SKIDMORE COLLEGE SELF-STUDY

FINAL REPORT

Submitted to the

Middle States Commission on Higher Education

Skidmore College

Saratoga Springs, New York 12866

February 2006

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 1

SKIDMORE COLLEGE SELF-STUDY FINAL REPORT

Introduction

Students who are intellectually engaged: we know them when we see them. But we don’t always see them, and we aren’t necessarily sure how to bring this engagement about—we aren’t even sure we know how to define the student behavior patterns and attitudes that transform the classroom, laboratory, library, studio, and museum into exciting places of learning. In preparing for our Middle States report this past year, we asked a group of faculty working on outcomes assessment to find out from faculty colleagues just what they associate with student “engagement.” We then compressed the results into the following working definition: “We understand students to be engaged when they demonstrate that they are learning actively and energetically; when they extend their learning beyond an individual course, and even beyond their academic curriculum; when they pose questions, undertake extra work, collaborate effectively with each other, draw connections, think critically, take responsibility, show enthusiasm for and commitment to their learning—in a combination of some or all of these.”1 Presented with evidence that will be reviewed in this report, we came to believe that we must engage our students in the residential college more effectively and creatively at Skidmore, especially in the first year; in the natural sciences; and in learning about cultural differences—based principally on race, ethnicity, social class, gender, and sexuality—and intercultural understanding, both in the United States and in the world beyond our borders. These three general areas of inquiry thus form the substance of the three chapters that follow. We must also be sure we are challenging our students with a rigorous academic program, providing the support they need to succeed, and motivating them to take charge of their own education and to commit to a life of learning beyond college. We would do well to investigate further the relationship between engagement and learning. These tend to appear to be inextricable, but in our open discussions of this self-study’s earlier drafts, some faculty raised probing questions: can students be engaged— enthusiastically paying attention and putting in time—without learning what we want them to learn, or what they seek to learn? Can students be learning—mastering quantities of essential knowledge in a discipline, for example—while remaining somewhat disengaged? We know engaged students when we see them, but we have only just begun to ascertain whether in the aggregate they are learning what we want them to learn.2 Nor are we certain that engaging students always means challenging

1 Student Engagement: Faculty Survey Reports (Appendix C), also available online at http://www.skidmore.edu/administration/assessment/Student%20Engagement%20Survey%20Reports.htm. 2 For reports on our assessments of student learning, independent of engagement, see the Report on Assessment of Critical Inquiry Revealed by Senior Papers, 2005 (Appendix D); Report on Assessment of Senior Writing, 2005 (Appendix E); and Summary of Department Assessments as of Summer 2005 (Appendix F). The many discussions of this subject in a variety of contexts made it clear to the steering committee that there is community-wide support for and interest in our focus on student engagement,

2 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

them to the highest levels of learning and accomplishment of which they are capable. Accordingly, we seek to understand how greater academic challenge might contribute to increased student engagement; how we might ensure that engagement leads students to learn, independently and with increasing complexity and depth; and how we might continue to cultivate an intellectual environment that celebrates the life of the mind, both for its own sake and in the service of others. In sum, though the process of this self-study has helped us begin to understand how and where our students are most and least engaged, and though consequently we have already begun to adjust our curriculum and our pedagogies, we have also come to realize how much more we have to learn. We can learn a great deal, of course, from the students who do engage to an exceptional degree with the faculty and with objects of study in the advancement of learning. As we sought to define how we understand “engagement,” we collected dozens of examples from faculty to ascertain where they see our students most engaged. Here is one case in point: in the spring of 2005, as part of their capstone course in Environmental Studies, ten Skidmore students spent nearly every weekend out in the tributaries of the Kayaderosseras Creek, talking with local community members and collecting data about this watershed that is emerging as central in the city’s controversies over expanding water sources. The students had helped launch the College’s Water Resources Initiative (WRI), an ambitious project that spans a number of disciplines and political and social contexts. For our students, it was an intensely lived experience: literally and metaphorically, they got their feet wet. Spending long hours in the field, they then shaped their research into presentations that they would deliver during the College’s Academic Festival in May. During the final week before the festival, their class period typically ran an hour over, as they insisted on staying until every team member had presented information and perspectives and received the group’s feedback. The students’ three-hour session on Academic Festival day drew a large audience of fellow students, faculty, and members from several community groups. The air was charged with interest in the students’ work; it was hard to draw the meeting to a close. We learned that in the WRI we had found an effective model for motivating students to become fully engaged, to do excellent work, and to demonstrate what they had learned in a context that was meaningful to all of the participants. Interdisciplinary, problem- based learning, community-based research, civic responsibility, public controversy, collaborative projects, oral presentation in a public context: these elements all contributed to an extraordinary level of student engagement. This is just one of the countless examples of engaged learning that faculty provided to the Middle States Steering Committee as we began our exploration of the strategies, resources, and institutional atmosphere most likely to elicit the very best from our students. A few more examples of effectively engaged student learning:

particularly in relation to student achievement. We must note that one faculty member in a major committee made a strong statement against the report’s focus, arguing instead that we should be focusing on what the faculty needs to deliver an excellent education.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 3

• A history professor relays e-mails from students who didn’t want the discussion to end when class ends: one says, “After class I kept thinking. I am really struggling to articulate this argument. . . . I’ve looked at some stuff from Beard and re-read the part in Grestle about parks, and have this article from 1925 . . . thanks so much for your help. Class was fiery and great today.” An engaged discussion leads a student to do extra reading, find more sources, and take an intellectual leap. • A student in “Introduction to Anthropology” goes to her professor about constructing a family genealogy after spending the summer back home in Egypt. Her professor writes, “She was already thinking about differences in systems— what to do with fictive kin, or real kin acting in a ‘fictive’ capacity, or whether to look at it as a completely different system. She was also thinking hard about the likely dodges she would receive, power dynamics and the role of the patriarch, and her exceptional gender status when she returns.” The student has learned analytic tools for understanding both her own and other cultures and is moving to the next level, modifying the tools to address more complex circumstances even as she learns to appreciate their explanatory power. • A biology instructor describes the four-week experiment her students performed outside of lab time: “Each student sowed fern spores on agar plates, then carefully monitored development from spore to sporophyte. . . . All students spent many weekend and evening hours completing and writing about this experiment. Now students are asking to plant the ferns that they grew from spores and several have told me that they want to gather the spores that their ferns produce and see what happens to the mutation in the next generation! . . . By the way, the resultant paper was only worth 5% of their total course grade.” Grades, we know, do not always reflect engagement or learning—nor do they always motivate these. What does motivate students, in this case, seems to be the connection to living things using instruments and techniques that empower a more advanced level of understanding. We gauge their engagement in terms of their time and their attentiveness beyond the bounds prescribed in the grading scale, but also in the more elusive sense of their own and the instructor’s enthusiasm for the project.

Students themselves, and alumni, have also provided the Middle States Steering Committee compelling stories about their engagement while at Skidmore. One alumna responded to a questionnaire about the impact of her study abroad on her studies and life since college: “I traveled to Belize, Central America and worked on several archaeological digs that focused on the ancient Maya culture. . . . We lived with our peers. . . . However, we worked daily on the archaeological digs with local men who lived in a small village . . .” She went on to describe what she learned from these men of Mayan descent about excavation, the local flora and fauna, and Mayan culture. Back at Skidmore for her senior year, she completed her Studio Art major as well as a concentration in archaeology. Working on her Ph.D. in archaeology, she returned to Belize, where increasingly she was integrating her skills as an artist into her fieldwork, a combination she had begun while a student here. “Today,” she wrote, “I am writing

