Report to the President on
Academic Year 98-99
July 30, 1999
Jim Swartz
Vice President for Academic
Affairs and Dean of the College
This past year, I saw Grinnell College emerge from a period of intensive self-study that included lists of core values and learning-assessment plans, preparation of a self-study report for re-accreditation, and the Board’s actions leading to the establishment of the Grinnell College Fund for Excellence. The most striking theme to arise from each type of institutional self-examination was a strongly affirmed commitment to provide qualified students with an unsurpassed education in the liberal arts, distinguished above all by intensive interactions between faculty members and students. Once the College community had worked together to delineate a clear picture of the College’s academic mission, the arrival of a new President and Dean provided an opportunity for institutional experiments on many levels. In short, 1998-99 has been a year of tremendous change and innovation, guided by a clear sense of Grinnell’s identity. This clarity of vision extends also to the world beyond the campus, as in the creation of the new viewbook, which successfully articulates what is most important about the College.
Summary of Changes and Developments
I. FACULTY:
II. ACADEMIC PROGRAMS:
III. ACADEMIC SUPPORT SERVICES:
IV. FACULTY SUPPORT AND ORGANIZATION:
As I review these changes in the College’s academic programs and in the way that we administer these programs, it is not difficult to trace the origins of virtually every change back to two fundamental wishes or objectives that arose from our self-study process:
The following sections of this report describe in greater detail the changes that have taken place in each area: the faculty, the curriculum, academic support services, organization and support for the faculty, and the Dean’s Office itself.
I. Faculty
I served on the Executive Council some years ago, when it conducted all faculty reviews. The Personnel Committee now does a very thorough job with these reviews, and I believe it has raised the standards in all areas: teaching, scholarship, and service. I have always believed that we have a strong faculty, but I am particularly impressed with those recently tenured and currently untenured. They are energetic and very strong teacher-scholars. This year we lost three of them to research universities. I anticipate that we will continue to have some losses from this group, whose credentials and experience are coveted by other institutions.
During the summer of 1998 we substantially revised the documents outlining the procedures for reviewing faculty for recontracting and promotion. We did not attempt to change the ways in which reviews are conducted or the criteria for successful reviews. Rather, the intention was to make it easier for departments to follow the guidelines. I believe that departments found this helpful; certainly the review dossiers were delivered to the Dean’s Office in a much more timely fashion.
Tenure, Promotion, and Recontracting
Six faculty members were considered for tenure and promotion to Associate Professor. Five of these faculty members were recommended for promotion and tenure to the President, who accepted all recommendations, and these were in turn approved by the Board. Newly tenured Associate Professors include: Todd Armstrong, Russian; Susan Ferguson, Sociology; Edmund Gilday, Religious Studies; Leslie Gregg-Jolly, Biology; Mary Mader, Chemistry. One faculty member, Tom Hietala, History, was considered for promotion to Professor and the positive recommendation was accepted by the President and Board. The Personnel Committee also considered contract renewals for twenty-five faculty members. Contract renewal was recommended for all but one.
New Faculty Appointments
This year we carried out searches for tenure track faculty in Chemistry (an expansion approved in AY97-98), English (replacing a faculty member who resigned last year), French (replacing a faculty member whose contract was not renewed), and Theatre (replacing Sandy Moffett, who will move to Senior Faculty Status in a year). All these searches resulted in appointments, although in each case we were turned down by our first-choice candidate for reasons unconnected with the terms of our offer (spousal employment or other personal reasons). We also appointed Pablo Silva, a faculty member filling a term position in History, to a tenure track position as an early replacement for Don Smith, who attains SFS in two years. We appointed Kelly Herold, a faculty member filling a term position in Russian, to a tenure track position replacing Helen Scott, who has been in the Dean’s Office for seven years and may well continue to serve the College in this role.
We conducted fifteen searches for faculty members in term positions, replacing faculty on leaves, plus four teaching postdoctoral appointments in science, to fill positions created with support of our $500,000 NSF-AIRE grant. All these searches (with the exception of one unfilled postdoctoral position) were successful, and virtually all resulted in the appointment of first-choice candidates. On the recommendation of the Russian department and the Executive Council, we also re-appointed Raquel Greene for a second year as CSMP Fellow.
