Presentation:

In looking at integrative models for undergraduate education in the Humanities and humanistic Social Sciences, session leader Turner has a unique perspective, having served as Dean of Humanities, Arts & Cultural Studies and as Vice Provost of Undergraduate Studies, at the University of California, Davis (UCD), while also being a faculty member in the program in African-American Studies. She brought her experiences in all three positions to bear in her analysis of UCD’s Middle East and South Asia ME/SA) Initiative, an interdisciplinary initiative that was inspired by student and faculty interest in creating language and cultural instruction projects. Since this initiative was conceived while she was Vice Provost and implemented when she was Dean, she has a full appreciation of the complexity inherent in meeting students and faculty needs.

Dr. Turner began by noting that we all enter discussions on integrative programs with baggage that is unique to our institutions. At UCD, for example, the Division of Social Sciences has eleven departments and programs, including the departments of Linguistics, History and Philosophy. In comparison, the Division of Humanities has 29 departments and programs, including all the language departments, the department of Ethnic and Women Studies, and the Arts departments. This structure results in accidents of intellectual mappings that became one of the issues that influenced the ME/SA initiative.

When Dr. Turner was appointed Vice-Provost in 1999, there was growing student interest in uncommonly taught languages such as Farsi, Korean, Tagolog, Arabic, and Vietnamese. A majority of the students seeking courses in these languages were “legacy” students, eager to learn the spoken language of their ancestors, and not looking for matriculation in a degree-granting program. Dr. Turner was charged by the Chancellor to respond to their interest. Doing so required thinking outside of the box.

There were many challenges Dr. Turner had to address. She looked to existing partnerships, including one that UCD had established with the local community college district. Because the University of California is legally prohibited from using state funding for remedial education, UCD had outsourced Pre-Calculus, Pre-Chemistry, and Subject A Writing courses to the community college. Over the last decade UCD and the community college district have worked out the kinks and have been able to use this approach to teach the three courses on their own campus. One of the major issues had involved timing because UCD is on the quarter system and the nearby community college uses semesters. Another issue related to standards. In order for UCD to be able to offer this type of remedial course, the course has to be offered at a campus in the UC System; in addition, the community college class is required to use the same standards as the UC institution to make the credits count toward graduation. With much assistance from the Associate Dean of Letters and Science, Dr. Turner pursued adding these languages to the community college partnership portfolio. Since UCLA offers Arabic language classes, UCD was able to use the UCLA course standards and move forward with planning the course.

The next question the campus faced was: “If you build it, will they come?” Students had asked for the courses and programs to be established, but past experience with similar requests showed that their wanting a course to be offered does not necessarily translate into their taking the course. Once the new course is implemented, students need to be able to fit the class into their lives. They must find space for it in their weekly course schedule, and, in the case of a language courses in particular, they have to make sure that they have time for the highly intensive homework requirements such courses impose. Since student programs at UCD are major driven, many students do not have space to take additional classes. Thus when UCD offered its first new language course, in Farsi, there was a question about whether there was going to be sufficient enrollment to warrant the community college hiring faculty to offer the three new courses.

The panoply of issues surrounding the ME/SA initiative illustrate the value in establishing good internal and external partnerships. Although the Associate Dean of Letters and Sciences does not report to the Vice Provost of Undergraduate Studies, he nevertheless played a pivotal role in building the courses. Another partnership was with the local community college. By working with the local community college, UCD was able to offer Arabic and Farsi, and Tagalog, and Korean are currently in development. Fortuitously, the ME/SA initiative took place at the same time that the UC System language faculty were looking to partner with colleagues in technology to address a parallel interest to offer legacy languages across all UC campuses. A proposal to form a system-wide consortium of foreign language learning was submitted to the UC President; the proposal included a commitment of funds from all the campuses to support the system wide effort. The Consortium worked on models for several uncommonly taught languages. Its first “product” was the Arabic without Walls program, which provides online content to help students learn Arabic. Jill Robbins, a session participant from UC Irvine, noted that this program has proved valuable to the whole UC system.

At about the same time that the proposal was being presented to the UC President, Dr. Turner was asked to move from her current position as Vice Provost in order to serve as Interim Dean of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies. Shortly after becoming Interim Dean, she once again found herself dealing with the legacy language situation, this time in the form of a proposal from a group of faculty to develop a Middle Eastern Studies major; and again the proposal was based on faculty intellectual interest and student demand. Since she lacked revenue for new programs, her key challenge in responding positively to the request was finding the funds to support it. She decided that the best course was a comprehensive programmatic approach. Several departments within UCD, such as Comparative Literature, Arts History, and History, had lone Islamic scholars who had more in common with one another than they did with colleagues in their own department. There were also many interdisciplinary groups. Thus creating a Middle Eastern/ South Asian Studies (ME/SA) group was a natural development.

