College of Liberal Arts and Sciences P.O. Box 117305
Department of Anthropology 1112 Turlington Hall
Gainesville, FL 32611-7305
352-392-2253
352-392-6929 fax
April 4, 2011
Search Committee, Dean of College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
PSU University
Portland, Oregon
Dear Colleagues:
I was very pleased to have been asked to apply for the position of Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at PSU University. I am enthusiastic about this possibility and enclose a recent copy of my CV with this letter for your consideration. Here I briefly highlight my experiences and interests as they illustrate my interest in becoming Dean of the College. I am especially drawn to the clear articulation of the mission of the University within Portland, the surrounding region, and the global footprint of the University in the future. In this letter I discuss some of my experiences to highlight how my leadership can enhance that plan while clearly defining the mission and impact of the College.
Why PSU? Portland State University and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has a great reputation as a place where the undergraduate experience of students is taken seriously, where research and engagement with the community is evident, and where the College has built a foundation that will serve it well in the future. While the identity of the College as a large and comprehensive unit in the University will continue, I look forward to working with faculty and others to bring out a clear vision of the College. To do this I draw on my own values and changes that are occurring in higher education. Put briefly, I believe that the identity of the College should be based on the articulation of diversity, creativity in research and scholarship, and responsibilities to students, communities, and society. The chance to work with the faculty, students and staff at PSU in implementing more international connections, increase the research footprint of the faculty, and help develop gift giving and other resources that serve the students and faculty is a tremendous opportunity. The undergraduate and graduate experiences in the College, with their emphasis on service learning, community engagement, and global strategies are especially interesting areas for me, as they reflect my own experiences and goals for making the College effective and successful. Finally, on a personal note, our children have now left home and are pursuing their careers, and so this is an opportune time for a move to Portland and PSU.
How have I implemented visions into action? I am the Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Florida and hold an endowed Professorship in College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. I was the senior Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs in the College (2004-2009), and was Department Chair for six years prior to that. I have also served as the Fulbright and Prestigious Scholarship Advisor for the University through the Honors program, and I created and administer the University of Florida Exchange with the Autonomous University of the Yucatan. That program encompasses Arts and Sciences, Medicine, Dentistry, Environment, Veterinary Medicine and several other programs. Beyond the University, I am the President of the international Society for Applied Anthropology and serve on the Development board of the University of the Valley of Guatemala.
Anthropology at Florida is a large department with over 650 undergraduate majors and 130 graduate students. Professors in the department are exceptional in their research, collegiality, and diversity, so much so that we are regularly described as the model department in the University. Under my leadership grants and contracts in the department have more than doubled. This was accomplished by raising the profile of our forensics laboratory (now considered one of the top human identification laboratories in the country), recruiting faculty with experience and initiative to secure outside funding, and focusing on a variety of funding sources for research. Our department now has two members of the National Academy of Sciences, within a total university number of nine. The election of these two professors to the Academy is based on their merits, but I have dedicated my efforts to provide them with the resources and opportunities to excel in their respective fields. My own research in Latin America has been funded by NSF, the Department of Labor, private donors, and Latin American government ministries. As Associate Dean and as Department Chair, I have encouraged researchers to look beyond traditional agencies for funding to emerging resources such as international and private foundations.
A value I hold about higher education is that both undergraduate and graduate students need hands on, real life experiences in order to learn and to succeed. I put this into practice by creating a dozen different laboratories in the anthropology department where undergraduate and graduate students could become inspired with real research experiences. These laboratories range from the humanistic side of our discipline (visual anthropology, ethnohistory, and ethnography) as well as the scientific side (molecular biology, forensic science, and GIS). I have established and encouraged community projects through the department. “View Our Voices,” was a documentary photo and video project for at-risk teenagers, funded by the City of Gainesville. I created an interdisciplinary research institute, the “Land Use and Environment Change Institute,” that brought together the Departments of Geology, Geography, and Anthropology to develop skills and research programs in land cover change, GIS modeling, and climate change. I was one of the developers of the University wide undergraduate research program, “University Scholars” that provides stipends for students with the initiative to seek out a mentor and publish on their research before they graduate. When the program was being developed, I was able to include a $500 extra stipend for the students to either study abroad or to give papers at professional meetings with their faculty mentors.
Engagement with the Civic world of Portland. Partnerships with community based organizations in Portland are central to the transformation of the University, as President Wiewell has noted in his blueprint for change for the University. In addition to service learning, e-based learning and outreach, an important part of engagement is the development of cooperative and collaborative programs with Portland and beyond. The College can become a model for that effective engagement in ways that reflect the skills and interests of the College. These may be in global arenas: combining “sister city” programs with academic programs in the College. They may be in educational engagements, such as the “View our Voices” program I developed here in Gainesville. They may also be focused on developing the best internship program of any urban university in the country to give students skills and opportunities to flourish. Finally, the College can partake in the renewal of 7.1 million square feet of downtown Portland by creating research “hot spots” where innovations, inventions, and the articulation of scholarship and research with the city grow and become successful.