While this year did not see a dramatic increase in faculty diversity, we made incremental progress in this area. Further actions to increase faculty diversity will remain an important priority of this administration. We appointed two women and four men to tenure-track positions; only one of these new faculty members is a person of color. Of the 19 faculty members (not including the postdoctoral fellows) appointed to term positions, ten are women and nine are men; this group includes one Native American faculty member, two Asian American faculty members, and one African American faculty member.
This year, we also began a new mentoring program for recently appointed faculty. Each new faculty member was matched with a tenured faculty member outside his or her own department, though usually from the same academic division. Mentors are encouraged to invite the new faculty member to coffee or lunch and to be available for consultation and questions. In addition, a series of lunches on topics that might interest new faculty were organized throughout the year. These lunches were well attended; topics ranged from "what we wish we had known" to announcements of faculty-development opportunities. From these lunches, we gathered questions and concerns that led us to revise our annual New Faculty Orientation, in the hope of making this session more relevant and useful to the new faculty members.
Resignations, Retirements and Transitions to Senior Faculty Status (SFS)
This year, the following tenured or tenure-track faculty members resigned to accept positions at other academic institutions:
Jan Czechowski, Professor of Theatre, has resigned to accept a position as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the College of St. Catherine in St Paul.
Jared Gardner and Beth Hewitt, who shared a position as Assistant Professors of English, resigned to accept positions at Ohio State University. Both were offered senior-level Assistant Professor positions there with substantial support for their scholarly work.
Sandy Goldberg, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, will become Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky. The reason for his resignation was spousal employment.
Three faculty members, Merle Zirkle, Art, Don Smith, History, and Sandy Moffett, Theatre, signed contracts in preparation for future transition to Senior Faculty Status. Merle and Sandy will make this transition at the end of AY 99-00, and Don at the end of AY 2001-02. Lenore Durkee retired from SFS to move to Ithaca, NY with her husband, Vern, where they will be closer to their daughter and grandson.
Grants and Awards
Bradley Bateman, Professor of Economics, was awarded a one-year residential fellowship at the National Humanities Center, where he will work on a book-length manuscript on the influence of the Social Gospel movement on American economics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This fellowship is highly competitive, with less than eight percent of applicants awarded internationally.
Victoria Brown, Associate Professor of History, was identified by a national search committee and offered a prestigious teaching-research fellowship, which is a one-year joint appointment to Occidental College and the Huntington Library. This award honors faculty members who have distinguished records of teaching and scholarship in a liberal arts setting.
George Drake, Professor of History, was awarded the Professional Achievement Citation by the University of Chicago’s Alumni Awards Committee. The award, presented during the University’s reunion weekend on June 5, 1999, recognized George Drake’s professional and community service contributions locally, nationally, and globally.
This past year the College nominated Elizabeth Hewitt, Assistant Professor of English, and Michael Rosenthal, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, to the National Endowment for the Humanities for consideration of awards supporting their scholarship during the summer of 1999. In the meantime, through a separate selection process, both Michael and Elizabeth were awarded Harris Faculty Fellowships for the 1999-2000 academic year. Subsequently, both were awarded summer stipends by the NEH.
Peter Jacobson, Assistant Professor of Biology, brought to the College its first cooperative agreement with a major international non-governmental agency, The Nature Conservancy. Under this agreement, Peter Jacobson will conduct research on dryland riparian ecosystems of the southwestern United States. His work, in collaboration with the University of New Mexico, will provide crucial information for improved river management, and inform policy decision-making regarding repair and new levee and dam construction throughout the western United Sates.
William Patch, Professor of History, has been awarded a one-year fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to pursue his research on Tory workers in Rhineland-Westphalia between 1890 and 1960.
Irene (Tinker) Powell, Associate Professor of Economics, received one of 34 Fellowships awarded annually by the American Council on Education. This competitive national program provides senior faculty members with intensive mentoring and training in areas of administrative decision-making and institutional change. As a 1999-2000 ACE Fellow, Tinker plans to spend the fall semester at Macalester College and spring semester at Scripps College.