The key to the success of the ME/SA initiative was that the group had an energized faculty leader for whom this project was a labor of love. Her leadership and hard work made the project a success. She started by working on a Title 6A federal grant proposal to establish a language center on campus; as part of her application, she secured “matching funds” from the Dean of Humanities and Social Studies, which she used to demonstrate UCD’s institutional commitment. She also successfully involved the whole campus: The Teaching Resource Center provided faculty development money, Graduate Studies provided graduate fellowships, the Office of Research provided funding and the Dean of Social Sciences provided space and staff. The combined interest and resources of these various units helped to demonstrate that UCD would be able to sustain the curriculum. In addition, UCD’s investment in the Arabic Without Walls Program was leveraged to show UCD’s commitment to language learning.

One issue still needed to be resolved: If UCD was going to offer Arabic, where was it going to be taught? ME/SA faculty were reluctant to accept the distance language learning initiatives developed by the Consortium. In addressing this question, session leader Turner’s background as both Dean and Vice Provost was useful. As Interim Dean, she was reluctant to add a new program to the Humanities, Arts & Cultural Studies portfolio. By working with the Social Sciences dean, she was able to forge a compromise. The program will reside in the division of Social Sciences for its first two years, after which the deans will re-visit its placement.

Administrative networking was another aspect that made this program successful. The UCD Letters and Science deans all have offices in same corridor and they all eat lunch together on Mondays. The deans also eat with lunch with the Chancellor and other senior administrators on Tuesdays. These no-agenda meetings are intended to give participants an opportunity to talk about current and emerging issues. Many problems are solved at the lunch table. When the Provost issued a call for initiatives that required new FTEs, Dean Turner and the Social Science dean jointly developed a successful proposal for several FTEs to be divided between their divisions. After their proposal was accepted, they appointed a faculty committee, made up of faculty representatives from the Social Sciences and the Humanities, to make recommendations on the distribution of the FTEs. The committee vetted proposals for Islam FTEs from already-established programs and departments.

ME/SA is still a work-in-progress, but with support garnered from the UCD development office, the Title 6A grant, and the continued engagement of the students and faculty, the program is off to a good start. Has the program been a success so far? Student numbers are increasing, and scholars who are involved in it are reasonably happy. The only concern that has been expressed came from a group of Jewish faculty who, looking at problems that had occurred at other universities, thought it inappropriate for the campus to invest in Islam at this time. Fortunately, the ME/SA steering committee included Jewish faculty members from the Humanities and Social Sciences who supported the Islamic initiative. For the time being, the opposing faculty are not pursuing further action.

How are undergraduates served by this program, which was created in large part in response to their requests? Its curriculum includes a research component. The academic program also encourages faculty to take advantage of a variety of campus resources, including the Education Abroad Center (EAC), the campus research conference, and other campus services.

Discussion:

One of the main challenges the Humanities and humanistic Social Sciences face is in fighting prevailing myths and paradigms. The discussion focused on several of the most common beliefs.

Undergraduate Research Programs Are Developed around the Natural Sciences

• Grants: The research university culture values faculty who receive external funding. Natural scientists develop skills in writing proposals because their ability to get grants impinges directly on their ability to be a successful researcher. Since the Humanities and Social Sciences do not have a similar grant-dependent culture, faculty in these disciplines are not as familiar with the grant process, nor do they necessarily know how to present their work within the required context. Thus when institutions invite undergraduates to write proposals to support their research ambitions, they typically receive two-to-three times more applications from natural sciences students than from students in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the applications from the natural science students tend to be of higher quality. The reasons are twofold: Science faculty are more accustomed to grant writing and therefore more likely to encourage their students to submit a proposal, and the science faculty have the skills to support their students’ grant writing. In other words, the problem is as much one of state-of-mind and experience as it is of institutional support.

  At the same time, faculty and students, regardless of discipline, should be able to communicate their research interests We need to ask ourselves why it is assumed that students and faculty in the Humanities and Social Sciences cannot do this as well as their colleagues in the natural sciences. Noting that his campus research office was focused solely on patterns in the natural sciences and did not comprehend research in the liberal arts, session participant John Antel, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Houston, hired a grant writer specifically to work with students and faculty in the Humanities and humanistic Social Sciences.