4 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

my dissertation on the ancient Maya culture, specifically focusing on a series of ancient settlements that I excavated in the Sibun Valley . . . ” In the process, this alumna has received a major MacArthur Foundation award in support of her doctoral project, which combines her work as an artist and as an archaeologist. Clearly, it would be possible to fill hundreds of pages with anecdotes about our students engaged in learning. These anecdotes remind us of just how varied and unpredictable this terrain is, and how often it comes down to the individual student, the individual faculty member, an unusual dialog, the sudden moment embedded in the long process. These are the galvanizing connections that we all look for, that transform our students and, along the way, our faculty. The faculty who sent in the anecdotes often injected an unsolicited note about their own engagement: “I was thrilled . . . ,” “It was really nice for me to see . . . ,” “This one makes me very proud to be in our profession,” “And, needless to say, it feeds my enthusiasm, which in turn, further engages them. It’s been remarkable!” Engagement, it seems, works both ways—or perhaps all ways, not just in dialog, but in the energy and commitment of a community in intellectual and creative exchanges. Our focus in this study, however, is the students. We open with these anecdotes to keep our study firmly anchored in our students’ lived experiences as they pursue their Skidmore educations. We know that our faculty could also recount many other moments of frustration, disappointment, and disengagement. Many faculty conversations over the years have kept before us the evidence of too many students who do not invest enough energy in the learning process, and whose tenuous links with the academic community diminish the educational experience for significant numbers of other students. In the past several years, as the following report will reveal, more systematic studies of Skidmore students’ attitudes and commitments have deepened our concern for those not yet fulfilling their best potential. The goal we set for ourselves in this study is to understand better what engages and challenges our students, and to provide the understanding that will help us set in motion initiatives to expand, deepen, and multiply those experiences.

* * *

The College’s decision to focus on student engagement in this self-study dates to our earliest planning for the Middle States re-accreditation, in the spring of 2004. Our reasons were several. Skidmore went into this periodic review in a rather different place than we occupied ten years ago, at the time of our last review. We were at that time in the midst of a presidency that had successfully consolidated the remarkable achievements of the previous presidency: we were settled into our new campus and into our relatively new identity as a more academically balanced and stronger coeducational liberal arts college. This year, in contrast, we have a relatively new president, Philip Glotzbach, in his third year, and we have just embarked on a new campaign that emerges from six years of strategic planning. We have made major conceptual changes in our core curriculum for the first time in some twenty years, and have just begun to

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 5

revise the structure and curricula of our University Without Walls and our Master of Arts in Liberal Studies as well, now under the auspices of Academic Affairs.3 And we have heightened ambitions for the College, articulated both in our Academic Vision Statement of 2003 and, most recently, in our Strategic Plan (Engaged Liberal Learning: The Plan for Skidmore College, 2005-2015): to continue to strengthen our faculty and student body, to expand our facilities, to maintain our position as a top-tier liberal arts college, and to challenge every student to achieve full engagement with a rigorous and transformative academic experience.4 Perhaps most important, our extensive work on strategic planning initiated by our previous president, Jamienne Studley, and refined and extended under the leadership of President Glotzbach and Dean Charles Joseph (now Vice President for Academic Affairs), constitute a self-evaluation more informed and comprehensive than at any time in our history. The documentation included in our Middle States review to demonstrate compliance with all of the standards reveals the scope of our undertaking during that planning process. Over the past three years, Dean/Vice President Joseph led the faculty through a process of defining our academic vision and shaping changes to our curriculum in response to the Academic Vision Statement and to the information we have gathered. Our Office of Institutional Research, led by Director and Registrar Ann Henderson, also gathers substantive information routinely so that our decision making is informed by essential data. Our Director of Assessment 2002-2005, Ray Rodrigues, was instrumental in guiding the College towards more pervasive and substantial assessment both at the departmental level and college-wide. Our new Strategic Plan, with its emerging implementation, has thus arisen out of the College’s most exhaustive and information-rich planning process ever. Furthermore, new senior appointments—our two new academic deans arrived on campus in time this fall to further the curricular goals of the Strategic Plan—help us strengthen our collective concept of a broadly-based academic community. For Skidmore offers a more complex educational environment than it sometimes recognizes in itself. Our residential undergraduate population, which numbers some 2,200 students, is one part of a complex whole: our nonresidential degree students have been an important part of the school for several decades, and our vibrant summer institutes bring in young-adult, college-age, and adult students from across the country and the globe. Indeed, the intrinsically interdisciplinary mission of our Special Programs and the range of opportunities it affords to our residential students contribute to the residential college experience in ways that are critical to the mission of the College as a whole. Given the liberty by the Middle States Commission to make the best possible use of the accreditation process, we decided on a focused self-study to consider the ways we are challenging our students to engage fully in their education at Skidmore. When we participated in the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) two years ago, some of the results confirmed what we had known anecdotally about our

3 For a brief summary of Skidmore College today, see the institutional profile (Appendix A). 4 Skidmore College Academic Vision Statement, August 2003 (Appendix G); Strategic Plan, available online at http://www.skidmore.edu/planning/index.htm.