II. Academic Programs
During this academic year the faculty engaged in fresh discussion of the advantages and risks of our present curriculum. We examined, in particular, the unusual freedom that we grant to students when we allow each one to design an individual academic program. Curricular study began in summer and fall 1998 with detailed analysis and discussion of sample student transcripts. At the same time, faculty groups received administrative support to hold workshops in preparation of academic proposals to the Fund for Excellence. These discussions led to several new developments during the academic year: faculty legislation requiring each student to design and submit an academic plan, reconsideration of the first-year tutorial, and the capstone experiment.
Fund for Excellence
This year’s curricular review has been stimulated and supported by the Fund for Excellence. Across the College, faculty members actively engaged in preparing academic proposals for this year’s two rounds of awards. More than just writing and submitting proposals, I believe that this process has helped faculty members to think more strategically about the College, its mission, and their role in that process. For example, I believe that through experimenting with capstone projects, we will develop an understanding of how our students move through our curriculum and gain the knowledge and skills needed to be exemplary citizens of the world.
The Fund for Excellence process is already leading departments, concentrations, and other groups of faculty to think about the curriculum in new and productive ways. One good example is international studies. A diverse group of faculty members is discussing relations between the study of language and literature and other elements of internationalism in the curriculum. In short, the Fund for Excellence process has generated a fresh look at the curriculum, not through a top-down process, but in the context of strategic planning at its best. In this spirit, the faculty has been at the forefront in this year’s exploration of what is distinctive about the academic program of Grinnell College and how we can take advantage of our strengths.
Transcript Analysis
During summer 1998, with help from Director of Institutional Research Carol Trosset, I convened a group of faculty members from all academic divisions to examine a sample of anonymous student transcripts. Over several months, faculty participants rated the students’ educational choices and jointly discussed the results, refining their own views on the components of an ideal liberal arts curriculum. Carol Trosset then used cluster analysis to sort the faculty ratings and assess their level of agreement on what constitutes a liberal arts education. This small transcript workshop became the model for a wider discussion in fall 1998, in which all faculty members were invited to participate. There were 83 faculty members involved in the all-faculty transcript survey and an ensuing discussion on November 2, 1998.
The project revealed considerable agreement, and some areas of disagreement, among the faculty. While faculty members expressed broad agreement on the desirability of breadth in the liberal arts curriculum, they were more divided on the issue of depth. Some faculty members find it essential for students to gain in-depth knowledge in several areas, but others disagree, believing that a narrower focus of study will limit the student’s opportunity to gain breadth across a greater number of areas.
Three basic curricular models emerged from the transcript analysis project. They correspond to three different ways of looking at the curriculum: modes of inquiry, areas of knowledge, or range of skills. Growing from this project, new text for the academic catalog on "Elements of Liberal Arts Education" and new materials for faculty advisers will be presented for faculty discussion in 1999-2000.
Academic Plan
At the end of spring 1998, students on the College Curriculum Committee told me how important it had been for them to submit a four-year academic plan as part of their application to study abroad. They suggested that this experience would be valuable for all Grinnell students, not only those who seek to spend a semester outside the United States or to graduate in seven semesters. Responding to their idea, I asked Associate Dean Paula Smith to consult informally with faculty members and with the new Registrar, Gerry Adams, and to draft a proposal asking all students to design a comprehensive academic plan at the time when they declare a major.
Under the terms of this proposal, fourth-semester students will work with their faculty advisers to review the first two years of liberal arts study. Upon declaring a major, each student will set forth a draft plan (both a list of courses and a brief rationale) for the next two years. The rationale is a brief statement explaining how they have organized their program and how it resonates with their emerging sense of education in the liberal arts. As seniors, they will revise this statement in light of what they have learned, reflecting their new insights and priorities developed since the mid-point of their Grinnell career.
After going through a number of drafts during the fall semester, this proposal was discussed and endorsed by the College Curriculum Committee and by the Faculty Executive Council in February 1999. The full faculty approved this proposal in March 1999 and it will go into effect in academic year 1999-2000.
Off-Campus Study
This past academic year, the faculty Off-Campus Study Board began a review of all of the off-campus study programs to which we have been sending our students over the past several years. The objective of this review is to reduce the large number of off-campus study sites to a more manageable number for the purpose of academic quality control. A full faculty review of off-campus study goals is planned for the fall semester, 1999. This will help the Off-Campus Study Board select a reduced number of academically rigorous programs which meet the needs of academic departments, concentrations, and the overall goals of a liberal arts education. This review of goals and programs will also enhance faculty advising of students wishing to study abroad. Over the past two years, 59% of our junior classes have studied abroad. This represents a marked increase over previous years when the numbers ranged from 40%-50%. We remain committed to providing our students with off-campus study experiences at a high level of academic quality.
