English Academic Program Review

English Academic Program Review

Chair’s Response

18 Feb 2014

I am deeply indebted to our department’s APR committee – Profs. Beth Burmester, Melissa McLeod, Paul Schmidt, John Holman, LeeAnne Richardson, and chair Chris Kocela – for presenting a detailed and thoughtful report. Throughout the process, this committee interacted constantly and intricately with all of our department’s faculty and staff: they interviewed many people, and targeted many otherscollecting data and background about our department’snumerous projects and curricular activities.

At three faculty meetings that were solely devoted to discussing the APR, Prof. Kocela led discussions that solicited input from all our faculty about what sorts of issues we wanted to prioritize in this report, what sorts of challenges and problems we are confronting, and how we might talk about solving problems and moving forward in ways that make sense for our department and that track the University’s strategic plan. At each of these meetings, Prof. Kocela distributed notes and drafts beforehand, and collected comments and feedback that his committee integrated into the subsequent draft of the report. Finally, in November 2013, we held a final meeting to review and approve the report: approval was unanimous.

I recount these details to make the point that throughout this APR process, I (and everyone else in the department) knew what we were focusing on and how we were framing our goals and challenges. As in a Quaker meeting, everyone spoke and discussions ended only when wehad reached consensus. There is nothing in this report that came as a surprise to me, and nothing I disagree with. In brief, then, my response is simply: I affirm this report, and feel strongly that it represents an accurate and widely shared sense of how our faculty and staff regard our department, and how we want to focus our energies for the future.

We have considered the APR process to be, first of all, an accounting of where we are now, and more importantly, an opportunity to articulate and prioritize our goals for the future. We have, indeed, already begun to discuss ways to expand our Signature Experiences for majors; we are on the verge of undertaking an extensive review of our undergraduate curriculum in order to make it more current and more attractive to students; and, most importantly, we have renewed our commitment to securing more funding, and more research time, for our graduate students. We have unanimously agreed on the need fora specialist in Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, a position which will be an especially vital piece of our curricular revisions. We have discussed, and will continue to advance, initiatives in Public Scholarship and Digital Humanities. In sum, our APR report represents a concise and useful account of issues that we would be dealing with even if we hadn’t engaged in this review. The process of compiling this report, and the forthcoming input we expect from our external reviewers and then from the University, will give us all the more momentum and focus as we continue these discussions.

The English Department as it is described in this report is one that I am profoundly honored to chair: we are comprised of faculty conducting nationally-acclaimed scholarship and creative work on an incredible scale, and students who appreciate the first-class pedagogy they experience and who succeed in impressive ways once they leave our program. We are grateful to have a staff who support our mission admirably, and upper-level administrators in the College and University who value our work keenly. Like many other programs in the Humanities, we face significant challenges that are almost completely a consequence of economic constraints: our faculty and staff are drastically underpaid, our graduate students are drastically underfunded, and opportunities for external support, which were never enormous in the first place, are drying up. Despite all this, we have persevered and will continue to do so with determination. Along with GSU, the English Department is moving forward: celebrating our many past achievements and leveraging these to raise our department’s profile all the more resplendently.

Sincerely,

Randy Malamud

Regents’ Professor and Chair