6 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

educational successes and disappointments, while other data in the report surprised us.5 Most striking were the differences between first-year students’ and seniors’ responses in the categories associated with student-faculty interaction and academic engagement. We had been pioneers in the world of first-year curricula when in 1985 we launched our new interdisciplinary Liberal Studies Program targeted especially to first- and second- year students, and evolving versions of the Liberal Studies curriculum for the past twenty years have been a hallmark of a Skidmore education; we were thus concerned about what we found. In addition, we knew that it was becoming increasingly difficult to staff the Liberal Studies courses with full-time faculty. We have also known for some years that we typically lose 10% or more of the entering class after the first year, while our aspirant and several of our peer institutions do not. We wondered too whether our further loss of 8-9% of the sophomore class might be caused in part by the absence of a powerful connection for too many of our students during their first year. NSSE data show evidence that our seniors are fully engaged, at a level equal to or greater than our peer institutions. Consequently, we have been particularly concerned about inspiring stronger academic, cocurricular, and personal links for our students during their first year. A closer look at the NSSE data and related Skidmore studies helps define the challenges ahead of us and suggests a number of strategies for engaging and retaining more of our students. The NSSE survey is a complex instrument, reporting on a wide range of matters, and some of us have questioned the measures the survey uses to gauge engagement; our own definition of the term embraces not only behaviors that can be quantified (such as time spent on task, one NSSE measure) but also affect that can be very difficult to measure (enthusiasm for learning, sense of intellectually satisfying connection to the faculty or to peers). Some of us are more skeptical about the value of the NSSE results than others, and we hope that our own future work on assessing student engagement might challenge the NSSE instrument in more detail. But whatever questions we raise about the instrument, the survey results point to some consistencies that are disquieting. The pattern of first-year students’ behaviors and attitudes is consistent across the study: they report being slightly less engaged relative to students at other liberal arts colleges than we might expect them to be, based on our profile as a college. (NSSE surveys first-year students and seniors, so we have no data on students in their second and third year.) Data descriptions of our seniors are more encouraging: by their fourth year, our students appear to be slightly more engaged than we might expect. While we can be pleased that the seniors appear to reverse the trends of disengagement we can see among the first-years, the data on our first-years are nevertheless sobering. Of the other eighty colleges that participated in the survey that year, only four are among our identified peer colleges, and none are aspirant peers.6 Thus, even though we might be said to be a stronger college than most of the NSSE participants by a variety of

5 National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), 2003 Skidmore College Report (Appendix H). 6 For purposes of institutional comparisons and benchmarking, we use the following list of peer colleges: Bates, Bard, Colgate, Connecticut, Dickinson, Franklin and Marshall, Gettysburg, Hamilton, Kenyon, Oberlin, St. Lawrence, Sarah Lawrence, Trinity, Union, Vassar, and Wheaton.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 7