First-Year Tutorial
Curricular discussion during the 1998-99 academic year extended even to the first-year tutorial, long accepted as fundamental to a Grinnell education. The College Curriculum Committee began by questioning the way that we record this course on student transcripts; members noted several misleading implications of the term "tutorial" and of recording specific tutorial topics on the transcripts. After extended discussion, the Curriculum Committee formally proposed a change to "First-Year Seminar" as most suitably describing this experience. The Tutorial Committee, in parallel meetings, decided to initiate a broad discussion about the role of a seminar or other first-year experience in a Grinnell education. This dialogue opened with a well-attended and stimulating Teaching Colloquium in March, followed by a full faculty discussion with presentations by Al Jones and Jan Berkowitz Gross in early May. While this event affirmed broad faculty support for the tutorial, it also encouraged the need to examine ways that this first-year experience can be given more focus and strengthened as the basis of our present curriculum. Meanwhile, the Curriculum Committee’s proposal to revise the transcript entry to "First-Year Seminar" received endorsement from the Tutorial Committee in late spring, and it will come before the faculty early this fall.
Capstone Experiments
Our self-study noted the absence of a college-wide option to complete a senior project of the sort that challenges students to demonstrate the reasons behind the curricular choices they have made and to apply a broad liberal-arts perspective to a specific discipline or cross-disciplinary area of mastery. Although some departments offer a senior project as part of the academic major, and some students individually design such projects, this has not been a college-wide opportunity or expectation. Therefore, faculty members express concern that some of our upper-level students may lose motivation or be less willing to take intellectual risks or push themselves in constructive ways.
This faculty concern about the lack of a culminating experience in the curriculum is not new. As early as 1991, the faculty endorsed in principle the value of "advanced integrated inter-departmental study," but concrete plans to make this type of study central to the Grinnell curriculum did not move forward, as the College was not then ready to make the commitments entailed by such large-scale change. Now, however, with resources available through the Fund for Excellence, it became possible to experiment with this area of curricular change.
President Osgood initially proposed a capstone experience as a universal feature of a Grinnell education, but he modified this decision after listening to comments from both students and faculty. There was widespread conviction on the campus that an optional capstone was more consistent with Grinnell’s tradition of student autonomy and would help to ensure the high quality of each project. As a result, President Osgood announced a five-year capstone experiment in his memorandum "Grinnell College and the Future," dated December 17, 1998. During this trial period, the capstone will be optional for upper level students.
Planning for capstone projects immediately went into effect, inaugurated with a capstone travel seminar that took students and faculty members to the Mississippi Delta in March 1999, and followed by the adaptation of this year’s Hewlett Overseas Project, with a focus on Namibia Studies, to become a capstone experience for the participating students. Faculty members planned summer workshops to design several interdisciplinary and departmental capstone seminars. More than 80 students enrolled for capstone credit in summer 1999. These projects and their results will be evaluated to learn what works and which formats are effective in the liberal arts setting. Ideally, many capstone projects will ultimately be viewed and evaluated by audiences beyond the campus, offering tangible evidence of the scholarly and creative achievements of Grinnell students.
I hope that every academic department will discuss capstone experiments in the context of its own curriculum, and that individual faculty members will think about how they and their departments can adjust teaching responsibilities and curricular structures to increase the possibility of offering capstone options. If a growing number of students select this option, we will need to think about whether the College should institute some method for recognizing capstone projects of exceptional quality. During the trial period, directing six capstone projects will count as the equivalent of teaching a standard four-credit course. (Until now, Independent Projects and Summer Research have been directed by faculty members as an unpaid overload.) We will need to review this system of teaching equivalence to see whether it seems appropriate, and we should also monitor our success in promoting the publication, dissemination, and performance of the work that results from student capstone projects.
It has been exciting to launch this important curricular initiative and to set forth a provisional structure for the experiment. Many students and faculty members are already involved in this enterprise, and I hope that there will be even wider participation in the coming academic year.
