Macalester/Faculty/Minutes/September 8 2004
from the Macalester Public Knowledge Base
Minutes of the Macalester College faculty meeting of September 8, 2004
Weyerhaeuser Board Room and Lounge Paul Solon called the meeting to order at 4:45 PM and greeting the faculty as the new presiding officer.
[edit] Approval of the May 5, 2004 Faculty Meeting
By a unanimous voice vote, the minutes of the May 5, 2004 meeting were approved as circulated.
[edit] Administrative Reports
[edit] Report from the President: Brian Rosenberg
Given the detailed nature of the announcements contained in President Rosenberg's comments, his remarks are included in their entirety below:
"First faculty meetings are typically times for noshing, introducing new colleagues, and forgetting for at least one session those thorny issues that divide and bedevil us for the remainder of the year. While I have no desire to undermine any of this therapeutic conviviality, I do want to take advantage of another characteristic of first faculty meetings?the fact that they are usually the most well-attended of the year?to speak more seriously and substantively than perhaps is common. Rarely do I get a chance to address so many of you at one time, and I want to use this particular opportunity to speak about issues that matter, to make some important announcements, and I hope to provide some framework for your efforts during the year that is about to commence.
Let me begin with an assurance and an observation. The assurance is this: though the responsibilities of a college president are many, and though the need to raise money takes me off campus with some regularity, I am paying attention?I think pretty close attention?to the work you do and the decisions you make as a collective body. For better or worse, I am at bottom something of an academic policy wonk, and so discussions of programmatic organization, general education requirements, cumcular offerings, and other, similar subjects hold for me a fascination that might at times be characterized as unhealthy. I also believe that these issues are in the aggregate of great importance to the college, since they articulate very publicly the priorities, goals, and shared values of the college faculty. If I remain silent during faculty debates, it is due not to indifference but to a very strong belief that it is unwise for a college president to weigh in on curricular issues absent a compelling institutional interest. The grooves in my tongue attest to the discipline with which I have so far adhered to this belief.
The observation is one that I suspect a good number of you in this room would make as well: that is, that the faculty of this college does its best work, its most passionate and creative work, when thinking about departmental or programmatic interests; that faculty members tend to define their primary allegiance as being to departments; and that there is somewhat less passion and creativity brought to bear upon work that addresses larger institutional interests and a broader institutional context. Put somewhat more directly, this faculty is, given the size and nature of the college, rather unusually fragmented or atomistic. The clearest benefit of this condition is a set of departmental programs that is very strong , of which we can be most proud, and that serves our graduates well; the clearest drawbacks are a reluctance to discuss in productive ways the central academic priorities of the college, the absence of any shared student experience within the curriculum, the attenuation of faculty allegiance to the college as opposed to the department, and, I believe, the consequent attenuation of student and alumni allegiance to the college.
I have come to understand that the historical underpinnings of this situation are powerful and complex and I have been told, by some, that it may be impossible to change. That may be. But I am a dogged individual, and I can tell you that I will be doing what I can to change it: by encouraging you to think about the college, by informing you about the interests and needs of the college, by reminding you that you are members of the faculty of Macalester College and not simply of a particular Macalester department, and, most important, by attempting to inspire in you a sense that the mission of this college is essential, exciting, and worth embracing.
I do this because I believe strongly in the necessity of faculty governance and because I want faculty to remain near the center of college decision-making. This can only happen if faculty are prepared to think seriously about interests that transcend the individual and departmental. Faculty at Macalester are invested by both our by-laws and our culture with the power to make decisions that affect the institutional well-being. At very few colleges? very few?do faculty play so pivotal a role in decisions affecting position allocations, program continuation and discontinuation, fiscal planning, and other similar matters. Yet to quote that noted contemporary philosopher, Spiderman's Uncle Ben, with great power comes great responsibility. With this power comes the responsibility to think seriously about what is best for the college and to be prepared to acknowledge that at times what is best for the college will not be what is best for every department within it?even to acknowledge that at times the college interests may supersede and conflict with the interests of all individual departments, as might be the case were a college-wide program to be created that took faculty time away from departmental offerings. If faculty are going to think chiefly on a departmental, programmatic, or individual level, they should rightly be invested with the power to make departmental, programmatic, and individual decisions, while decisions that impact profoundly the college as a whole should be left to others. My goal in encouraging you to think and act more collectively is to ensure that this does not happen.