How are administrative responsibilities related to values? The responsibilities I held as senior Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences here at UF were wide ranging but still allowed for initiatives to improve the College. The College has 600 faculty, 12,000 undergraduate majors, and 2,000 graduate students. There are 42 degree programs within 20 departments and an 20 other centers and programs. As senior Associate Dean, I oversaw faculty recruitment, retention, tenure and promotion processes, faculty travel, issues of academic and research misconduct, and solving faculty/department conflicts. In addition, I was responsible for graduate student curriculum, stipends, and UF’s prestigious “Graduate School Award” program for incoming graduate students. I worked with the UF Foundation to develop grants for graduate support, including travel grants, dissertation writing grants, and other initiatives. I was the designated grievance officer for the College, as well as in charge of the Outstanding Teacher of the Year and other honors within the College. I also managed internal grant competitions for faculty in the college in the Sciences. During my tenure as senior Associate Dean our office saw downturns in state funding, layoffs, and the consolidation of departments. I solved serious problems in several departments, and served as interim leader in two of them as when budgets and morale were at their lowest. My yearly evaluations by chairs and faculty were always very high. During the most severe budget cuts I was referred to as the “hero of the College” in the comments section of the evaluations. On a more serious note, I was given the “Presidential Medal of Honor” for my service when I stepped down as Associate Dean in August of 2009.
How is diversity related to fundraising? I am committed to diversity, and so have made it a priority recruit minority faculty and students, to find minority funding opportunities, and when they are not there, to develop them. I am a founder of UF’s “Zora Neale Hurston” a graduate student scholarship that honors the African American writer and anthropologist. Zora Neale Hurston’s brother sent the Department a small royalty check of less than $30 and asked that it be given to a worthy student. Other leaders of the department and I turned that gesture in to a $300,000 endowment for the graduate scholarship. I also developed the Elizabeth Eddy Endowment in Applied Anthropology by maintaining friendship with a retired faculty who made a bequest of $1M before she died; that endowment has now grown to $1.5M. I enjoy fundraising. I believe to be successful in fundraising that one has to be give as well. To this end, my wife and I are working to endow a graduate research award, the Miguel Angel Amaya award. The award focuses on medicine and human rights and honors my brother-in-law, a medical school student who died before finishing his degree in El Salvador.
I also work on development in my role as President of the Society for Applied Anthropology. Three weeks ago, one of my past students who is now a successful lawyer pledged $9,000 to fund student travel to our meetings for papers focusing on human rights. Through the offices of the Executive Director, the Society just received a bequest of approximately $200,000.
Developing a culture of giving is important to PSU Liberal Arts and Sciences. Smaller endowments for professors (including assistant and associate professors) can do much to jump start research and other innovations, as they simultaneously help morale and salary compression. But fundraising can only be done with knowledge and needs of departments and their programs clearly in the forefront of development. Before any more specific strategies can be named, I would first need to know department and faculty priorities. My approach to working with donors is based on my own belief that Universities make tremendous differences in the quality of people’s lives, and that is an easy story to tell. Given this belief in the good that Universities do, it is easy to communicate this to prospective donors and to ask them for their support, either now or in the future.
Diversity and student success: Increasing diversity in departments can be successful and that very diversity can lead to significant fund raising. To increase diversity, minority faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, and staff have to increase simultaneously. It does little to hire diverse faculty if the student body or staff is not diverse. I implemented this strategy as Associate Dean by linking increased prestigious graduate fellowships to faculty and student diversity in Departments. My own department is one of the University’s success stories in diversity enhancement. Students say they are attracted to the major in anthropology because classes are like “being in the United Nations,” as one student put it.
This fall I began a conversation with President Obama’s sister, Dr. Maya Soetero-ng about multicultural education and what I saw as the key to student success and retention, the inspiration that students need throughout their lives. Dr. Soetero-ng did a short video about this for the meetings of the Society for Applied Anthropology, and I have asked her permission to post parts of it on Youtube. I mention this as an example of educational advocacy, advocacy based on her own work in the field of k-12 education and how it connects with university level recruitment, retention, and success.
As a result of my commitment to minority graduate student education, the Florida Education Fund has honored me as the state-wide “Outstanding Minority Mentor” for my graduate student mentoring, considered the most successful throughout the entire Florida University system in October of this past academic year. I have also been named one of five University of Florida professors from all colleges as the winner of the “Doctoral Dissertation Mentoring Award” at the University this year and will be honored for that award at the Spring graduation ceremonies.
How can a university be global and not just international? PSU’s international impact would be especially enjoyable to develop, especially as “achieving global excellence” is a key part of President Wiewell’s blueprint’s for the future. My own career has included spending a year in Denmark as a senior Fulbright scholar, a year in Spain as an Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana scholar, and many years teaching and working in Latin America, especially Mexico and Central America. The exchange program I began with the Autonomous University of the Yucatan has over 1,000 alumni, and was recently featured in the Alumni newsletter here at Florida: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/alumni/alumninotes/2010spring/exchange.html