Friday, October 26, 2007--Something about Stonehill

As some of you know, I’ve been away from Stonehill for about 10 days—on three different work-related projects. On Thursday and Friday of last week, I attended a meeting sponsored by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC), the accrediting body that reviews Stonehill and other New England schools and colleges every ten years. This workshop was intended to prepare colleges coming up for review in 2009 for the self-study and campus visit that are important elements of the accreditation process.

On Sunday I joined four academics from other institutions (three faculty members and a librarian) as part of a team named by the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education to undertake an intensive review of a college seeking to add new programs that would change the nature of its charter. It was an exhausting four days of working late into the night—indeed into the early morning!—to understand that college’s unique culture and to evaluate the quality of the programs they were proposing.

Both the NEASC workshop and the off-site curriculum review reminded me that our profession depends in so many ways on peer review. We think about it most with our scholarship, but in fact, all kinds of institutional accreditations and program approvals rely on peer evaluation to hold colleges to the professional standards we have agreed on as institutions of higher learning. We may sometimes take this for granted, but among the interesting things about being at a young college is that we actually have colleagues among us who remember when the College was first accredited! And it was an enormous accomplishment.

After finishing up the review on Wednesday, I flew to Washington D.C. on Thursday to join a Stonehill team that included Louis Liotta, Sue Mooney, and Karen Talentino for a conference called “Promoting the Liberal Sciences: Science as Liberal Education,” sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society and the American Conference of Academic Deans. We made a 90-minute presentation on two curricular developments at Stonehill that we argued promote the sciences as liberated from narrow specialization and liberating in developing the broad and deep scientific literacy required for engaged citizenship.

As all of you know, there’s nothing like getting away to make one feel that there’s something about Stonehill. Something good. Something to appreciate.

In fact, the most powerful aspect of all three of my own experiences over the last ten days was an informal kind of "peer review"--hearing about Stonehill’s reputation and profile among the other academics I met. I found people who knew and admired a faculty member or knew and respected a faculty member’s work. Or they had been on our campus and were stunned by the physical beauty of the place. Or they identified Stonehill as being a “hot” school that was doing innovative things.

As the other Stonehill folks at the PBK/ACAD meeting can attest, many people we met who did not know of Stonehill before today were impressed with our spirit of engagement and with the curricular efforts we described. In fact, one conference speaker began his own presentation by commenting on the “inspirational” Stonehill session he had just attended!

We met junior faculty members from colleges with far more resources than Stonehill who said that they could not ever team-teach at their own institutions, so the idea of Learning Communities with a third course that counts fully in each faculty member’s course load was mind-boggling to them. Between sessions, one such junior faculty member confided wistfully that he’d like to be “one of us.”

Sometimes, when we get bogged down with our campus responsibilities and the day-to-day minutiae of our jobs, we lose sight of the great community we really are—a community where I know there’s a good deal of faculty collegiality and where I think there’s relatively little tension between faculty and administration. Getting away can offer some perspective about what really matters, and this week it offered me insights into just how much we have to celebrate.

Best regards,
Katie