• Research Lab: In a research lab, students can do significant (publishable) research. Similar rewards and outlets do not exist for students in the Humanities and non-laboratory Social Sciences. Further, many faculty in these disciplines believe the projects on which they are working do not lend themselves well to student participation. These faculty need help in conceiving ways to involve students in their work and in developing sound ways to include them. Undergraduates can serve as more than administrative assistants and they can make a meaningful contribution to a scholarly pursuit.

• Vertically Integrated Model: Faculty and students in the Humanities can learn from some of the success that the natural sciences have experienced. The larger graduate student groups in the natural sciences provide a built-in system of mentorship that supports undergraduate research. We need to refer to this system to help professors realize that layers of mentorship can be work within the Humanities and Social Sciences as well. Duke University’s Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, which has a built-in mentorship component, provides support for graduate student to “fill in” and assist professors in supervising undergraduates. A question was raised about mentoring vs. teaching. Too often, support structures are not there to help professors understand how to mentor. Part of the attraction of academia is the emphasis on individuality: It's all about you. How do you translate this to teaching and mentoring?

The Natural Sciences Are Superior?

The Humanities have allowed research universities to be defined by the interests of the natural sciences, which argue that the money they bring to a campus is used indirectly to support a range of campus needs, in addition to the laboratories, computers, and other science-oriented items they directly pay for. In response to this myth, it was noted that, in fact, many natural science grants require matching funds and other campus resources. The Humanities need to take back ownership.

• Startup Support: Research universities typically provide funds to newly-hired faculty to build laboratories, obtain equipment and pay for support services, including research assistants. In contrast, new Humanities faculty receive very little support. To counteract this imbalance, the University of Toronto has established a program that gives $10,000 startup grants to all tenure track faculty to help them achieve tenure. This program has equalized the field by providing Humanities faculty with funds for traveling abroad, research assistants, and archive time to help them establish their research career.
  
• Humanities Grant Foundations Do Not Allow Indirect Costs. This limitation makes it hard for the grant to support any individuals other than the primary researcher. In contrast, grants in the sciences often support graduate students, undergraduates, and support staff. Humanities grants also often have a cap on their awards. Organizations that fund humanities research should be encouraged to change these practices. Senior administrators at research universities should work with granting agencies to review how they support their researchers and to promote change

The Solo-Researcher Model

It is often assumed that all scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences are still working within the 19th century paradigm of the single scholar. Perpetuating this “monk in a cell” image could be the death of these fields. We need to challenge the myths and reward unique approaches.

• Integrating Students into Existing Programs: There are numerous ways to do this. Anthropology and Archeology students can help on field trips and learn while doing hands-on research. We can draw on established campus centers: By involving students in university writing centers and using peer tutor programs, we cam train student in pedagogy. Students can contribute meaningfully to scholarly work being done within Social Science centers, assisting with oral histories or helping to recover foreign language literature. The Florida State University Human Rights Center works collaboratively with the University’s Honors Program to create research opportunities for undergraduate students. The partnership has had such great success that the Honors Program is now considering forming a similar partnership with the Women Studies Center. Florida State also has a project in which undergraduates help transcribe radio interviews.
  
• Foster Successful Individual Projects: A professor at Emory University has engaged an undergraduate to help annotate the University’s T.S. Elliot archive. In addition to learning much about Eliot and modern poetry, as well as how to do an annotation, the student is making a valuable scholarly contribution. Equally important, the student has developed a strong relationship with the professor.

  One problem with this kind of approach is its focus on the single student, and the negative incentive it provides for Humanities and Social Science professors to mentor multiple students. Every new student is often seen as an extra project that results in extra work. This individual mentoring structure contrasts with that within the natural sciences, where responsibility can be divided between faculty supervisor and graduate students. The University of Toronto has made a concerted effort to break down the walls among disciplines, and thereby create expanded opportunities for undergraduates. A Chinese scholar, for example, who needed a student who was fluent in French and Vietnamese, discovered that the best student available was in the immunology program.

• Use Technology: Brown University’s Virtual Humanities Lab is a program that is run through a Web site that allows people to collaborate in editing and creating text about people, places and themes. Basically, it is a space where individuals can communicate and interact, creating an online community environment. The purpose of the site is to encourage students and faculty alike to share ideas with a broader community. Students have gotten involved by making little annotations and verifying the discussion forum. Their comments are refereed by senior faculty before being adding to the Web site. Although the Web site has not yet been integrated into coursework, there is interest in doing this. The key is that technology is allowing students to contribute to knowledge and get involved in a reservoir of ideas.
  