As I make decisions about Macalester, two fundamental beliefs will be guiding my thinking. It is important that you know what these are. The first is that we must seek always to improve the academic quality of the college. This is not to say that we are at present wanting in quality; to the contrary, I have discovered at Macalester a group of faculty and students that is the best I have ever encountered. But until and unless someone tells me otherwise, I will take it as my charge not to preserve what we have but to improve on it and firmly to position this college as one of the very best in the world. For most colleges this aspiration is unrealistic; for us it is not.
This project is leant a certain urgency, I think, by the rather peculiar and precarious nature of Macalester's current position in the educational marketplace. Research done for us during the past year by Art and Science, a highly regarded academic consulting firm, suggests that we are, as they put it, firmly ensconced at "the bottom of the top" (which may be preferable to being at the "top of the bottom" but which is a more challenging place to be). That is, we are being compared and linked to the best colleges and universities in the country, we are attracting the same inquirers and applicants, but we are typically being seen as a second or third choice or worse?in other words, we are failing very often to compete successfully for the very best students. And those students cite very often their sense that our academic program is not as strong as what they find at the best of our peers?a perception that may or may not be true but that we must change if we are to strengthen our competitive position. And we must change it not chiefly by doing better public relations work?though that never hurts?but by improving the actual quality of what we offer. This goal should drive your collective discussions and decision-making.
My second belief is that we must do everything possible to embrace and take advantage of our distinctive mission and location. Our mission statement defines our special emphasis on internationalism, multiculturahsm, and service to society, and unless we change that mission I take it as an obligation to carry it out. This means not just chanting the mission statement as if it were a mantra but regularly seeking to create new and better embodiments of it in our programs. It means that not just some departments but all departments should at least think about how the particular character of Macalester is shaping and should shape their work with students. The same holds true for our location. We talk about ourselves as an urban college, but if that refers simply to the density of local coffee shops then we are missing an extraordinary opportunity. I want to be able to describe Macalester as the most exciting urban liberal arts college in America and to be able to list at least ten solid academic justifications for that claim.
All of this leads me to the announcement of some decisions I have made and some initiatives I have undertaken to advance the mission of the college.
First, with regard to a subject about which I suspect there is much faculty interest, I want to announce that I will be initiating almost immediately a full national search for a Provost to succeed Dan Hombach when his term expires at the end of the current academic year. I am fully cognizant of the plusses and minuses of doing internal and external searches for a chief academic officer and will not rehearse all of those here. I am aware as well, and once again, of the historical undertow affecting such decisions at Macalester. For now I will simply state that we owe it to ourselves to bring the same high standard to our search for a Provost that we bring to our searches for tenure-track faculty: that is, we should seek to hire the best person in the country to fill the position. A top-flight college should expect no less. If that person happens to reside on our campus we should consider ourselves fortunate, but we should not assume this to be the case. Though the ultimate responsibility for making this appointment rests with me, the search itself will be faculty-driven, and I will very quickly be working in concert with faculty leadership to appoint a search committee to organize the process, review candidates, and ultimately make a hiring recommendation.
Second, I will be doing all I can this year to focus and energize the curricular renewal process, whose importance to the future fortunes of the college I cannot over-emphasize and whose progress seems to me, for a variety of reasons, to have stalled. I have been consulting with EPAG over the summer and plan to meet periodically with the committee throughout the fall to be briefed on the progress of curricular review and to provide my own input into the discussions. The outcome of this process is to me more important than the precise timetable, but my hope is that a concrete proposal for curricular enhancement can be brought expeditiously before the faculty and that you can provide me with compelling evidence of the faculty's efforts continually to strengthen a Macalester education as we begin to prepare for our next capital campaign. I believe that such evidence sends a more powerful message to supporters of the college than do the plans for any building.
Third, I want to announce that Macalester will in the fall of 2005 formally launch a new Center for Global
Citizenship. This center will serve as the organizational heart of our efforts to educate global citizen-leaders and will reflect my own belief that our commitment to civic engagement needs to be rooted first and foremost in our academic programs. It will incorporate and connect our emphasis on serving and working in the local community and our emphasis in serving and understanding the much larger national and international communities to which Macalester has long been tied. It will be overseen by an advisory board of nationally prominent academic and civic leaders and will I hope eventually be supported by a dedicated endowment. For now, I have asked Professor Andrew Latham to serve as Assistant to the President for Civic Engagement and to oversee the effort to establish this important new enterprise. I have also received grants totaling $100,000 from the Andrew Mellon and Christian Johnson foundations to support the start-up effort.
