreme) satisfaction at attending a liberals university (a few have spent at least a term in a non-liberal arts environment). Some even expressed concern for their peers elsewhere: "I see a liberal arts education to be very important because I have noticed a terrifying trend that not many of my peers that attend non-liberal arts universities are very secluded and "protected" from the world and the culture in which they live."

So far they know what they're talking about.

Problem solving, a.k.a., we'll see where this goes...

...in light of the conversation I had with my colleague last Friday (and the subsequent blog post last Sunday) on student perceptions of our university, I've just sent an e-mail to our new chief admissions officer, requesting a meeting with her at which we might discuss outreach activities involving area high school guidance counselors, whether that outreach takes place at the level of the university or at the level of the department.

To be continued, I'm sure...

Identity crisis

One of my colleagues swung by my office Friday afternoon in order to let me in on the latest tidbit from the university's Branding Committee.

It seems that according to a recent survey of North Carolina high school juniors and seniors who achieved the highest scores on various metrics (SAT, ACT, GPA, et cetera), our school, the state's public liberal arts school, scored dead last out of the sixteen-school state system when it came to student perception of the amount of individual attention faculty provide to their students.

"What in the hell?" was my reaction.

My colleague nodded his vigorous assent.

"We should be first!"

More excited nodding. "It is frightening that students believe they're more likely to get individualized attention from their professors at Chapel Hill than they'll get here," said my colleague.

"Do the students know what 'liberal arts' means?"

The nodding turned to a solemn side-to-side shake of his head. "No," he said. "That's the thing. High school students do not understand what a liberal arts college is."

"Why is that?" I mused out loud. "Is it because they associate the phrase 'liberal arts' [however erroneously!] with 'unemployability' and fear that if they attend a liberal arts college they'll spend four or more years learning useless skills that will ill, if at all, prepare them for the job they'll need to recoup the money they put into the program in the first place?"

"I don't know."

"Remember the exit survey data that Beauregard sent around a few months ago, indicating seniors' perceptions of the education they'd received here? I seem to recall that we did pretty well on that survey, as regards perception of faculty attention."

"Yeah," my colleague agreed. "The seniors get it, they realize what we've got. But the students we're trying to recruit...the very best of the students we're trying to recruit, don't understand."

"Whose fault is this?" I asked rhetorically.

"Oh, it's our fault."

"But what are we supposed to do about it? What can we do better?"

"We need to get out the message that we offer small classes, that we offer individualized attention. Whenever we're advertised as a 'liberal arts college,' it turns students off. Whenever we emphasize the small class sizes students will find here, they're attracted to us."

"Craziness."

My colleague had another meeting, and I had another class, so the conversation ended there. Busied with grading for the past day and a half, I've only now had a chance to reflect on the conversation and give more thought to its topic.

I'm not sure I understand any better now what I didn't get then.

Let's say that students simply don't understand the phrase "liberal arts," and perhaps instead of merely passively misunderstanding it and chalking it up as a phrase they don't know and are unlikely ever to (like "diffeomorphic" or "Weltanschauung"), they actively and horrifically misunderstand it to entail instruction irrelevant to any likely future employment. (I should note that historically this is the most frequent misinterpretation of the phrase. That it truly is a misinterpretation is shown by data I was made aware of this past Thursday at a department liaison luncheon with the university's Career Center staff: the National Association of Colleges and Employers, a professional organization for college staff devoted to career counseling, human resources, and so forth, recently released the results of a 2008 survey showing that all of the top ten skills employers desire in the people they hire are frequently and explicitly listed as learning goals in liberal arts courses.) Even given this misunderstanding, how on Earth do the students misunderstand "liberal arts" to entail large, impersonal lectures or standoffish professors who have no time for personal interaction with their students? Surely the next most common stereotype of a liberal arts education (after the erroneous one detailed above) involves a hirsute and betweeded tenured professor gathering several of his favorite students to climb up to the rooftop of their classroom building and there sit, overlooking the quad, while they smoke weed and contemplate the relevance of Derrida to modern-day indigenous dairy farmers. What aspect of that (also, perhaps more sadly!, erroneous) stereotype implies impersonality or aloofness?

I've just now pulled up the survey results that I'd mentioned in my conversation with my colleague, to see if I'd misremembered anything. I'm happy to say that the data are even richer than I'd remembered: we have midcourse data, too, from the sophomores. Here are the relevant figures.