• Reward System: The University of Toronto is developing programs in which groups of faculty are rewarded for work they do within the group structure. In order to make such an approach successful at other research universities, and particularly for Humanities faculty, we need to address the issue of group publications. Currently at many universities, publications on scholarly work done with undergraduates do not count toward tenure. This needs to be reviewed.
  
• Institutional Creation: Florida State University has a cluster hiring initiative for the purpose of establishing an interdisciplinary group to work on the history of text technology. Having the University support this interdisciplinary structure is helping to break the traditional paradigm. When they see this kind of collaborative option, researchers who work in the traditional solitary mode will hopefully be inspired to think about possible collaborations that would enrich their own work. When thinking about collaborations with undergraduates, it is useful to begin by focusing on the basic skills in the discipline that the students need to learn in order to do the required work. It often works best to design students’ project so that they are relatively small and “doable” and give students a taste of what the discipline is like.

Resources for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Researchers in the natural sciences are routinely provided with laboratory space, work supplies, and funding to support a large group of graduate students. What resources do we need to provide for scholars in the Humanities and humanistic Social Sciences?

• Funding: Duke University awards Deans' Summer Research Fellowships to enable undergraduates to start an independent research project during the summer; work on the project is then continued the following semester(s). The Fellowship program, which is funded by Trinity College, Duke’s undergraduate college, as well as by external grants, gives students up to $2,500 to complete 3+ weeks of intensive research; they may not attend summer school while holding the fellowship. The program has supported a wide range of projects in all disciplines, and the funds have been used for a variety of purposes by students including archival access and travel to Europe. Students work with a faculty mentor of their choice in developing the idea for the project. Although many of the Fellows supported by the program are students working on their senior thesis, some fellowships are set aside for first-year students. All Fellows are required to present their work at Visible Thinking Day, Duke’s undergraduate research conference.
  
• Academic Credit: Giving upper level academic credit and a transcript notation to students who engage in research can provide motivation for students who plan to apply for graduate school. Assigning credit and listing their supervisor as the “instructor” for the course has the added benefit of offering a way to keep track both of students who are involved with faculty-mentored research projects and their faculty mentors.
  
• Faculty Reward System: We must acknowledge that bribery is a tried and true reward system. The University of Toronto gives $1,500 to faculty who supervise undergraduate projects. Session leader Turner suggested asking senior administrators--the University chancellor, president, provost and deans--to provide “that extra bit of cheerleading.” These senior officials should be urged to take advantage of receptions and other public functions to approach faculty about supervising students and to publicly thank and credit those faculty who have been doing this. . This extra pat on the back (and the bragging rights that come with it) can really provide the extra boost. Other possible rewards are o providing funds for a special need, such as a new computer or other technology, travel abroad, a research or archive time, or giving teaching credit to faculty who go the extra step in supervising undergraduates.. It is important to provide additional support as an incentive, especially to junior faculty.

Personal Motivation For Faculty to Be Involved

Given that at many research universities, supervision of undergraduate research does not count in merit or tenure or promotion reviews, why should faculty become involved in such activity? What are the problems and benefits?

• Co-authorship: Currently within the Humanities, articles that junior faculty co-author with undergraduates do not count in their tenure review. Senior faculty must step forward to lead efforts to change this practice and ensure that work done with undergraduates is a factor in personnel reviews.
  
• Course Development: Undergraduates can serve as valuable research assistants to faculty developing new courses since this work invariably involves identifying and reviewing a range of resources, both printed and online. Having students help benefits the students because it gives them a purpose for their work, while also allowing them a chance to discover what current topics of interest in the field. This starting point can then blossom into a project. At the same time, the faculty benefit because undergraduates are often comfortable and adept at using online resources and can save the faculty time. This kind of assistance alleviates the problem of the student publishing.
  
• Teaching Credit/Course Time: Capstone projects and research methods classes provide a unique opportunity to teach undergraduates about the process of research within the disciplines. This teaching can also improve individual research. Students can produce bibliographies, thereby increasing their disciplinary knowledge and their research skills. Teaching credit should be provided for faculty involved in this process.
  
• Background Reading/Archive Time: Faculty can engage undergraduates creatively by asking them to read and make notes on current writings that may apply to their own work and then discussing the individual articles together. The faculty save time since they can draw on the students’ work and be more selective in their own examination of the materials. At the same time, the students benefit from their interaction with the faculty member and by learning about a field and about research. This division of work makes the researcher more efficient and provides useful training for the undergraduate.

