Early in my time as Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, I began to formulate themes to describe and guide the future of the arts and sciences at Boston University. I presented these themes in our first faculty meeting last academic year, and I have written about each theme in this forum over the past year. These priority areas recognize faculty depth and respond to global challenges and opportunities, as well as student interest. They inform our strategy for growth and development of faculty, degree programs, research collaborations, and fundraising. Taken together, these themes offer opportunities for faculty and departments to build on collective strengths in ways that best fit their disciplinary assets, but encourage interdisciplinary discovery.
As I near the midpoint of my (first) five-year term as Dean, it is an apt time to report on our efforts to articulate, build, and promote these strategic foci. These themes by no means encompass all of the important and excellent work of our faculty and students, but they serve to focus our narrative, while acknowledging our breadth. This narrative has, among other things, structured my twice-a-year external Dean’s advisory board meetings: at each meeting, we have reported on one of these themes. Four of the five have been addressed so far, with the final one scheduled for spring 2018. I’ll address the themes in that chronological order.
The first theme is the digital revolution in CAS: embracing the evolving powers of data analytics and infusing the disciplines of the college—from the humanities to the natural sciences—with the opportunities presented by data science. In this area we have worked hard in the past two years to hire multiple faculty in the departments of computer science and mathematics & statistics in order to meet surging student demand. We have also hired a number of faculty who use computational tools and methods in their research in sociology, political science, economics, literature, and the natural sciences. In fall 2016, CAS teamed with the BU Center for the Humanities and the Hariri Institute to host a seminar in digital humanities for faculty and graduate students. I hosted a conversation with Boston-area deans and faculty on the digital revolution in the liberal arts and sciences. In summer 2017, we launched BU in San Francisco, an internship experience for students in the tech industry in Silicon Valley. This academic year, a yearlong Mellon Foundation-funded Sawyer seminar on Humanities and Technology at the Crossroads is taking on epistemological, ethical, and social issues in computation and new media.
The second theme is climate change and sustainability, for which we highlighted the work of the department of earth and environment in our board meeting and with an Alumni College event in fall 2016. The Earth House living-learning community has been relaunched, and there is now a minor in sustainable energy. A new NSF-funded, interdisciplinary graduate student training grant, led by Professor Pamela Templer of the department of biology, will train students to address foundational questions about the physical environment and reduce the impacts of the environment on both ecosystem function and human health. This fall, the university’s draft Climate Action Plan was made public. The plan’s call for curriculum development provides, I believe, a blueprint for exciting new pathways through general education for our students, as I will explain shortly.
The third theme is highlighting the humanities as a crucial component of a liberal education and critical perspective on our technological age. We focused on the work of humanists and the BU Center for the Humanities in our spring 2017 advisory board meeting. This summer we named two new endowed professorships in the humanities. The BUCH hosted its first annual forum, this one on the topic of libraries and archives in the digital age. We have begun a campaign to raise funds for a new physical home for the BUCH, where we can hold seminars, colloquia, and outreach events, in addition to housing faculty fellows.
As a fourth theme, we highlighted our strong neuroscience programs at this fall’s CAS advisory board meeting. The meeting included a neuroscience-focused Alumni College program and coincided with the naming of the Rajen Kilachand Center for Integrated Life Science and Engineering, which houses some of the outstanding faculty working in neuroscience, and the $115 million endowment gift to fund research in the life sciences. Several excellent junior hires in neuroscience-related areas have been made in CAS in the past two years, including three in the department of psychological and brain sciences (PBS), two in biology, and one in philosophy, with additional ongoing searches in biology and PBS.
The final theme, which will be the focus of our spring 2018 CAS advisory board meeting, is understanding the roots of inequality and the requirements of justice, and embracing our special role as educators in creating social mobility by increasing accessibility of a BU education for talented students regardless of family income. In this upcoming advisory board meeting, we are planning to highlight the important research of our faculty on various topics related to inequality, as well as discussing how to raise more funding for financial aid. Related to the latter, President Brown in his recent State of the University letter reported the outstanding results in admissions from committing more funding to financial aid for low-income students. Not only have we raised the portion of Pell grant-eligible students in the incoming class from 14.6 to 18.2%, but we also have the most diverse class ever – a majority minority among the domestic students. As my own research concerns both oppression and educational inequality, I am especially eager to highlight research that falls under these themes, and have begun to convene a faculty group to discuss how we might do so.
As we in CAS continue to build out our offerings in the BU Hub, I propose that we build pathways around each of these themes. One of them, the interdisciplinary humanities, is already well underway as the Core Curriculum reshapes itself to achieve Hub learning outcomes through its integrated great books curriculum. I propose that we build pathways, loosely modeled on the Core, to guide our students through integrated curricula focused on each of the other four areas: the digital revolution, environmental sustainability, mind and brain, and inequality and social change. This approach would provide students with a suite of choices, each creating a cohort of fellow students and focusing on the depth and breadth of offerings in CAS. Of course, many of our students would continue to take an a la carte menu of courses. But for those students who seek more guidance and coherence for their pathway through general education, these themes can fill an important need. This idea is only in the early stages of development. I am seeking faculty who are eager to champion one of these themes, and I welcome your ideas and input.