measures, our first-year students appear to be less engaged than those of many other four-year colleges, as measured by the NSSE survey. This apparent shortfall of engagement among our first-years holds for nearly every measure in the survey. For example, the report includes data on the hours students report spending to prepare for class; the number and nature of written assignments, readings, presentations, and other activities; the intellectual nature of the coursework; time spent collaborating with faculty and with other students; feedback received on assignments; perceived quality of advising and support services; and general campus climate, among a large number of related measures.7 Taken as a whole, the NSSE survey reveals that significant numbers of our first- year students appear to find their academic work less challenging than do students at other colleges; our students seem to engage in less active and collaborative learning than do other first-year students; in their first year our students report having less frequent and less engaged interaction with the faculty than do their peers elsewhere; our first-years experience and anticipate slightly fewer enriching educational experiences; and they find the campus environment somewhat less supportive than do students at other colleges. We had known about some of these real and perceived shortfalls from previous inquiries, but especially disconcerting for Skidmore faculty and staff were the students’ lackluster assessments of the intellectual challenge of our first-year courses and of the collaborative links between faculty and students. These results, surprising in their consistency, dovetailed with a very different, qualitative study undertaken on campus in 1999-2000, the Student Cultures Report (whose full title is Examining Student Cultures: A Report to President Jamienne Studley on Selected Findings of the Skidmore College Student Cultures Project; see Appendix J). This project was undertaken by a group of student researchers under the guidance of Associate Professor of Sociology Susan Walzer, Assistant Professor of Psychology Patricia Colby, then-Director of the Higher Education Opportunity Program Susan Layden, and Dean of Student Affairs Thomas P. Oles. Although never officially published to the community, the report was featured in a memorable pedagogy workshop for faculty and was discussed in many other meetings; consequently, it has had a significant impact on the ways we think about our students. In particular, its insights helped shape the report of the Committee on Retention (December 2003), in turn a document that has been influential in our most recent strategic planning process. The Student Cultures Report has had an impact on our planning for structural changes in the administration, changes that are just now coming to fruition. And its findings on the ways our students look for connections between their coursework and the world beyond the College have influenced our quest to strengthen and expand opportunities for service learning, internships, and problem-based learning, one of the major goals articulated in the Academic Vision Statement and the Strategic Plan. Indeed, we received a substantial Mellon Grant in June 2004 to pursue several of these projects for building a stronger academic community especially among first-year students, and they are unfolding this year.

7 The Benchmark Report condenses this information into eight clear, concise pages; our own Office of Institutional Research also issued a report summarizing the most cogent results (see Appendix I: Skidmore College Institutional Benchmark Report [NSSE], November 2003).

8 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

The Student Cultures Report offers qualitative and narrative insights into our students’ attitudes, and in that sense it complements the more quantitative results of the NSSE survey. Its primary conclusions about students’ engagement in the College’s academic life are: students seem to adopt one of three main attitudes towards their academic work—“slacking; getting by; or excelling” (1); “[G]rades matter to students because they perceive them as having implications for their post-college potential and opportunities. . . . [S]tudents want to see connections between their college education and their lives after college” (1); and faculty are “the most potent influence on academic engagement and effort” (3). The report elaborates on each of these three points and offers examples of student subjects’ explanations. It is clear, for example, that some number of our students are “just getting by” or “slacking,” and that our academic culture allows that to happen. As one student subject quoted in the report says, “I’ll be honest. I do the reading that I want to. If I’m interested in my class, I will do the work. If not, I really don’t care… It’s what you make of it, you know. If you want to excel, if you want to do work all your --ing life, go ahead. I don’t, so I don’t” (2). This student would not be considered typical, but the study does identify a group of students, the slackers, who are candid about not being motivated to do the work. Like those who are “getting by,” these students find that it is possible to remain at Skidmore without being academically engaged and to receive relatively comfortable grades as well for their modest efforts. Clearly we need to be thinking about both engaging and challenging our students with higher expectations of their commitment to their academic work. The report draws a connection between disengagement from academics and some other behaviors: “Students who reported being bored in class also reported higher levels of drinking, smoking, depression, and feeling anxious” (2). Another section of the report addresses the students’ personal and social life while at Skidmore; these findings, too, relate to our concerns about engagement. As the report notes, our students are self- conscious about their need to balance their academic and their social experiences while at college. The report suggests—though it stops short of asserting—that for many or most of them the “balance” is really an imbalance: “Students spend more time socializing than doing their homework or attending college events. One of the student field researchers concluded her report by saying, ‘Right now, our social life constitutes who we are; it is in front of us and behind us at every turn. Skidmore students embrace their freedom and their social life’” (7). It is hard to escape the conclusion, again, that we are not asking enough of our students. The researchers uncovered patterns of behavior, some of them revolving around friendships and cocurricular activities, others around alcohol and casual sexual encounters, with alcohol and big parties playing a more dominant role among the newer students (11). As one researcher put it, she “tried [in her report] to avoid the clichés about college drinking, but it almost seems inescapable. Most social situations that I looked at involved alcohol” (11). The report does suggest—and these findings were substantiated by our 2001 participation in the Core Institute Drug and Alcohol Survey— that newer students are more likely to engage in binge drinking than older ones. After the 2001 survey, Student Affairs initiated a series of programs involving increased late- night social programming on weekends, increased support for recreation and fitness,