Challenging Complacency
New faculty are bringing cultural change with them. Some come with the belief that faculty who cannot communicate their discipline or who do not want to teach should not be faculty. On the other hand, there is still a generation of faculty who cling to the kind of educational experiences that they themselves had and do not like change: If they were able to succeed without help and by doing things the hard way, then that is how the next generation should go about learning.

We must deal with the complacency many tenured faculty have about learning new approaches to teaching and about working with students, many of whom they do not want to teach. Individuals who do not want to teach in innovative programs should not be compelled to do so. Instead, there should be incentives and faculty rewards for those who re-think their courses and supervise students: the incentives will help attract individuals who may be curious or interested in a program or in pedagogy, more generally. The excitement and success generated by innovative programs will in turn bring others into it.

Another way to approach the challenge of complacency is by looking at individual disciplines. In Economics, for example, after the professional societies took a firm stand on what should be taught and what students need to learn, the course work changed. Humanities and Social Science disciplines need to be talking to one another as well. Once their professional societies make the decision to interact, they can redefine the process and can influence academic institutional policies like those relating to tenure, for example, so that interdisciplinarity is valued.

The University of Houston has an implicit contract with state of Texas: Faculty do two days of teaching and then have three-to-five days to do peer reviewed work. This is a heavy load, but we cannot subordinate our teaching needs to fit into the research v. teaching model. Many of our better students, tired of the cafeteria level general education, are eager for a more integrative educational experience and the chance to be challenged by working on big ideas.

Recommendations:

Session leader Turner referred the group back to the plenary talk of Wayne Clough, President of Georgia Institute of Technology, who spoke about the need to find best practices and use them to redefine undergraduate engineering education. The Humanities and humanistic Social Sciences need to undergo a similar process, finding best practices, avoiding self-flagellation and learning from our successes.

For Individual Campuses

• Campuses need to engage in a focused conversation about creating an educated citizenry; the conversations should emphasize the civic aspects of citizenship to counteract the financial aspect.

For The Reinvention Center

• Work with professional associations to change the definition of research so that it is inclusive and encompasses work done by students in Humanities and humanistic Social Science disciplines.
• Work with granting agencies to initiate programs that encourage and support undergraduate participation in research in the Humanities and humanistic Social Sciences. Their model should by the National Science Foundation which has used its funding to revolutionize undergraduate education in the natural sciences and engineering and promote research by undergraduates. To ensure the success of new efforts, the Reinvention Center should undertake a comparative study of the infrastructure that is needed to support undergraduate research. The structure should include a mentoring, vertical integration, and funds to pay for the time and services of faculty, graduate students and undergraduates who want to be involved in the process.
• Institute a review of the tenure and promotion processes at research universities, specifically reviewing how individual campuses measure faculty productivity. Everyone, from faculty through the Reinvention Center, should participate in the study.
  
  The review should focus on several variables: Teaching load, equitability of startup funds among disciplines, supervision of graduate students across disciplines, supervision of undergraduates across disciplines, course release policies (including time spent on mentoring undergraduates doing research), incentives and rewards, and the extent to which undergraduate teaching is embedded in individual fields and departments

References/Resources:

Websites

1. UC Arabic Without Walls Distance Language Learning Program developed by the UC Consortium for Language Learning & Teaching, The National Middle East Language Resource Center at Brigham Young University and Near Eastern Studies Department at UC Berkeley: http://arabicwithoutwalls.ucdavis.edu/aww/
2. Brown University Virtual Humanities Lab, including a Virtual Editing House and a Virtual Seminar Room that provides a platform for shared activities ranging from scholarly editions and publications to team-taught online workshops and seminars: http://brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/vhl/
3. The Duke University Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, a funding program that supports research opportunities to provide students interested in a scholarly career with a greater awareness of the challenges and opportunities of academic life: http://www.aas.duke.edu/trinity/mmuf/
4. Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program and Diversity Initiatives, established to broaden the pool of those pursuing academic careers in higher education. The program supports individuals in selected disciplines who demonstrate a strong commitment to increasing opportunities for underrepresented minorities and advancing cross-racial and ethnic understanding: http://www.mellon.org/grant_programs/programs/higher-education-and-scholarship/mellon-mays-fellowship
5. Duke University Deans' Summer Research Fellowship, providing support of undergraduate research and inquiry in the arts and sciences: http://www.aas.duke.edu/trinity/research/deansmr/
6. Florida State University Cluster Hire History of Text Technology:, an interdisciplinary cluster of new hires that focuses on the technological evolution from manuscript to print in western Europe, especially in the related literatures and cultures of England, France, and Italy: http://pathways.fsu.edu/faculty/hott/
7. Florida State University Human Rights Center: http://www.cahr.fsu.edu/