CREATING OUR FUTURE, 2010-2020: THE STRATEGIC PLAN OF THE COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES PART II: DEPARTMENT, PROGRAM, & OTHER UNIT PLANS April 2010 CAS Strategic Plan, 2010-2020 Part IIA: Academic Departments Table of Contents Anthropology Archaeology Art History Astronomy Biology Chemistry Classical Studies Cognitive & Neural Systems Computer Science Earth Sciences Economics English Geography & Environment History International Relations Mathematics & Statistics Modern Languages & Comparative Literature Music Philosophy Physics Political Sciences Psychology Religion Romance Studies Sociology Part IIA: Academic Departments Department of Anthropology Strategic Plan, 2010-2020 A. Mission Statement Anthropology is the study of all aspects of human life—from our biological evolution to our modern societies, religions, and economies. Our productive and respected faculty excels in strategically chosen geographic and theoretical areas in social and biological anthropology. Our teaching offers the breadth and depth to prepare undergraduate majors for graduate programs, the NGO world, and professional careers. Graduate teaching guides students toward new findings and trains them to compete for top jobs in academics and applied fields of anthropology. We also offer students across the University a basis in cultural and biological comparison. We contribute to Boston University’s missions to build global strength and develop interdisciplinary links. B. The Present 1. Peer Group We initially compared a group of 31 schools to BU as possible peers. We chose them based on relatively similar size of student body, similar size of anthropology faculty, presence of a biological anthropology program, and similar rankings from U.S. News and World Report. On this larger list, only four departments are smaller than we are, and all of those are at much smaller institutions. The average size is 28.3, roughly one-third larger than BU. The six we chose to compare ourselves to represent both state and private schools, moderately close to us by all measures of size and coverage of anthropology. Of those, NYU Anthropology has had a large university investment, but nevertheless has pursued a strategy similar to ours—becoming exceptional at a few things rather than trying to cover all things the way far larger departments can do. We judge ourselves to be below the level of NYU at this point, but clearly above the University of Connecticut in both social and biological anthropology. We are very roughly comparable at this point to Santa Cruz, USC, Cornell (in biological but arguably not yet in social), and Colorado-Boulder (in biological, but arguably better in social). Very few measurable data are available for the comparison beyond these raw numbers. Note that only BU has a separate Archaeology Department. 2. Faculty Publishing, grant, and citation expectations differ significantly between social and biological anthropology, and this plan will thus consider them separately. We have no research appointments and only one full-time lecturer as a temporary arrangement, so we limit discussion here to faculty at regular ranks. Every single member of the faculty is research-active. In so far as can be judged, they are more successful bringing in grants, more productive in publishing, and better cited as a group than at comparable departments elsewhere. Among social anthropologists, for example, two books are normally expected for promotion to full professor at research universities, and most people orient publishing more toward books than articles. The average for our department’s seven full professors is 9.1 (including edited books), far above the minimum expectation. In the last three years alone, our social anthropologists have published 13 books, and there is one further from a biological anthropologist. Most of these have appeared from the top academic presses, including Blackwell, Oxford, Princeton, and Yale. Members of our faculty, for instance, account for five of the seventeen books in Princeton’s prestigious Studies in Muslim Politics series. Biological anthropologists instead publish primarily articles, and citation indexes are more useful for them. We currently have only three faculty members in this subfield. Two of them have been very actively cited in the last three years (382 for the most senior and 247 for the more junior in Web of Science); the third is only in his second year out of the PhD, but already has 15 citations. They have also published in some of the top peer-reviewed Anthropology — 1 Part IIA: Academic Departments journals in the field in the past three years, including Proceedings of the Royal Academy B, Science and Journal of Human Evolution. Recent awards and honors recognizing faculty quality include Robert Hefner’s election as President of the Association for Asian Studies, Tom Barfield’s service as President of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies, and Jenny White’s presidencies of the Turkish Studies Association and of the Middle East Section of the AAA. Equally notable, Parker Shipton was awarded the Herskovits Prize by the Association for African Studies. In 2002, Fredrik Barth (now emeritus) was Distinguished Lecturer of the AAA. Biological anthropologists tend to get more and larger grants than social anthropologists, and this has tended to be true so far, even though none of the current biological faculty has been here more than three years. Since 2006, biological anthropology has brought in $1.1 million in grants (including those Knott brought from Harvard). Social anthropologists have been active as well, bringing in over $900,000 in grants over the same period. Many grants are from prestigious sources, including two Guggenheims, two Fulbrights, five NSFs, and others. The total comes to about $2 million, although not all these grants ran through the department. One problem with these measures is that there are no comparable figures available from competing departments. Furthermore, the only regular ranking of anthropology departments is the NRC exercise, which has still not been completed as of this writing. Even after it appears, their next report will be more than a decade from now, which greatly limits its utility for planning. Nevertheless, on the basis of our experience of other departments, we feel that our per capita levels of grants and publications compare very well with our peers, although we are much smaller than comparable departments at the highest-ranked institutions. Our strategy over two decades has been to build ourselves gradually into a top program in a few specialized areas rather than trying to cover everything in a more shallow way. Social anthropologists typically measure themselves along two lines: areas of ethnographic expertise and areas of theoretical significance. Ethnographically, the department has concentrated on developing three overlapping strengths: Africa, Asia broadly conceived, and the Islamic world. To an extent, of course, these specialties mesh with strengths of the entire University, and many of us have been closely involved in those developments. We compare well to other anthropology departments in all three of these areas, and certainly rank as one of the top few in the anthropology of Islam. Faculty research invokes a wide range of theoretical concerns, but we have a number of important synergies for which we are known. One is the study of religion and modernity. We are also known for work on problems of trust and civil society. Another concentration of energies is developing on issues of youth culture. In biological anthropology, the situation is still changing because we are in the midst of our plans to build up to five positions. Our three current faculty give us noteworthy strength in the study of primatology, great ape biology, and human evolution, utilizing multiple perspectives and techniques. With the addition of two more positions, we expect to have an outstanding program for a department of our size. One major indicator of success in program development is the number of graduate applications specifically addressed to our areas of expertise. Applications clearly converge on main faculty strengths. Another measure is requests to come as one-year visiting scholars (usually with Fulbright or comparable funding). This has increased from essentially none two decades ago to a constant stream leading to two-to- three scholars in residence every year. In teaching, performance is probably best measured by course evaluations. Here the department has maintained high expectations, while understanding that large introductory lecture courses may typically get lower evaluations. In general, we expect ratings of course and instructor to be around 4.0 or higher. Cases where they fall below 3.5 receive attention, including discussions about ways of improving. For this purpose, evaluations are supplemented by periodic peer reviews of classes. In anthropology, only a few courses have fallen much below our expectations, and we have been able to ameliorate by offering help or occasionally by staffing changes. We expect faculty to develop new courses every few years, but the main measure of teaching quality will continue to be the evaluations. The Anthropology Department has generally tried to have all faculty maintain a balance between larger and smaller classes, and between undergraduate and graduate teaching. No one teaches only graduate seminars; no one teaches only large undergraduate courses. Even faculty with administrative course releases continue to teach 100- and 200-level