A multitude of opportunities, and the case for optimism at Bates.

INTRODUCTION

I want to start by thanking the CFG for opening space in this faculty meeting. I realize how precious time is, and how important an opportunity to gather in this type of forum can be.

I am here in what I hope will be the first of many opportunities to talk about our collective work. But today I wanted to share a bit about what I have been thinking about since joining the Bates community. I want to share ways that I am listening to you, how I am gaining an understand the faculty’s goals, and how I am attempting to be the best advocate for what you do as I can be. I want to thank Kathy Low, in particular, for taking so much of her time over the summer and fall as she shared her insights on the work of the dean.

I have started by trying to learn more about our core values. I have listened to many constituencies to learn about the important issues in the community, and to get a sense of where you want to go. I have also looked at the governing structures on this campus to figure out how we can achieve our ambitious goals.

I have spent the last 6 months in a crash course on all things Bates. My first experiences on this campus included the Bates Dance Festival – a truly joyful and nationally consequential program that made me temporarily believe gravity does not affect all humans in the same way. I spent time getting to know the physical space in the glories of a Maine summer. I also studied the governing and academic structures from a detached space: my office studying the handbook, catalogue and webpages.

I have paid attention to the history of this place. Bates has a proud tradition of offering an exceptional undergraduate education and training talented students who have changed our society in fundamental ways. Leigh Weisenburger and her colleagues in Admission are fantastic partners dedicated to attracting exceptionally talented students. I have been impressed with the devotion and care for students that y’all show. This is a remarkable and distinctive characteristic. However, this education and a career at Bates have not been available to all in equal measure, and we have an obligation to address this part of our history (and our present) as we move to consider our future.

I’ve studied how Bates has wrestled with its complicated history. Our abolitionist forebears challenged the ideas that supported the inhumanity of slavery – with the hope of eliminating an evil economic engine. These individuals were motivated to speak truth to power, and deny a social contract that inhibited, imprisoned, murdered, demoralized, and destroyed millions. From those noble origins, Bates has been seen as a place to examine structures that inhibit based on race, gender, sexual orientation, class, economic status, and power. However, we have not, and likely are not, always living up to aspirations of equity & inclusion that are stated in our mission. I challenge myself and all of us to reach for these goals.

I have attempted to understand the structures that support our shared mission and the values that motivate us. I have tried as hard as possible to meet and get to know each member of the community, though I still have some ways to go, I am happy to say that I am close to meeting this goal. I look forward to gaining more nuanced understanding of the cares and worries of this community in the coming months and years. Most important, however, I have listened to as many voices from faculty, staff, and students as I’ve been able to so that I can understand the place and its people to the fullest extent. I am grateful to everyone who has shared their time, experience, humor, and wisdom. This crash course has helped move me towards true membership in the Bates community, and has helped me appreciate why what you offer is such an exceptional example of higher education in the liberal arts context. It has also fortified my desire to contribute to our aspirations and goals in all the ways I might be able to contribute.

Bates is a special place. We are all fortunate to work here and to have the opportunity to do the important work of training talented students as they forge their own paths. We have administrators and staff devoted to providing talented faculty with the tools to offer that education, and remarkable students eager to grow, be challenged, and take on the challenges of the world. You are a busy and dedicate group of faculty, and while this is a joyful profession, it is clear that your time and energy budgets are maxed out. I have heard a persistent call to address this aspect of professional life at Bates, to find resources to support what you do, and I take that call seriously and will work with Clayton and Geoff to find ways to support you in your academic work.

It is an exciting time at Bates. There are wonderful signs of success, and real reasons for optimism at Bates. And we have a lot of work yet to do. At a time when wall-building and the buttressing of barriers are an ever present part of the national dialogue, Bates’ legacy is to build a different kind of structure. We build knowledge – knowledge that at its core is about removing barriers/breaking down walls. I want to support efforts to build knowledge, build relationships, build communities, build new ways to view the world, grow our aspirations, discover new pathways…so that our work is about removing barriers that exist in our society.

I want to talk today about what I see as a multitude of opportunities, and articulate the case for optimism at Bates given an ambitious vision for our role in the national landscape.