Biological Chemistry Major
One other curricular change this year was the approval of a new academic major. The departments of Biology and Chemistry proposed the establishment of a Biological Chemistry Major, which was approved by the faculty. This new major will appear in the 2000-01 catalog. This is an exciting truly interdisciplinary major and is a result of several years’ work by both departments. It required substantial re-evaluation of the curricula in both departments. The Biology Department submitted a new curriculum for approval that will start in the 2000-01 academic year.
III. Academic Support Services
Computing
During the 1998-99 academic year, we initiated a thorough review of computing at Grinnell. Ove Arup, part of our campus master planning team, and Nathaniel Borenstein, the first Noyce Visiting Professor of Computer Science, proved very helpful. During the academic year and summer of 1999 we have converted multiple relatively incompatible e-mail systems to a single service using Microsoft Exchange on the server and EUDORA on the clients for faculty and staff. Since students use multiple computers in various locations and multiple students use each computer, we needed a different solution for them. We will implement WEBMAIL in the fall for students. Many students began using this system during the past academic year. We have examined our word processing software and found that we were using multiple systems on different platforms. This year we have phased out our old VAX based administrative word processor, and converted to PC based systems. We are investigating focusing our entire word processing and other office systems on a single solution, Microsoft Office 2000, to decrease costs and improve support. This would provide all faculty members, staff and students with access to the same word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation packages and improve our ability to share files and communicate.
During the academic year and summer, we have made major investments in our hardware infrastructure. We have removed all nearly all of the old terminals (approximately 100) and replaced those appropriate with PCs. We also replaced approximately 140 older computers with new systems. This is approximately twice the rate of replacement of pervious years. We installed three new and far more robust servers to handle all file services including e-mail, software, file storage, and World Wide Web service. This will allow us to remove older servers which are costly to maintain and less reliable than we would like. Finally, we have replaced much of our network routers and switches and some older wiring with newer systems, increasing the flow of data by a factor of ten to 100. Clearly we are still in the midst of upgrades, and in the technology area, this will continue to be the case. Nevertheless, we have made substantial progress.
Faculty members continue to be active and innovative in the use of technology in the classroom. The faculty development section of this report offers commentary on their recent accomplishments and projects.
Grinnell College Libraries
Perhaps the libraries’ biggest story of the year was a successful application for Fund for Excellence underwriting of an upgrade to the automation system. Innopac, a product of Innovative Interfaces Inc. and the libraries’ current system, has been in place since 1989. It has been both a popular and reliable system, but it is character-based and menu-driven. New library software applications are being written on the assumption that libraries will be operating in a graphical user interface (GUI) mode. The libraries have proposed a four-year project to bring up Innovative Interfaces’ next-generation, graphical-user-interface system called Millennium. Installation of the new software will begin early in 1999-2000. Another significant event under the electronic library rubric was the completion of a new, reorganized, and greatly improved Web site for the libraries. This site may be accessed at <http://www.lib.grin.edu>
Burling Library’s new electronic classroom, the Interactive Instructional Facility (IIF), designed during 1997-98, became operational during 1998-99. Intended primarily for information literacy instruction—that is, teaching students, faculty and staff how to use effectively the (seemingly infinite) spectrum of the world’s electronic resources—it can also be scheduled for individual classes and by campus groups and activities. This facility represents a major advance in electronic classroom design, especially in its resolution of seemingly contradictory problems of student sight lines and instructor observation.
Turning from electronic to physical collections, it is also worth noting the completion of a major cataloging project in Burling Library. The final Chinese-language titles from the personal collection of the late Mou Jen-sun, University Professor of History at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, were formally added to the Tsang-Feng East Asian Collection housed in Burling Library. In many cases Grinnell was the first library to record these titles or these editions of titles in the OCLC world database. Completion of this cataloging brings the Tsang-Feng East Asian Collection to a strength of nearly 2300 vernacular-language titles.
Finally, working in close cooperation with the Office of Development and Alumni Relations, the libraries initiated in 1998-99 a significant fund-raising effort. Grinnell, in common with the other private colleges of Iowa, has received a three-year challenge from the Iowa College Foundation. In each of those three years, Grinnell will receive $9,000 from the Iowa College Foundation for library enhancement, provided it matches those nine thousand dollars three-to-one from its own fund-raising efforts. Thanks to the generosity of donors and the indispensable assistance of the Development Office, Grinnell College met its challenge for 1998-99.
