2023 August

A Word from the Dean

The week before the Fall Semester gets underway is filled with meetings. This year, it began on Monday morning with the University’s Council of Chairs. The next day we had the all-university meeting in the morning, which was followed by our college meeting later that afternoon. Then on Wednesday morning, I met with our department chairs for an off-campus retreat. By that afternoon, my battery light was flashing and I was only halfway through the week! 

Apart from feeling tired, that’s not a complaint. I actually like meetings. I realized years ago that you can’t say “I like to collaborate with others,” which everyone says, and also say, “Ugh, I hate meetings.”  If you like to collaborate, then it would make sense that you would like meetings because meetings are where collaboration happens. 

Anyhow, this year’s back-to-school meetings featured a few common threads, the most prominent of which was the arrival of artificial intelligence. We all recognize that it is no longer in our future but in our present. How will we adapt to the challenges it presents? Will students use it to write their papers and assignments instead of doing the work themselves, and how will we know if they do? Will AI erode the expertise that faculty offer in our respective subject areas? And what are the upsides of AI? What best practices will emerge in using the technology creatively in the classroom and in our own scholarship and artistic work?  So many questions and not a little bit of anxiety. 

Speaking of anxiety, mental health also came up frequently in back-to-school meetings. Although there is a general sense that people (both students and faculty) are feeling better than they did during the peak of the pandemic, and some evidence to support it, the demand for mental health services still exceeds our ability to meet it to our satisfaction, and so we spent a fair amount of time in some of these meetings reminding ourselves of resources and sharpening our skills for dealing with people in crisis.  

These past four or five years have kept us busy keeping up with change in higher education, and I haven’t even mentioned any of the legal decisions that re-shape the way that people think and talk about college. 

As academics, we are a tradition-loving people. Our institutions retain many of their medieval features—you see it not just in our ceremonies and regalia, but in our language (if you are pursuing a “baccalaureate” degree, you have follow a certain “curriculum” that has been established by the faculty in your “college,” which is headed by a “dean” who reports to a “provost”—those words have long lineages and remain unique to our enterprise) and in our principles, like academic freedom. And of course, every institution has its own long-standing traditions that are unique to it and to which it clings. Looking at it that way, from the outside, it might appear that colleges and universities are slow to change and even, perhaps, resistant to change. But I would argue the contrary: we are an adaptable people, and never so more than lately. We hold onto our values and standards while learning how to do things like meet the pedagogical needs of new generations, in new modalities, and in new formats. Within our disciplines, methods of study and practice constantly evolve, and new knowledge is produced at such a rate that if you look away from the field for even a short time, you quickly fall behind. So, while we may appear monkish in our garb and use a vocabulary that sounds antique at times, we also have a record of being up for any challenge. Bring on the robots!