Overarching goals of the DOF office

We have some important overarching goals in our office, but the primary one is to improve the professional life of members of the Bates community. Our job is to support and nurture one of the strongest undergraduate educations available in the US, and we want to strengthen our community in this endeavor whenever and wherever possible. I am interested in being efficient, pragmatic, and aspirational in our decision making – especially as it relates to our institutional mission. We will communicate decisions, and encourage this in the entire community, so that we may all understand – even if we don’t all agree – with what was decided, who was responsible for the decision, and what criteria were used to reach our decisions. I hope to improve the quality of our professional exchanges – disagreement doesn’t mean dislike, and we must be open to the qualities of discourse that help us improve what we are attempting to accomplish. We must be encouraging. As a small community, it is essential to have discourse that does not erode the generosity and even the kindness of our exchanges. I realize that pressures to meet the demands of this job can do just that. You all are working at maximal capacity – and I have seen how much effort you must expend. I will be an advocate for mobilizing resources to support what you do. I hope to increase our sense of shared purpose, improve the narrative of “we,” and strengthen a culture that ties individual success to other’s success (students, colleagues, Bates).

We will be student-centered in this approach so we tie our successes to student successes. In short, our overarching goal is going to be to provide support, to support what is working well, strengthen what can be strengthened, and to remove structural barriers that are getting in the way of our shared goals and individual success so that we may continue to offer a signature and singular model of liberal arts education.

Strengthen what we do well

How can we strengthen what we do well? We have a community of teachers and scholars committed to undergraduate education. That commitment is astonishing, and distinctive.

I have been asking faculty in a variety of settings about some of the things that make their professional lives rich and rewarding here at Bates. There is some strong unanimity in what folks find supportive.

The talented scholars and artists on this campus want support for creative educational and professional opportunities. There are many successful programs in place. For example, our Harward Center offers exceptional and nationally-distinctive opportunities for faculty, staff and students to engage with our community. Bates is a national leader in one of the best examples of a high-impact educational practice.

The Short Term courses that I have seen are transformative for the students, and excite many of our faculty. This is an area of curricular innovation that allows for the use of creative and new pedagogies. This is distinctive! I am interested in picking up the Institutional Plan’s call to optimize ST and will be looking for ways to engage faculty-led conversations and policy discussions in the next year on this topic.

Bates’ commitment to students engaging in signature work is obvious – this is among a short list of the highest-impact educational practices possible in the academy. Thesis is the most obvious example – it is something Bates does exceptionally well. Thesis, however, represents a significant investment of time and energy. But the co-creation of new knowledge, new ways to view the world are ways that Bates makes lasting contributions to the academy. We will be developing a tool, working with Mary Meserve and Pat Schokneckt and colleagues in ILS, to capture some of the information from theses every year so that we can gauge aspects of scholarship that our students conduct and where their interests lie. The tool will eventually allow us a historic perspective on thesis work at Bates. We will also look for ways to identify the pedagogical objective of thesis, and for ways to lessen the load of thesis for students and faculty while maintaining it as a distinctive part of the Bates education. Faculty have expressed to me the urge to think critically about how many theses students do, and how we recognize and reward the thesis work of students and faculty. Our office will work to facilitate these types of faculty-led discussions next year.

I look forward to strengthening the academic ties to Purposeful Work. This is an exciting initiative. PW helps students align their passions, skills, and interests with their vocation. It offers an unapologetic defense against misguided and myopic attacks of the liberal arts. I look forward to finding ways to contribute to that narrative, to find ways to tell the stories that highlight all the ways that the training we engage students in throughout their 4 years conveys the types of skills, real-world, practical skills that employers are interested in having in the work force. Exploration of the world, developing greater appreciation for the beauty of the world, building skills in critical analysis, these are the tangibles that we give to students that allow them to thrive once they leave our campus. PW helps us achieve that.

The efforts that are going into the recently funded HHMI and Mellon grants are so exciting. These two initiatives offer opportunities to transform what happens in and out of the classroom as we explore ways to ensure broad access and remove barriers to persistence and thriving. These faculty-led initiatives offer opportunities to tie faculty success to student success such that we reward colleagues who are making a major difference in helping students who may not have benefitted from well-resourced educational backgrounds or who are not part of the pervasively white culture at Bates. This is among the best that Bates has to offer. But these efforts need to extend to all reaches of our curriculum, and our office will look for ways to share lessons from the great and innovative equity-minded and inclusive work you are doing.

