The forthcoming Christmas-New Year holiday season will mark the end of my first six months as a dean. I’m looking forward to a couple of weeks of no meetings, and time to catch up on reading. I’ll also take a break from this “Dispatches From a New Dean” blog, restarting the week of January 6. Happy Holidays!
On Saturday I attended my first UW-Parkside Commencement ceremony, where I performed a new task: reading the names of graduates in my college. I was quite nervous about that, as I did not want to mispronounce anyone’s name, and had never read names before. Additionally, I was told that the phonetic spellings that some students write on the cards they hand you do more harm than good. Three or four times I hesitated before reading the names, and the students in those instances helped me by whispering the pronunciation, and I think I did OK with the rest. Whew!
I did make a mistake with the first three students, however: I just read each student’s name instead of her/his name, degree, and major. I corrected myself with the fourth student, and it was smooth sailing after that.
One additional change for this Commencement vs. the ceremonies I attended at the University of Minnesota: I borrowed one of the robes kept by the Office of the Chancellor instead of having regalia rented for me. Since I’ll now be wearing regalia much more often as an administrator than I did as a faculty member I think I’ll go ahead and buy my own. It’ll be nice to get that cool doctoral tam!
Earlier today I attended a preliminary oral examination for a Ph.D. candidate in higher education studies. Actually, I should say that I skyped in to the meeting, as it was for a student at the University of Minnesota. It was fun to discuss theoretical and methodological issues about his forthcoming dissertation on digital storytelling, but as we proceeded the most compelling questions and ideas that popped into my mind were about possible program development around digital storytelling here at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. So even in a traditional faculty-centric setting I most strongly resonated with administrative elements. Full-time administration is definitely the place for me at this stage of my career!
One of the important tasks of a dean is to recognize the accomplishments of the faculty. When a faculty member receives an award or notification of a publication I send her/him an email note, and we post a notification to the college’s Facebook page. I have also sent congratulatory greeting cards to award winners; I selected blank cards with different covers and wrote brief notes to each person. For the next iteration of hand-written cards I’m thinking about ordering custom letterpress stationery. This will be a bit expensive, but the process of creating the stationery will be fun!
“In this heady age of rapid technological change, we all struggle to maintain our bearings. The developments that unfold each day in communications and computing can be thrilling and disorienting. One understandable reaction is to wonder: Are these changes good or bad? Should we welcome or fear them? The answer is both.”
The text above is the introduction to the “technorealism” movement of the late 1990s. I signed the list of principles in 1997, and for the next 10 years or so introduced students to the concepts. Someone needs to launch a new version of technorealism for the 2010s, which would include tools to help us evaluate the use of Big Data for employment decisions.
A couple of days before Thanksgiving last week a faculty member asked me to provide some information for a grant application that is due at the end of December. I told him that I would get to it after Thanksgiving. The next day he sent another request about getting an answer to him immediately. If the info was something he needed before doing anything else I would have made time, but the requested data is essentially “I support this project because of A, B, and C” that can be inserted the day before the deadline. I sent the faculty member a polite note to remind him that I had a number of tasks due before Thanksgiving and I would provide the information the next week, as promised. Yesterday one of the directors of a university program told me about a favorite saying: “Your urgency is not my emergency.” I may have to start using that!
$760 has been contributed online to the Social Sciences Kaleidoscope, and we received a $200 check. So we are just $240 away from our $1200 goal! Students are submitting their proposals this week. Please help us reach the goal of providing three students with $400 each. For more information and/or to make an investment go to http://www.gofundme.com/UWP-SSK. Thank you!
The Social Sciences Kaleidoscope will be a web portal for social media channels students will use to engage external audiences about what they are learning & researching in the social sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. A call is out for students to participate in the spring 2014 semester. A committee will select three projects, and each student will receive $400 (to match what they get in the university’s Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program [URAP]). Students will use Vine, YouTube, podcasts, tumblr, digital stories, etc. to document learning and engage peers and members of larger communities. For more information, see our fundraising page. Please also consider making a donation; any amount helps!
In a November 12 post I outlined a plan to create a career readiness plan for my college. The plan could include granting internship credit for jobs students already have as a compliment to the traditional internship model of sending students out to new assignments. Does anyone know of any examples I should investigate? Thanks in advance for your suggestions!
Last week I attended the 2013 annual meeting of the Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences (CCAS). It was great to meet up with old friends, meet new people, and generate new possibilities to try back in our home institutions. Two panels in particular gave me hand cramps from writing a long list of ideas:
“Advancing the Career Opportunities of Liberal Arts Graduates: Best practices and strategies for working with multiple constituents to articulate liberal arts skills set and value.” This session will foreground the exigency of and outline possible methods of establishing partnerships with multiple constituents in order to enhance student, faculty, administrative, and community understanding of the skill sets acquired in liberal arts degrees, as well as methods by which liberal arts graduates can showcase those skills and their particular talents. The ultimate goal is to engage participants in a discussion of the exigency and possible methods to enable placement of liberal arts graduates into non-profit and for-profit corporations at better rates and with more ease.
“Career Preparedness and the Liberal Arts: On-campus partnerships and initiatives.” Significant pressures have been placed on institutions to demonstrate that their students can compete successfully for jobs upon graduation. Liberal arts colleges are especially prone to negative assessments of their students’ career prospects. This panel focuses on ways that deans can work with their faculty, staff, and other campus stakeholders to develop institutional support and structure to promote career preparedness. The panel will address successful partnership strategies with various campus units to improve the role of professional advising; develop a college-wide career curriculum; collaborate with offices of career services; and incorporate internship, coaching, and shadowing programs.
I outlined a plan to enable students to better understand career pathways while building strong social scientific and liberal arts skills through high impact learning practices in curricular, co-curricular, and extra-curricular activities. Today I asked my department chairs to discuss the draft, and we will further develop it in collaboration with an external advisory board of community leaders as well as with other units in the university. Possible practices to include: a mentoring program where recent alumni connect with students in person and online, and an internship program built around students’ existing jobs. I’m looking forward to the discussions!