Nevertheless and Therefore:
A Year of Accountability and Accomplishment
(A speech given by Dean Fred Antczak to the faculty and staff of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences on April 17, 2007)
It is simply impossible to begin this speech with anything other than an expression of compassion for the shooting victims at Virginia Tech yesterday—our hearts go out to them and their friends and families. For such a violent fate to befall them on a college campus, perhaps the best and most peaceable place in all of our public sphere, is shocking—a defiling of a space we hold and treat with special reverence. I ask for a moment of silence in memory of the victims of the Virginia Tech students slain and the many members of that community who were injured by yesterday’s sad and frightening events.
There is no doubt that what happened yesterday will change American universities, and we need to be thinking and talking with each other about how it will touch Grand Valley. But I will not make the obvious move, to say that this horrific event somehow “puts our everyday struggles in perspective.” Madness does not put anything in a reasonable perspective. It was just madness, the irremediable waste of what is most irreplaceably precious. I want to talk with you today about the challenges we faced this year, and to do so reasonably—the way communities of learners do, the way that despite differences we surely did this year—requires us to set aside what is not reasonable. But today—a day of retrospection for us, and in no small measure a day of celebration—those students will not be far from our minds and hearts. Let us, as learners, pledge to one another here to try to learn more about each other, and in so doing build a community in which chaos and force give way to continuing conversation among colleagues.
Wordless at the sight of unspeakable loss, let us try turn our thoughts for the moment from the tragic present in Blacksburg to our year’s past. We will remember 2006-2007 as a year of externally oriented tasks—strategic planning, assessment, workload—all to give a fair account of ourselves to constituencies ranging from accreditors to legislators to trustees. Moreover, these are tools to give a fair account of ourselves to ourselves, in the belief that taking the trouble of knowing in finer detail what we all are doing together is important, first and most importantly, for building our own future together.
I remember when, at the very first Unit Heads meeting of this academic year, I told the chairs of departments and programs what was on the docket for the year and what all we had to accomplish. If facial expressions were any indication, they had assessed remarkably accurately the challenge and seriousness of all the undertakings in the year immediately ahead. Like it or not, we’d found ourselves in a new era of accountability. Some of the tasks we had to address were in areas outside our expertise and many quite outside what we most love to do. And all of us were about to meet the challenge of making the most of it.
We need to keep our retrospective on our year of accountability in focus. When we think of 2006-2007, it is important to remember that all this was work that HAD to be done. Our tasks were not cooked up by suddenly hyperactive and unusually imaginative administrators. They were either required in order to be accountable to increasingly demanding external constituencies, or were unavoidable necessities:
· The last review of GVSU for NCA accreditation in 1997-8 specifically required us to do more planning before our turn came ‘round again in 2007. So, we planned.
· Reflecting an external climate which is vastly more interested (and not always very thoughtfully) in outcomes, NCA has chosen to place much heavier emphasis on assessment. So we put ourselves to work to assess something meaningful.
· The software company that serviced the Sys system was no more. So, like many other universities, we converted.
Now, only once every one or two decades do we put into place a student records system such as Banner; we undergo an accreditation review only once in ten years (sooner if all does not go well). Even more rarely do they coincide; lucky us, huh? The departmental discussions on workload and areas of significant focus, the Bylaws our Faculty Council wrote (and the other colleges immediately took as their models), the work of the Advising Taskforce—these will provide the basis for better practices while only requiring periodic tweaking. And as for filling out the Faculty Activity Reports and holding our elections, we will find the necessary annual activities easier as we get used to them.
Of course, as teachers sometimes tell students, there are some tasks that can’t be simplified past a certain point without losing the purpose for which they are done. I know the faculty very much wanted to do a good job in their work, and no one can deny that CLAS faculty dug in and took ownership of their tasks this year. So for the ways we were not as clear we might have been, and for the times we were not able to make the tasks dovetail optimally, and for any activity if it genuinely will prove unproductive in the long run, I take responsibility. We tried our best, but you deserved better. I pledge that we will continue to sanity-check our processes and requests, and continue to use the College website as a mode for conveying information and keeping things transparent. Best practices should apply not only to teaching and scholarship, but to administration—should, and will. We’re always looking at suggestions about how to simplify, pare back, merge tasks, eliminate paperwork. For instance, Steve Schlicker suggested the other day that given the annual FARs in the new “FARP” form they have taken, it’s not necessary for faculty to update and submit their CVs annually—so we’ll relax that requirement to a new CV every three years, and you all have Steve to thank. In fact I’d like to give special credit to the unit heads for working all year to find ways to ease the burden; unit heads, you accomplished a great deal in a challenging year. Please stand for a round of applause for your work.
I’d also like to recognize Dean Stark and Dean Cimitile for working persistently and ingeniously to smooth the way. In fact, at this time I’d like to call Gary and Maria up to the rostrum.
On behalf of grateful, relieved, and thanks to you, not completely exhausted faculty (not to mention staff and students), I present you with these T-shirts as a sign of our gratitude and an ensemble for future planning meetings—if any.
Let me note that Maria will be taking her sabbatical in fall semester, as Jann is doing right now (and this is a promise I’ll make to you for as long as I am your dean, the College Office will be peopled by active teacher-scholars). Succeeding Maria on an interim basis through December will be the former chair of the College Curriculum Committee, Professor Sherril Soman of Chemistry. I hope you work with her to make her feel comfortable in that role. But please join me now in thanking Maria for all the good work, full of patience and respect, that she has done in helping us with strategic planning this year.