Maintaining scholarly and creative endeavors is essential to what it means to be a Bates faculty member. The reasons for this are varied – for some it is about identity, for some it is about curiosity, for some it is about joy. Professional achievement helps grow the reputation of Bates, and it helps attract students and future colleagues. However, the reason we value it at a place like Bates is that it is one of the best ways to ensure that our students are gaining perspectives from the best teachers who are also excellent scholars and artists. We have among us leading experts at the forefront of their fields – our faculty are working at the cutting edge of an ever-changing educational landscape. And they should be. The value of a Bates degree comes in part from the recognition that we have recruited outstanding scholars who are equally committed to the creation of new knowledge at least in part because that is one of the most effective teaching tools in our toolkit. I will look for ways to support our scholars and artists who find creative ways to engage students in their work. Our office will also be looking for ways to enhance existing support for the scholarly lives of colleagues – one small example of this is that we will increase the travel allotment to $1750 starting next academic year. It is a small step. The BFDF is also an essential aspect of supporting the scholarly work on campus. It is important to thank the colleagues who have received funding from external sources, because a part of those funds supports the BFDF, and helps the entire community do their meaningful work. We will look for ways to further support the BFDF so additional resources can be focused in areas of professional happiness. Sarah Pearson and her colleagues are working hard to support our efforts, and I look forward to working even harder with her to provide resources to support our broader goals. Hiring a new director of SPARC will be an important component of this goal.

We are also interested in telling the stories about the work of faculty and staff. Our goal is to recognize achievements and support innovation. We are working with Sean Findlen and the BCO staff to craft strategies around this goal. We have created a Focus on the Faculty initiative, a twitter account, and we will be pursuing other ways to tell the broader community about the great work of colleagues here.

Remove barriers that are getting in the way of our shared goals

I have heard many speak of ways we can improve what we are doing, and part of my 6 months here have been spent trying to understand the concerns of the community without letting those concerns be the only narrative that emerges. Again, Bates is a wonderful institution filled with colleagues who love their jobs and the careers they have crafted at Bates. At the same time, there are some opportunities for improving the quality of the professional experience for folks on campus.

I have looked at data from a number of places : COACHE, Workload study, conversations on campus, your descriptions of top priorities for the new dean. I have also directly observed practices that may not be aligned with our shared objectives. There are inequities in our systems – power structures that require realignment – and these have eroded morale for some of our colleagues. For example, the workload survey indicated that women contribute a greater number of hours than men to committee work (on average >20% more than men; >38% more than men at full professor level) and those efforts are not seen as being valued or contributing to professional advancement. The COACHE data indicate that colleagues of color and women experience professional satisfaction at rates lower than white men on this campus. We have work to do to ensure that Bates is a place with the highest levels of job satisfaction possible, and that it attends to issues equity and inclusion for all members of the community.

I look forward to working with CFG, AAC, COP, chairs of committees and other faculty leaders on campus, to develop strategies to align our structures and policies with the mission of the institution and to support faculty, staff, and student thriving. Some of the topics we will address initially include the following:

Chairs are now working with a “Teaching Load Tool.” The goal here is to think about teaching equity within academic units, and to think about how we are all contributing to a Bates education that extends beyond majors. Starting next year, I will ask chairs to develop with their colleagues a “Career Profile & Values Statement” for their academic units. This will articulate the responsibilities and agency of faculty on this campus. This effort has to be tied to our understanding of our shared values – and this serves as a cornerstone of efforts to improve mentoring of our colleagues.

You have highlighted in notes to me that mentoring is an area that needs improvement. We will be developing a robust mentoring program, based on vetted and nationally consequential methods. To provide meaningful mentorship, we will need clear statements about our values as well as training for what effective mentorship looks like. Our office is committed to supporting both aspects of an emerging mentoring plan, and our membership in NCFDD is a good first step.

Faculty engagement with the operation of the academic mission is critical and deeply valued by our colleagues, yet faculty have expressed to me the desire to improve our governing structures. As a new dean, with new institutional eyes, there is an opportunity to explore governing structures – to clarify, for example, on this campus the distinctions between elected and appointed committees, the types of work that our committees do and don’t do, the expectations of this work as part of our social contract, and the communication that occurs to the community about this work. These are also issues highlighted in previous accreditation exercises. I have raised these and other questions with the CFG, the AAC, and COP, and while it is not glamorous administrative work, it seems to be a good moment at Bates to engage with this essential aspect of how we function. I believe it is time to bring in experts from outside of Bates to review all of our practices, at a broad, systematic level, and to provide recommendations for ways that we might align with national best practices. I will work with CFG to coordinate this effort in the coming academic year. This is a big initiative, and it will require many faculty perspectives to ensure that we are meeting the goals of our community.

