Edwards College dean candidates visit campus, give presentations
The Edwards College search committee for a new dean invited four candidates to campus in January for interviews, college drop-ins, and to give presentations regarding their vision for the future. Below is a recap of each of their visits. The answers to the questions have been condensed and summarized, and the candidates are listed in the order the presentations were scheduled.
Who: Holley Tankersley, professor and associate dean, Thomas W. and Robin W. Edwards College for Humanities and Fine Arts, Coastal Carolina University
Q: Why now? Why Coastal?
A: "I've spent eight years in administration, and I’ve sought out development opportunities. I have developed a pretty good understanding of the types of challenges we face. I have achieved what I set out to achieve and learned what I wanted to learn. It's time for me to take the next step. I've invested my career here. To be able to take the next step here would be wonderful."
Q: What is your vision for the Edwards College?
A: "To continue to do things we are already doing very well. Graduate program development is necessary, and we need to stay on the cutting edge of our disciplinary development. We need to strengthen our interdisciplinary work inside the college and across colleges in program development and pedagogy. We have made progress in the area of facilities, but we need some additional spaces that are a little bit unconventional. Space is not going to happen without money, and I have a three-part strategy for fundraising and development. I think any dean should have three parts to faculty development: enable autonomy, provide support and convey appreciation."
Q: As we bring in graduate students, how do you plan to provide development for them?
A: "I never intended to be in higher education. I always intended to go back to consulting. The reason I'm here today is because I had a graduate assistantship and fell in love with teaching. How do we provide that experience for our students? For graduate faculty, what does that look like? How do we provide resources? We build a community among graduate students so they have peer support. It's a cultural change among our undergraduate students; we ease them into using graduate students as mentors. Start that now with a peer mentorship program. We can use some of that to build on. It will be an institutional change, but it's coming."
Who: Todd Shiver, Professor and Interim Dean, College of Arts and Humanities, Central Washington University
Q: Why Coastal?
A: “Why would I not apply for this position? I accidentally ended up as a chair and now as interim dean, which is great because you I could give it a try. Truth is, that as interim dean I’ve been able to do quite a bit. Since I had this great experience as interim dean, if any positions came open in the southeastern U.S. that interested me, I told myself I would put my name in the hat. My family is in the Southeast. When I saw this opening and the webpages … I love your webpages. The media presence for the college is very impressive. The size of this institution and community is something I’m used to. The mission of this University aligns with mine: you have a strong liberal arts core, that is part of my upbringing. It seems like a good match.”
Q: What is your vision for the Edwards College?
A: “An alumni mentorship program that connects alumni with students and builds a meaningful mentor relationship. Not only does that give students a clear pathway to a career, it reconnects the alumni to campus who may not have been here for 10 or 20 years. Our goal was to match 50 students; now we are at 75. It was so successful for our humanities students, the business college is going to do something similar. Create student ambassadors, students who represent every department who help us recruit and serve as pure mentors for other students. Increase presence at college events like gallery exhibits and guest speakers. Get a lot of training about the department with a leadership training track. Create a leadership group of transfer students who mentor incoming transfer students. Community outreach is vital.”
Q: How do you envision fitting in recognition of the efforts of the faculty in things like recruitment and retention when they are already stretched too thin?
A: “I tell faculty that if I [as dean] tell you that you have to do this (extra service) and it is expected, then you should receive some kind of adjustment or compensation. Create incentives. I don't think scholarship and teaching are mutually exclusive; they complement each other. That's what we do. You have to be on the cutting edge, updated. You have to know current trends so must keep up with scholarship. To be a great teacher, scholarship is part of that.
Who: Seth Beckman, Professor and Dean, Mary Pappert School of Music, Duquesne University
Q: What is your vision for the Edwards College?
A: “I plan to work myself into how we address problems. Know where to put emphasis. Successful strategies require excellence, relevance, sustainability, appeal, agility, contracting, expanding, re-designing. One of the things I'm excited about is that there is a really innovative mindset here, people are willing to take risks, and there is incentive for risk-taking. Anne Lamott talks about creative writing as being an example of mentors, mirrors and guide dogs to us in our personal lives and our professional lives. There is a wonderful transfer to be made about humanities and fine arts about the work we do, the teaching we do. If we are looking at processing and producing examples of the human experiences, this can lead us in dramatic ways.”
Q: What have you done to improve retention and graduation rates?
A: “Retention issues could be in several different categories. Some students struggle financially. In that category, we’ve set up a micro-grant system where students assess with smaller groups what the issues are and set aside money to help them. That’s a great way for the Edwards College to address that issue. Another challenge is advising: Are we appropriately advising, and what are we doing to ensure they have the best advising available? At Florida State, we have three different kinds of advisers: student advisers as peers, faculty advisers, staff advisers. Student advisers are a great way to involve them. Advising programs need depth and breadth. There are also curriculum challenges: Some can be unnecessarily rigid. One semester of getting behind snowballs on them. I am overly skeptic of rigid curriculums. Add more flexibility and adaptability.”
Q: Can you speak to growing graduate programs and enrollment?
A: “There is a strong push toward graduate education here, similar to what I'm experiencing at my campus. We worked to put a moratorium on two of the three programs because they weren't to date and weren't appealing. Know your market, know what people need and what they want. It’s very dangerous to just build a graduate program on a particular passion and interest of scholarship and research. What does the market say? We do that by investing literally and figuratively in alumni. Ask them: What did you experience, what didn’t you experience, what should we do now that you're out and about? If we were to offer a program in [blank], what would you feel is essential for us to include and why? Then ask ourselves: How does that education interface with undergraduates, sustainable finances and other kinds of resources?”
Who: Claudia Bornholdt, Walburg Chair of German Language and Literature, Chair, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, The Catholic University of America
Q: Why Coastal?
A: “I knew for certain I didn't want to go to a big student university. I like the more personal attention and the easier collaboration with colleagues and offices. At Coastal, you have a humanities and fine arts program. I feel very strongly about the role of the humanities and the arts. I’ve been defending it for years. I spend a lot of time making sure the money stays where it should be. I’m from the coast, you're on the coast. I've been in the Midwest for a long time, and I like the idea of having a body of water close to me. You are a university with an upward trajectory. You're growing, innovating, building programs. I like to build things.”
Q: What is your vision for the Edwards College?
A: “The vision I think and the only way for humanities and arts to continue to do what is so successful in education is build bridges. Bridges exist in reality. You cannot do computer science if you can't think of the user. What we do in the humanities is the digital world. There isn't a divide between humanities and sciences anymore. We need to communicate this. You are already embracing this, the connection, and providing this already to the students. I started a program at my university in Spanish health care, and it's full. Not just speaking the language, but the culture. My vision is to communicate to the world what you're doing.”
Q: What are some examples of ways you could help improve retention?
A: “Very clear correlation between engagement and retention. I started thinking, what do we do with student life and organizations? Advising is essential, and so is mentoring students. So we linked advising and career services into one office, and that helped humanities and arts quite tremendously. A sense of community is so important, they feel they belong, have a home, that they are taken care of. I worked a lot as acting dean meeting with advisers to make sure they were communicating with each other and implemented a new advising platform accessible online. We are doing freshmen midterm grades and then do interventions through advising/career services center.”