Students are arriving on campus this week, and their excitement is palpable on Comm Ave. I hope you have had a wonderful summer and are feeling refreshed and ready to start a new academic year. I had a fabulous summer of travel, reading, writing, and outdoor adventures—including climbing Mt. Bierstadt, a “fourteener” in Colorado, with my son. I also had a chance to take a step back from the minutiae of memos and meetings to engage in some longer discussions and think deeper thoughts about the nature of liberal education, its place in the contemporary world, and the role of BU’s College of Arts & Sciences as Boston University’s standard-bearer for liberal education. I plan to share some of these thoughts with you through my Dean’s Notes throughout the year. For this first Note of the year, I would like to preview some of the themes I have identified for the upcoming year, and which I will be talking about in our first CAS faculty meeting on September 21.
The overarching theme that frames all of my thoughts about BU and CAS is that, fundamentally, we seek continually to build and foster a vibrant intellectual community. Our students, staff, and faculty are united by a common purpose and shared values; we welcome and celebrate diversity of thought, perspective, and background, and we seek excellence. We aim to nurture students to become thoughtful, engaged, and informed world citizens, and to create new knowledge that benefits humanity. This mission inspires and energizes me every day, as I hope it does you.
My second theme is faculty. CAS’s faculty are our foundational strength, and it is through our faculty that we will continue to grow and expand our influence and impact. By hiring, mentoring, and supporting the work of a great and diverse faculty, we maintain and strengthen our reputation as a major research university. We will welcome 28 new professorial rank faculty members and 11 full-time lecturers this year to CAS; soon I will announce searches to be conducted during the coming academic year. I expect that the President will soon make public the report from the Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion and his plans for follow-up; in CAS, we will pursue its strategies to further diversify the faculty, and we will also seek to hire scholars of race, gender, and sexuality to strengthen our scholarship in those areas. Mentoring faculty will be an area of expanded emphasis in CAS this year, beginning with orientations and workshops for new faculty, but also introducing a new series of workshops for mid-career faculty. I will also facilitate discussions of how annual merit reviews can be better used to mentor faculty at all levels. These efforts bring us together and strengthen our intellectual community by making explicit our shared norms and values.
The BU Hub is my third theme. Many of you have been invited to serve on various committees that will help develop and implement this new university-wide general education program. There can be no doubt that CAS, as the home of liberal education at BU, should play a leadership role in this endeavor. We provide instruction in foundational disciplinary and critical, integrative thinking across disciplines for all BU students; our students also stand to gain from the ability to enrich their studies with courses in BU’s fine professional schools. Now is the time for our faculty to think creatively and collaboratively about how we can work together to provide the fundamentals of liberal education for all BU students and make room for stimulating cross-college and co-curricular experimentation and learning.
A fourth theme that I will focus on this year is experiential learning, which is learning through structured out-of-classroom experiences that connect the classroom with issues, challenges, and opportunities in the greater world. These include: study abroad, independent research, internships, and service learning. Such experiences are particularly important for arts and sciences students, because these students tend to have fewer opportunities within the curriculum to engage with kinds of issues they will take on when they enter the world of work. The BU Hub gives us the opportunity to think about how we complement coursework with experiential learning in and out of the classroom for our undergrads. We will also be developing more internship opportunities this year through the CAS On-Campus Internship program and a new BU in San Francisco program pioneered by the Computer Science Department.
Finally, I want to mention the theme of fundraising–and the continuing success of the Campaign for BU. The work we do with alumni and donors is all part of building our vibrant intellectual community; it enables us to start new initiatives and improve the work we are already doing. I look forward to a busy schedule of development travel this fall. I find it energizing to be the conduit between donors and CAS, sharing with them the exciting things happening here, and involving them in our inspiring work.
Welcome back. Let’s have a great year!