Fourth, I have reconstituted and expanded the Multicultural Advisory Board and given that group a very specific charge. At the May meeting of the Admissions Committee of the Board of Trustees, the following motion was approved: "The Admissions Committee of the Board of Trustees endorses and encourages the development of a plan that defines success in multicultural recruiting at Macalester (including the role of the academic experience and campus life) and proposes strategies and resources necessary for achieving that success." In other words, the trustees have asked us to describe what success in the area ofmulticulturalism would look like and to identify concrete strategies and mechanisms for achieving that success. I have asked the Multicultural Advisory Board, co- chaired by Jan Serie and Joi Lewis, to develop such a plan, and I hope to have a draft to present to the Board by the conclusion of this academic year. It is time for us to know what we mean at Macalester when we speak about a commitment to this important component of our mission.
Fifth, I want to let you know that we have continued to make progress over the summer on both of the major building projects that are so important to the near-term future of the college. We have in hand a conceptual design for a new recreation, wellness, and athletic center and have begun the early stages of fundraising for the facility, which promises to enhance the quality of life for many members of the campus community. Last month we secured an initial, anonymous commitment to the project that may be in excess of $2 million. And we will have in hand by the end of this month a report from the firm ofDober Lidsky on our needs in the area of fine arts and on the likely size and cost of new or renovated facilities. This latter project in particular, given the number of disciplines involved, the number of buildings involved, and the complexity of the challenges, promises to be the most ambitious in the history of the college and will require an extraordinary commitment of time, energy, and resources. Andy Overman has at my request been overseeing the planning effort, and I have asked him to continue to assist me in that capacity over the coming year, and perhaps beyond.
Sixth, I would like to resurrect and act upon one of the recommendations of one of the many task forces established in 2001-2002. The Task Force on Institutional Identity, chaired by Stuart McDougal, recommended strongly that each department at Macalester work to assure that our location improve and enhance the academic experience of our students. Following the task force's suggestion, I will soon be distributing a memo in which I ask each department in the college to address the following questions: How, if at all, is your departmental program affected by Macalester's urban location at present? How, if at all, would you like to see your program shaped by our location over the next ten years, given sufficient institutional support? While the range of appropriate answers to these questions is very broad, I think it beneficial at least for every department to engage in a process of self- scrutiny that might yield some valuable ideas and inform the work of shaping a new curriculum. It is also clear from the work of Art and Science that if we do not turn our urban location into a clear programmatic advantage, our upper Midwestern location will remain our chief recruiting liability.
Finally, it should come as no surprise after last year's faculty meeting discussions and after the work done by the Resource Planning Committee that we need to take steps to address the increasing demands placed upon our budget by financial aid?or, put more broadly, to find an appropriate and sustainable balance at Macalester between the goal of access and the goal of academic excellence. Financial aid has been growing faster than any other expenditure in the budget and is projected within two years to equal or surpass the total endowment distribution for the year. While it is not the responsibility of the faculty to confront this challenge, I will be asking the faculty to help us do so; and while changes in policy do not in this area require a faculty vote, I will nonetheless be seeking faculty endorsement for any substantive changes we might propose. I do this because I believe that the faculty has as much at stake in these discussions as any other college constituency: we spent much of last year wrestling with the unpleasant implications of a resource base not projected to expand?of what was referred to as a zero-sum game or a pie that would not grow?and the faculty cannot afford to sit on the sidelines as we consider options for changing the nature of that game or enlarging the pie. At stake is the future of the academic programs of the college. Decisions in this area are not easy, but the avoidance of decision-making is not a desirable option, and a clearly expressed faculty viewpoint on the subject of balancing quality and access would carry enormous weight.
I apologize for consuming so much of your time this afternoon and for passing along in rapid fashion more information than can perhaps be quickly processed. It did seem important, however, to let you know what I have been and will be up to and that, as I pass from a first-year to a sophomore at Macalester, I have begun to build and act upon what I have learned. I continue to be excited by the prospect of taking a fine and admirable college and making it finer and more admirable still, yet also to be humbled by the realization that the challenges that confront us are considerable, and that your help, support, and good ideas will be essential if those challenges are to be met and overcome. Thanks for your attention. Have a great year.