In addition to broad scale perspectives on governance in general, there are also opportunities to clarify specific aspects of the handbook language. For example, there is room for improvement in handbook language associated with tenure and promotion. In the area of teaching, Bates faculty have expressed to me during a series of coordinated lunches and individual conversations that the following qualities, and these are quotes from y’all, are evidence of teaching excellence:
Continuing professional development in pedagogy.
Assessment of meaningful learning gains/outcomes: real measures of student learning.
Capacity to create an equitable and inclusive environment.
Employment of evidence-based pedagogy and risk-taking in the classroom
Responsiveness to change in students.
As it stands now, we do not assess these characteristics of our teaching, and some of the characteristics that are in the handbook you have identified as unimportant.

Also in the context of teaching, our handbook states that “academic advising is a normal part of a teacher’s responsibilities, and it is evaluated as such.” Several of you have expressed the challenges of assessing advising that is done on this campus. There are national best-practices in advising, and the question is, how much of that knowledge do we apply here at Bates? How do we train our colleagues in advising best practices, and how do we ensure that colleagues receive credit for this important part of our jobs? I have learned that there is a lacuna in advising that happens during a student’s Sophomore year. This is problematic for a host of reasons. The second year is a particularly important year in the lives of our students as they imagine the academic paths they will travel. In the absence of good academic advising – especially in the second year of a student’s experience – opportunities are lost to guide a student toward their academic passions. In the absence of this guidance, a number of far from useful factors may be influencing student choice in courses and majors. We will continue to explore ways to improve the advising experience from a student perspective, but also ways to support and reward faculty who do this important work.

In the context of professional achievement, our standards should also be evaluated to ensure they represent contemporary practices in particular fields (e.g., public scholarship in the digital age, open-access journals, new forms of scholarship). How do we value peer-review or public scrutiny and quality of our work in the context of a changing academic landscape?

It is also time to reimagine “Service.” Service is real work – not a donation or a kindness – and it is essential to the healthy, efficient operation of the college. There are different expectations (real and perceived) at different points of the career. Bias can be present both in who does this work and how it is valued. So we will look to determine how we fairly and equitably address this aspect of the life of an academic.

To address questions about tenure and promotion standards, I will ask CFG to establish an ad hoc committee with a charge to review our values and the handbook language to ensure that these are accurate reflections of our shared values. This is essential to providing useful mentorship to colleagues at all stages of a career, but it is especially true for pre-tenure colleagues, and those colleagues considering promotion to full. This work will also help us understand where to put resources that support faculty development and training that is aligned with the values of the community. For instance, several of you have asked for development and training in inclusive and evidence-based pedagogies – and this best practice should be articulated in our handbook.

As a final observation in areas where there is room for improvement at Bates, but one that will involve a much longer conversation, I believe Bates has, in places, a fragmented academic landscape. Some of the parsing of academic units has created smaller communities and more borders to defend – walls have been built up between divisions and academic units. In fact, that is language that I’ve heard some of you use. I will look for opportunities for strengthening what we do in partnership and collaboration rather than weakening our efforts through competition.

CONCLUSION

The world is a better place because of your efforts. Bates has a history of speaking truth to power. It also has benefitted from the inequities of society. The land we inhabit is the homeland of indigineous Wabanaki who used the Androscoggin River for transportation, navigation, trade, and sustenance. While it is absolutely true, and a source of pride, that our founders were abolitionists who stood against slavery and challenged the imperial slave economy, it is simultaneously true that they were individuals who accepted money from Benjamin Bates who made his fortune directly from cheap cotton made cheap because of the forced labor of millions of humans imprisoned in the south. This narrative of inequity and structural barriers based on race, gender, class,…- this is one that repeats throughout Bates’ history – from the Civil War, Jim Crow Era, Great Depression, WWII to today. I find hope and optimism in the fact that Bates is working to become a better version of itself, and has aspirations to be a model of equity and inclusion for the nation and world. I am looking forward to work with Dr. Noelle Chaddock on these initiatives in the coming years.

Bates has long recognized that a college diploma is more than a piece of paper, more than a major. It’s a ticket to social and economic mobility. Yet this educational path has been denied to many high-achieving students based on race, gender, sexual orientation, class….However, with our high-graduation-rate and incredible resources, I would argue that Bates should give these students the best chance for success because we attend to the individual in a way that most other institutions can’t. We can do more on this front, and I am looking for partners in these initiatives.

To summarize, I am interested in improving the professional lives of colleagues on this campus. I want to find resources to support what you do. I want to improve our processes and structures to free up and value your time. I want to be a part of a community that is joyously engaging in the important work that we do. I challenge this community, in constructive dialogue, to join together so that Bates can continue to transform the lives of talented and promising students – especially those who have not had the opportunity to reach their full potential and fully contribute to our society.

Thank you in advance for your continued generosity as we look for ways to move Bates towards our future goals.