Chris Hoeckley
September 2007
Cultivating Candidates for Mission
A Project of the Gaede Institute for the Liberal Arts at Westmont
Draft Proposal
The Problem
Christian liberal arts colleges are wrestling with “hiring for mission”—how do we recruit highly qualified candidates who understand and embrace our liberal arts mission? At the same time, many Christian liberal arts colleges continue to have difficulty recruiting faculty of color, and, in many fields, women remain seriously underrepresented on our faculties. These problems compound one another. The pool of prospective faculty of color, and in some fields of women candidates, is already relatively small. If those prospective candidates are expected to understand and support the unique mission of a Christian liberal arts college, that pool shrinks significantly.
The Diagnosis
Several factors contribute to this challenge. Many Christian Ph.D. students remain largely unaware of the Christian liberal arts vision. Those who are graduates of Christian liberal arts colleges will have some familiarity with it. But those with no personal experience are likely to have only the vaguest awareness of that vision. Moreover, what impressions they have may not be entirely positive. The prevailing assumption in many Ph.D. programs, that the academic vocation is essentially about research, leaves positions at liberal arts colleges—typically seen as teaching institutions—appearing second-rate to top candidates. This is all the more true for Christian liberal arts colleges given the too-frequent misperception that their religious identity might constrain serious inquiry. Add to that that faculty of color in all fields, andwomen in some, are highly sought after, and it’s no wonder that our faculty searches too rarely result in hiring a highly qualified person of color or woman who understands and embraces the Christian liberal arts vision.
The Solution
But maybe the very idea of a search is the problem. What if, rather than seeking candidates for mission, we cultivated candidates for mission? Research universities are doing that every day in their graduate departments.Graduate students are being socialized (largely unawares) to view a genuine academic vocation as research, and to think of teaching, or at least undergraduate teaching, as a necessary evil.A position at a liberal arts college (except the most elite schools) is often seen as second best to the positions at research institutions. Christian higher education often doesn't even get on the radar screen. By the time they're ready to apply for their first position, even graduates of Christian liberal arts colleges may have been socialized away from everything we are.If they're bright, and a person of color or a woman, they'll be so heavily recruited by the institutions they've been trained to see as the "real" ones, that Christian liberal arts colleges will hardly stand a chance.
So let's get in on the socialization.Let's cultivate candidates of color and women candidates who think that the Christian liberal arts vision is a high academic calling, who would prefer a position at a Christian liberal arts college to one at a secular research university, or at least see it as a serious alternative, and who seek us out rather than us having to get lucky enough to find them.
Program Design
The basic approach of the program is to host graduate students of color and women graduate students on our campus working with our faculty over a sufficient amount of time for those students to taste the Christian liberal arts vocation and for relationships to be established that can be developed in the years to follow. The strategy for doing so is to host academic programs based on successful models at Carleton College, Bryn Mawr College, and many others. The Gaede Institute for the Liberal Arts at Westmont will host two-week, discipline-based intensive summer workshops, each for ten to fifteen academically advanced undergraduate Christian students of colorand, in relevant disciplines, women students. The bulk of the teaching will be done by four graduate students in the relevant discipline—again, Christian students of color and, in relevant disciplines, women pursuing academic careers. The entire workshop will be under the leadership of two Westmont faculty members, one of whom will serve as the director of the program. Ideally two or more workshops would be held simultaneously with events for all participants that highlight interdisciplinary connections between their fields.
The ostensive purpose each workshop is to prepare the undergraduate students for graduate work. Many workshop sessions will be devoted to academic work of a caliber typical of graduate training. The academic work will thus provide a bridge to the kind of work they can expect in graduate school, strengthening their applications, or, if they have already been admitted to a program, equipping them to succeed. Moreover, the graduate students will serve as models for the undergraduates, helping them envision the lives they will be leading and the challenges they will face.
But the central focus of the workshops is on the graduate students. They acquire valuable teaching experience, but much more than that. Alongside the workshop sessions on advanced work in the discipline are sessions led by the faculty leaders on the integration of that discipline with one’s Christian faith, on the Christian liberal arts educational vision and the place of the discipline in that vision, and on the vocation of the Christian liberal arts scholar/teacher. The graduate students encounter people embodying that vocational vision, enabling them to imagine themselves pursuing an alternative to the life of research at a large university often offered as the norm in their graduate programs.
Program planning will be done jointly by the director of the Gaede Institute and the faculty director. The faculty director will receive a one course reduction in the spring semester immediately preceding the workshop.
Follow Up
Each year the Gaede Institute hosts a Conversation on the Liberal Arts, where faculty and academic administrators from colleges and universities across the country gather to dialogue about the pressing issues facing liberal arts education. In order to insure that the relationships begun during the summer workshop don’t end at the close of the workshop, workshop participants will be encouraged to take part in these annual Conversations, with their registration fees waived and their expenses covered by a travel stipend. The content of the conference program will deepen participants’ understanding of liberal arts education and strengthen their identification with that educational philosophy. More importantly, the conference will offer an opportunity to build relationships. Workshop faculty leaders will have the chance to stay connected with graduate student participants as they near completion of their degrees, and those graduate students will meet faculty and deans from a wide range of college and universities, many from Christian liberal arts colleges, who might have positions coming available.
Outcomes
Through their encounters with faculty from a Christian liberal arts institution, through sessions designed to shape their vision of the academic vocation, and through their participation in Christian liberal arts education, the graduate students will discover an educational vision that may have been unfamiliar tothem. They will become prospective faculty members who understand the mission of Christian liberal arts education, and who seek out positions at Christian liberal arts institutions when their job search begins. In case they don’t, our faculty become familiar with them and can seek them out when positions in our departments become available. We will have cultivated candidates who understand our mission, rather than simply hoping to find them.
We don’t just accomplish this with the graduate students. The undergraduates are themselves at the outset of an academic career, and the program allows us to shape their visions of their careers at a formative stage. They enter graduate school aware of the vocational alternatives available to them and of the trade-offs involved in their career choices. They too will have relationships with faculty that can be developed over the course of their graduate education, potentially bearing fruit in a position at a Christian liberal arts college. By making this a two-tier program we are looking not just two to four years out, but six and seven years out, filling the pipeline of highly qualified candidates of color and women candidates who don’t just happen to fit the Christian liberal arts mission, but who seek it out.