Corporate, Foundation, and Government Relations
The Office of Corporate, Foundation, and Government Relations provided a full range of support services to individual and faculty groups developing proposals to advance their scholarship (32) and procure academic equipment to further their classroom teaching (9). They worked with faculty and other administrators to develop new opportunities for faculty-student research and for student scholarship opportunities (7). They also took the lead in identifying grant programs and developing proposals for funding in areas that match the highest institutional priorities, as expressed by the Board of Trustees and the President—principally through decisions taken in relation to the Fund for Excellence (4).
This year, proposals were submitted to three national government agencies, one state government funded foundation, 12 university-based research centers, 12 private foundations, seven professional societies, and one international non-governmental organization. These institutions include many of major national stature including the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Sherman Fairchild Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the George I. Alden Trust, and the Research Corporation. Over the next fiscal year this office plans to present requests for support for the highest academic priorities of the College to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the W. M. Keck Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Freeman Foundation, and the Booth Ferris Foundation, among others. Of the proposals submitted this year, thirteen grants have been received and ten are pending.
For example, the Department of Biology submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation under a newly designed program entitled "Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement." This was the first year for national competition under this program. On the strength of the proposed revisions of their first year curriculum which would infuse the particular research interests of each of the department’s eight professors into a new discovery-based curriculum for each of the introductory sections, the department was granted $75,000 which will be matched 1:1 by the College.
Complementing the new capstone experiments, the College also received a five-year $500,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the appointment of five two-year postdoctoral fellows in the Humanities and Humanities-related social sciences. The Fund for Excellence will match this grant 1:1, bringing the total number of fellows to ten over five years. Fellows will teach core departmental courses, releasing regular faculty to develop capstone experiences for upper level students. Each fellow will receive close mentoring to help them acclimate to a liberal arts academic environment and to improve their teaching. They will also have substantial time to advance their scholarship.
Athletics
We continue to laud the performance of our athletic teams and individual student athletes. This year we won four Midwest Conference championships, a record bettered by only one college in our 10-member league. The titles came in men’s cross-country and football and women’s tennis and swimming. Grinnell continues to maintain strong programs across the entire venue of its 20 sports. In nine out of our 20 sports we had better finishes this year than in the 1997-98 campaign. Four Pioneer teams finished second and 14 were in the top half of the Midwest Conference. Our men’s basketball program continued to garner national exposure. The cagers led the nation in scoring and three-point shooting for the sixth-straight season. The Pioneers drew coverage from almost every major basketball publication and newspaper in the country. We had a tremendous year in football. Our squad was undefeated and ranked as high as 10th nationally in one publication. In addition, both our tennis teams were ranked among the top 15 in the Midwest Region. Two individuals, sophomore John Aerni and first-year Emily Mohl, competed at NCAA national meets in track and swimming, respectively.
Grinnell has about 40 percent of its students competing in varsity athletics. Our academic strength is highlighted by the fact that we led the conference in academic all-conference citations, with over 150 students named to that honor. Four of our teams, both cross-country and swim teams, were named academic All-America squads by their coaches’ associations.
Perhaps the best indicator of our overall athletic program is the conference’s all-sports race. Every finish in each sport receives a point value and these are totaled at the end of the year. Since its inception in the 1980's, Grinnell has never finished lower than third place in either men’s or women’s sports. This year our women placed third out of the 10-team league, maintaining the position we held last year. Our men won the all-sports award for the second straight year.
IV. Faculty Support and Organization
Support for Faculty Scholarship
During the academic year we reviewed the structure of leaves in support of faculty scholarship. In the previous year, the College added a new leave program of research leaves for untenured faculty. As we put this program into place, it became clear that a number of structural difficulties made planning difficult and discouraged faculty from taking such leaves. We developed an alternate plan, provided a time for comment by faculty, and ultimately implemented the plan. It provides paid one-semester research leaves (generally in the fourth or fifth year) to all regular full-time faculty, and stipulates that faculty members may apply for sabbatical leave in the year following a positive tenure decision. The research leave no longer postpones eligibility for the first sabbatical until the faculty member’s eleventh year.
