Friday, October 12, 2007—Endurance

When about 115 members of the Stonehill faculty met on Tuesday to spend the morning discussing how to support a culture of academic integrity, then ate lunch together and spent the afternoon reviewing the work of a faculty committee on course and credit models, I found myself thinking: “How have we created this faculty culture of self-evaluation, dialogue, and trust?”

I remembered a day back in early 2001 when Registrar Linda Sullivan, hard at work on the 2001-02 academic calendar, asked if I would like to use an "extra" Monday in the calendar for any kind of academic purpose. Out of that conversation Academic Development Day was born—a day now set aside each semester for faculty conversation about topics related to teaching and learning. This semester’s meeting was our thirteenth, and the record attendance, the spirited discussion, and the obvious good will in Alumni Hall made me certain that thirteen is a lucky number.

Back on our first Academic Development Day, Prof. Sue Mooney, who had just become our inaugural Dean of General Education, offered reflections on what was needed to move our Gen Ed agenda forward. Fifty-five current full-time faculty members and a significant number of academic administrators have been hired since that time, so let me take a moment to anchor you in 2001—and to remind those who were here for the discussion that day about the theme Sue chose.

Sue spoke of seeing a new film about Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 Antarctic expedition involving 28 men, 69 dogs, two pigs and one cat on a ship that would endure nine months trapped in the frozen seas before being crushed by shifting ice. You know the ending was happy—for the human travelers at least—but Sue focused on how the adventure on the ship called “Endurance” might offer lessons to the Stonehill faculty.

My favorite of her observations: “The men on the Endurance were an unlikely crew, a mix of professional, educated men and uneducated seamen. Men from the aristocracy and men from the slums. A moody artist, a fractious carpenter, a ground-breaking photographer, a nerdy scientist, a captain enamored of the ship and rather indifferent to the crew, even a young stowaway. Somehow, this group of very different men became a true community, trusting one another and cooperating under the most challenging of circumstances.”

She didn’t imply that we were quite such a motley crew, but she did suggest that we would need to work harder at working together to achieve our goals—that we must reach out “to colleagues all across this campus, beyond the smaller communities we form so naturally with those in our discipline or allied disciplines. . . . [T]he only way for us to achieve our goals, in general education and in other issues of concern to the faculty here at Stonehill, is to become a trusting, caring community.”

I believe that’s the community that was in place in 2001—and the community that showed up on Tuesday (with many new members aboard) for Academic Development Day #13. Led and inspired by Dr. Donald McCabe, Professor of Management and Global Business, Rutgers University and Founding President of the Center for Academic Integrity, our morning conversations pushed us all to think about the ways we can build and sustain a culture that encourages student responsibility, that responds to academic dishonesty consistently when it occurs, and that uses (and shares) campus resources, such as the new Center for Teaching and Learning, to bring faculty members together around clarifying expectations for student work and continually developing creative and fair forms of learning assessment.

I’d like to thank the Honor Code Task Force, led by Dr. Marylou Jackson, for all the substantive research and work that brought us to this point. Members include: Roger Denome (Biology), Beth Devonshire (Director of Community Standards), Pauline Dobrowski (Associate VP for Student Affairs), Joe Favazza (Dean of General Education and Interdisciplinary Studies), Denise Gannon (Campus Minister), Kathleen Joint (Associate Director of Academic Services), and George Piggford, C.S.C. (English).

The afternoon discussions about proposals to move to a graduation requirement based on credits rather than courses also brought out great collegial discussion among faculty members and academic administrators. Many thanks to the course and credit committee, which completed its own feat of endurance over Summer 2007 to bring us this proposal: Karen Anderson (Education), Scott Cohen (English), Roger Denome (Biology), Joe Favazza (Dean of General Education), Glen Ilacqua (Business Administration), Daniel Itzkovitz, (English), John Pestana (Registrar), Allyson Sheckler (Fine Arts), and Karen Talentino (Dean of Faculty).

We won’t always come to complete agreement on the significant matters that Academic Development Day invites us to confront. But I think we’ve come a long way together. We continue to build a faculty ethos of respect, curiosity, responsibility, inquiry, affirmation—and even endurance—that must surely rub off on our students as they rig out their own vessels and explore their own uncharted waters.

Best regards,
Katie