From sophomores:

1. In response to the prompt "Please evaluate how well faculty members at this campus encourage student-faculty interaction in and out of the classroom," 83.0% of Asheville sophomores in 2008 indicated either "good" (3 on a 4-point Likert scale) or "excellent" (4 on the scale). This is 6 percentage points higher than the state university system as a whole (77.0%).

2. The prompt "Please evaluate how well faculty members at this campus care about your academic success and welfare" elicited even better results: Asheville sophomores responded with a 3 or a 4 87.8% of the time, compared with a score of 78.6% across the system (a 9.2-point differential).

3. While the prompt "How would you evaluate your access to your adviser?" garnered almost identical numbers from Asheville sophomores (77.1% 3s and 4s) and from UNC sophomores in general (77.0%), the prompt "How well would you evaluate [obtaining] sufficient time with your adviser?" received 3s and 4s from 77.7% of Asheville sophomores and only 64.7% of all UNC sophomores.

4. In response to the question "How many of your classes, if any, do you feel have been too large for you to learn effectively?" 64.8% of Asheville sophomores responded "none," while only 34.7% (!) of all UNC sophomores were able to make the same boast.

All of this goes to show that students catch on quickly once they've gotten here: while they might not know what they're in for before they get to campus, they soon realize that when it comes to attention from their faculty, they've got it better here than they would elsewhere in the system.

What about the seniors?

1. and 2. The same prompts given to the sophomores elicited similar results from 2008's crop of graduating seniors: 89.2% indicated that student-faculty interaction was either "good" or "excellent" (this mark is 6.2 higher than the Asheville sophomores and 5.1 points higher than the 84.1% mark earned by all UNC seniors in 2008) and 92.2% (4.4 points higher than the sophomores' mark and 5.6 points above the 86.6% given by all seniors) gave the same marks to faculty concern for students' academic success and welfare. If anything, the last two years of their studies further convince students that they've got a good thing going at a smaller school.

3. When it comes to their advising experience, 85.8% of Asheville seniors (as opposed to 77.0% of the sophomores) indicated that they had good or excellent access to their advisers, and 81.4% (as opposed to 77.7% of sophomores) indicated that they'd found it easy to obtain sufficient time with them. These figures compare even more favorably with their system-wide counterparts than the corresponding sophomore survey results: the "access" grade exceeds the system-wide mark of 77.2% by 8.6 points and the "time" grade exceeds the system-wide of 73.2% by 8.2 points.

Strangely enough the seniors were not asked about class size, as were the sophomores. I would hypothesize, however, that the bigger schools are likely to close some of the distance between themselves and UNC Asheville during those last couple of years, as juniors and seniors are much more likely to take a large number of seminar-style classes in their respective majors and therefore are likelier than sophomores to have experienced smaller classes, even at schools like UNC Chapel Hill and NC State.

Lest you think I'm cherry-picking the data, I should mention that the above items are all of those on either survey that deal directly with student-faculty interaction: I'm not trying to sweep anything under the rug.

In the middle of compiling the data above I summarized my conversation with my colleague to Maggie, and she posed an interesting hypothesis I'd not thought of: "maybe the kids who took the survey you were talking about are the ones who will get the attention of the faculty at the big research schools."

She's got a really good point: the superstars are the ones who get the lion's share of the bigger schools' top-tier researchers' attention, even in the early, pre-college, years of their academic careers. (I remember being courted by the University of Denver, my eventual alma mater, as the Engineering school attempted to get me to take part in its summer program for talented high school students. I believe this wooing was, whether or not I was consciously aware of it, one of the reasons I ended up going to DU.) Therefore it could be that the students who were surveyed already suppose that bigger schools' faculty are likelier to give them attention than are the faculty at a smaller school like UNC Asheville. This is even more surely the case of students at schools like the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics and other hotbeds of adolescent excellence: which of NCSSM's students is going to think twice about heading for the mountains in the far-flung western corners of their state when world-famous scholars at Chapel Hill and State are already sending them personal invitations to join their research groups?

Nevertheless, we've got to get them to think twice.

So I ask the questions again: What are we supposed to do about this? What can we do better? Perhaps, to paraphrase one of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, we don't need to do a better job, we just need better PR for the job we're already doing.

I'd love to hear from my readers, students and faculty alike: are you at a liberal arts school? Faculty, how is your school perceived by prospective students? Students, what's your perception of your school? What are the causes of that perception? What's your take on the conversation I had with my colleague? Do you have any answers or suggestions?

Please discuss. Five pages minimum, double-spaced, one-inch margins. Due Friday.