A Fund for Excellence proposal from our office recommended creation of competitive Study Leaves for Associate Professors and Professors. This program was funded; it will provide faculty with time either to work on their research between sabbatical leaves or to extend a one-semester sabbatical leave to a full academic year. The first round of applications will be reviewed this fall, for leaves tenable in 2000-2001.
The new budget also substantially increases funding for faculty travel to professional meetings. In the past, in addition to support from the faculty travel line in the budget, faculty members regularly made special appeals to the Dean, Associate Dean, and President. We have tried to put funds together in one place, administered by the Dean and a newly formed Committee for Support of Faculty Scholarship, so that faculty members apply to one place for professional travel. This committee also administers the new leave programs, the Harris Faculty Fellowship, and the sabbatical program.
Teaching Development
We continue to offer strong support for faculty development. The Grant Board funded a broad range of research projects, and our faculty continued its active involvement in discussions about teaching facilitated by our Faculty Development Committee. Faculty members took advantage of a wide variety of opportunities: teaching colloquia, teaching and learning discussion groups, faculty reading groups, summer workshops on the teaching of writing and oral communication skills, and workshops on the integration of technology into teaching. A number of curricular development projects supported individual or collaborative course development to add greater diversity to the curriculum, increase interdisciplinary offerings, and introduce new teaching methods.
In addition to these ongoing faculty development opportunities, some new initiatives are emerging as a result of strategic curricular planning initiated by the Fund for Excellence. Some of our workshops this summer (1999) were devoted to the integration of capstones into interdisciplinary learning: Global Development, Africana Studies, Prairie Studies, and "Freedom & Authority" (an interdisciplinary senior seminar capstone project). Three departments (Psychology, Mathematics, and French) held summer workshops to discuss the integration of capstones into their departmental curricula. Groups of faculty also met over the summer to plan a Fund for Excellence proposal for a framework to build upon our strengths in foreign languages and international studies.
Our second Mellon grant and new Culpeper grant (for using technology to enhance learning on campus) have resulted in a sharp increase over the past several years in the number of faculty members using e-mail, Listservs, Web Pages, the Internet, and Multimedia in their teaching. Technology can promote active learning, opportunities for original and creative work, and connection with a broader community of scholars and learners. As such, it has an important place in the academic vision for Grinnell College.
Classroom technologies present increasing dilemmas, choices and opportunities. These range from the use of A-V, CD-ROM, and multimedia presentations and activities in the classroom, to web sites and hypertext that students use outside of class time. We increasingly need to teach Internet research skills, and a growing number of instructors use features like electronic journals and bulletin boards to supplement classroom instruction. An exciting element of the Mellon-Culpeper program is the role of instructional multimedia teaching specialists, working with faculty members in their respective areas of science, social studies, humanities, and the fine arts. The IMTS staff helps faculty to identify their needs, assists in the design and set-up of new course materials, and trains faculty members to integrate new technologies into their teaching.
These exciting advances raise new challenges to the ways that we provide both hardware and personnel support to the use of technology in the classroom. We have begun a review of the computing and audio-visual departments that will help us to make the most of these important resources to support student learning.
Faculty Governance and Activities
Ten years ago, the 1988 NCA accreditation review indicated that our faculty governance structure was cumbersome and overly time consuming. Since that time, we have detached the task of reviewing personnel cases from the Faculty Executive Council. Although I originally voted against that move, I now believe that this separation has worked well in giving the Council more time for strategic thinking and planning.
For example, the Executive Council (and the faculty as a whole) engaged in a major effort to assess the End of Course Evaluation process that we have been using. Laura Sinnett, Associate Professor of Psychology, conducted a substantial study that led us to conclude the existing system was not reliable. The faculty approved a one-semester experiment with a new, six-question form. Council recommended to the faculty this new form to be used in all Grinnell courses at the end of spring 1999, as an experiment to test the validity and reliability of this method. Because of its experimental status, the results of this semester’s test will not be used in faculty reviews, but only to measure the effectiveness of the end-of-course evaluation system. The Office of Institutional Research is currently conducting a study of these spring-semester results. Council also discussed issues related to the Fund for Excellence and policies governing faculty reviews, position allocation, and appointments. Activities of the Executive Council are delineated in more detail in the report of the Chair of the Faculty.