Now that we have a faculty driven strategic plan, we must resolve to put it into action. I’m pleased to announce a committee including faculty, staff and students that is specifically charged to keep the momentum going. The Committee for the Future of CLAS will meet once yet this spring, a couple of times just at the beginning of next fall, and monthly thereafter. Its charge is to prioritize the strategic plan action steps, send out information to parties responsible for those steps, receive and process feedback from those parties, follow and encourage progress across the College, and revise the plan where necessary. Our colleagues on the “Future” Committee are Steeve Buckridge, Patricia Clark, Cindy Hull, Karen Libman, Mark Luttenton, AP Diane Laughlin, COT Ginny Klingenberg and student Alex van Ameyde. Let’s have a hand to thank our colleagues for serving.
This year’s tasks had to be done and lessons have been learned; most importantly, together we met the challenges of accountability. All strategic plans are in, and responded to by the College. All the way across our departments, we have set the pace for the University on assessment. Benchmarking is largely done. Workload documents are coming in, with the “scope of work” the most elusive concept, but those documents will be in on time. We have met the challenges of accountability, and succeeded. That, nevertheless, was just part of our journey this year. Beyond accountability, what is far more remarkable in how we responded is what else, therefore, we have been able to accomplish together.
We have already celebrated service with our award winners, but it needs to be said that Nancy, Neal and Ed stand for so many CLAS faculty who have so generously served their department, college, university, community and field this year. The excellent teaching we are known for was exemplified by our university teaching award winners: Michael deWilde of Philosophy, Kevin DenDulk of Political Science and David Coffey of the Mathematics won Pew Teaching Awards. Once again this year CLAS colleagues were recognized with the Pew Teaching-with-Technology Award, Janel Pettes Guikema and David Eick of Modern Languages and Literatures. Grand Valley State University’s nominee for the state Professor of the Year Award is Mark Luttenton, from the Biology Department and the Annis Water Resources Institute. At Grand Valley, teaching remains Job One, and we had a remarkable year at our essential task. And that’s not all.
Look around you, and you can take pride in the scholarly accomplishments of our CLAS colleagues, only some of which are represented here. My special thanks to all of you whose work we celebrate today in the Sabbatical Showcase, let’s give them all a hand! And please join me in giving thanks to Jann Joseph for running this Showcase and to Keesha Walker who was instrumental in pulling it off—and to everyone who assisted them.
In addition to the Sabbatical research showcased here today, we also come together to celebrate the many other CLAS achievements of the year. Though I’m glad many have already come up in the committee reports and that in total they are too numerous to recount fully here, I do hope to give you a sense of the scope. To start, our faculty has received many awards and grants, and have been elected to prestigious posts.
· Shaily Menon[1] had a great year, including election to The International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS) of the National Academy of Sciences and receiving the Barbara Jordan Award.
· Ander Monson’s book Neck Deep and Other Predicaments: Essays was published and won the 2006 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize.[2]
· A $500,000 National Science Foundation grant was made to Michael Chu of AWRI.[3]
· John Harper Philbin[4] of the School of Communications directed a film, "The Gospel According to Roy," that won a film festival award.
· The Michigan Sociological Review is edited here by Joe Verschaeve[5]-- and Michael Ott and Mary de Young are on the editorial board.
· A continuation of Jim Persoon’s[6] Fulbright lectureship to Ghana is making possible some branching out from his well established expertise in British and American Literature. Jim is now researching the slave castle at Cape Coast; he delivered a paper about it at a conference in the UK in March on TransAtlantic Slavery commemorating the 200-year anniversary of the British abolition of the slave trade.
· These, and so many other accomplishments of our faculty helped inspire me this year as I worked to contribute to our culture of scholarship; it’s evidence that a culture of scholarship is rich when even the dean was caught up in it, publishing one paper in the journal Pedagogy, and presenting another paper at a national conference; I can also report that I’ll be serving for ten days in May as NEH Professor at Northeastern University, teaching in a seminar for college teachers on the American Lyceum. And I’ll be keeping out of trouble this summer preparing to teach a section of the Comm 203 Argumentation course in the fall semester.
And there’s one other aspect of CLAS I’d like to celebrate, albeit somewhat prospectively. I want to acknowledge the incredible new faculty that departments have brought to campus in the last couple of years—faculty who are already begun doing incredible things, that are a glimpse of how a community renews itself. I am convinced that as our new colleagues get more comfortable, they will have a distinct voice within the departments that chose them. And I want to offer a special invitation to all of our newer faculty to participate, in your own time and your own way, broadly and actively in the intellectual and professional life of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
The list of CLAS accomplishments would not be complete without acknowledging our students’ achievements, only some of which were gloriously on display not quite a week ago at Student Scholarship Day.
· Matthew Stamp is now the 4th Niemeyer Award winner from the Mathematics Dept[7] in 5 years. I like to laugh at James Thurber’s line about Ohio State University, that it aspired to be a University the football team could be proud of. But let’s keep score here: 4 out of 5 years, that puts the Math Department neck and neck with the football team.
· Jeff Lewandowski has been named a finalist in the 2007 International Trumpet Guild Competition and the very exciting news you may not have heard is that our New Music Ensemble[8] has been invited to play in New York at the prestigious Bang on A Can marathon.
· And our students are participating in research that ranges from creating documentaries about local WWII regiments[9] to providing the campus with a better understanding of our storm water run off[10]