A few years ago there was an unsuccessful attempt to reduce the number of committees and size of membership on committees. This year the Faculty Organization Committee, led by Kathy Kamp, came up with a proposal to combine a large number of committees into three new committees. Those committees are Committee on Scholarships, Committee on Instructional Support, and Committee for Support of Faculty Scholarship. I believe that these new committees will achieve more effective strategic planning and make recommendations in view of a larger picture than was possible for the many small committees that they replaced. In the process, a large number of committee 'slots’ were also eliminated, which I hope will ease the administrative burden on the faculty.
Procedural and Efficiency Issues
This year we have changed many procedures in an attempt to improve efficiency. For instance, about 50 faculty per year commonly wrote proposals for research funding to cover copying, phone, office supplies, and postage charges. Total expenditures in this category amounted to an average of $2,000 per year. To allocate and track these expenses, often amounting individually to less than $5, substantial effort was expended by the faculty members writing the proposals, the committee charged to review them, and the various faculty members, secretaries, and administrative staff who tracked the budget lines. To reduce the overall effort of all these groups, we simply added to each department budget an amount to cover such miscellaneous research costs, with the proviso that proposals for such incidental research expenses will no longer be accepted by the Committee for Support of Faculty Scholarship. In a similar move, we are re-organizing the process by which videotapes are ordered and cataloged, for a more centralized system that will be less cumbersome for faculty members to use.
Faculty secretaries have long been organized in units associated with buildings and supervised by volunteer faculty members. An outside review last year indicated that we are not providing reasonable training, that there are large differentials in ability and work load, and that in some offices long-term problems persist without being addressed. Over the year, I met several times with the secretarial group to learn from them which issues need attention. We have instituted a new system through which the secretaries can provide assistance or work sharing when their offices are short-handed or over-loaded. For AY 1999-2000 we budgeted an additional faculty secretarial position to provide more service. This spring, I appointed Angela Story-Johnson, a staff member in the Dean,s Office and former faculty secretary, as the coordinator of all the faculty secretaries. She and I are developing a more sophisticated training and work-sharing program, as well as reviewing all job descriptions to provide more effective support to the academic program.
I hope that this change will also decrease the burden on the faculty members, who previously had no administrative support or preparation for supervising the secretaries.
V. The Dean’s Office
Clearly, the 1998-99 academic year was a transitional year not only for the College as a whole, but also for the Dean’s Office. It was my first full year in the office, and Paula Smith’s first year as Associate Dean. Last summer saw renovations in Nollen House and re-assignment of offices, so that the Dean’s Office shares the second floor with the Office of Corporate, Foundation, and Government Relations, while the Office of the Associate Deans now occupies the third floor. This summer we are also turning over two of the four Dean’s Office staff positions. While this transition is not yet complete, we are already developing into a coherent team.
After completion of the College self-study and our re-accreditation review by the North Central Association in November, Paula Smith continued to work with faculty groups on Fund for Excellence proposals and helped coordinate some of the funded projects, including capstone models and several initiatives in the arts, writing, and humanities. Paula also offers administrative support to the Personnel Committee.
Associate Dean Helen Scott will now receive some help with the process of student scholarship selection from Doug Cutchins, Director of the new Office of Social Commitment, and with the Grinnell-in-London Program from Anne Geissinger, Director of the new Office of Special International Programs. This support will enable Helen to spend more time on programs for teaching development and instructional support, on the future of the first-year tutorial, and on the off-campus study program. Last year’s accomplishments in these areas are described in previous sections of this report.
Finally, during this year we tried to increase efficiency through greater use of our World Wide Web page, both to make important information accessible and to simplify the process of faculty responses to our routine inquiries. For instance, we used to save Executive Council minutes for distribution to all faculty members in hard copy attached to the faculty meeting agenda. Now we simply post these minutes to http://www.grinnell.edu/dean/Council/ as soon as they are approved. Thus, faculty members can see them right away, and we print far less paper. Similarly, we have created electronic forms for various requests from the Dean's Office rather than handling all these tasks with paper. We still have a long way to go in using technology effectively, but we have made a good start. Getting to a more unified e-mail and word processing system, and having more capable network systems, will help us immensely in this effort.
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last updated February 28, 2000