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 9

additional professional staff in the residence halls, and a “toughened” alcohol and drug policy to improve campus climate and reduce the use of alcohol and drugs. The 2003 Core Survey and a 2004-2005 review of campus safety reports reveal positive change on campus. However, the benefit of Student Affairs programs is limited. Students tend to progress by their senior year to a level of greater intellectual engagement because of their relationships with the faculty; we have concluded that we should devote more resources to engaging students more fully with the intellectual life of the College in their first year, in part by working to ensure that they see and feel the connections between their academic lives, the world outside the classroom, and their own futures. Thus, we note, the faculty are the most potent counterweight to disengagement that the Student Cultures Report identifies. As one student puts it, “If you have a professor who is really involved in what they’re teaching and really passionate about it, I think it pulls the student in as well” (3). Most of the subjects quoted in this section of the report address either the professor’s passion for the material or the students’ sense of reciprocity and dialog. The students quoted thrive on mutual respect, challenge, positive affect, communication, attention, regard, and hard work. When these qualities align, the excitement is palpable, and the language used by the students changes significantly. They say, “[Y]ou can tell he just loves it, which is definitely inspiring” (3); from a student who was floundering, “the fact that he expressed interest in me as a person . . . it kind of gave me hope” (4); from another, “I like the idea of having professors that I have respect for and that are doing things outside of here”; and finally, “I think that’s really the mark of a good professor—if he can interest you in something that you know that you weren’t interested in in the first place. Or if he can keep you hooked into it” (3). It seems clear that for these students, engagement begets engagement. Similarly, they are sensitive when they sense their faculty are disconnected from the students: “He definitely is excited about what he’s teaching. But I think sometimes he doesn’t invest enough time into his students individually, as people . . .” (3); or another: “You want it to be interactive. And sometimes professors don’t achieve that. Let’s see, I think the most boring class I’ve ever had, that was the biggest problem. And also the professor didn’t really have an understanding of where the students were coming from, didn’t really have too much empathy for their needs, what they kind of needed to extract from the class. . . . I remember specifically people didn’t want to really speak out in class because they didn’t feel supported” (4). Finally, one student describes a certain frustration with faculty who may lose sight of their audience: “I think that teachers a lot of times forget that they are biased, that they already have all this and that you don’t and I think that’s what happens when you end up with like a pretentious feeling or whatever. It’s like, you know, I’m so-and-so with this degree and this, this, and this, and who are you? . . . Well, I’m someone who is here to learn all that from you” (5). These statements of frustration and disappointment arise in part from implicit assumptions: the students quoted above assume that faculty do typically “have an understanding of where the students [are] coming from,” do feel empathy, know what they want their students to learn, and care whether they learn it. In any case, these students are also making distinctions among faculty. One of the lessons we learned from the report is that the faculty, too, need to make distinctions

10 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

when we talk about students. There is no single “student culture,” and our planning to increase student engagement would do well to take that into account. In a sense, we are already distinguishing among students by focusing our energies and resources, for example, on first-year students. But within even that subgroup, we acknowledge, there are multiple subcultures defined in a variety of ways. The chapters in this self-study break some of the student groups down as we think strategically about how best to engage them all. It is probably worth reminding ourselves that our students each belong to multiple subcultures at the same time: they may group themselves by race, for example, but also by sexual orientation, by major, by cocurricular activity (such as athletics, the arts, volunteering). Within each of those subgroups a given student may have relationships that can be powerfully engaging. Athletics, in particular, is an area in which we have been making significant changes that are largely invisible in this report, despite some clear connections between sports and student engagement. Several recent studies of athletics at Skidmore have determined that athletes’ grades, in the aggregate, closely parallel those of the student body as a whole; but we do not know whether participation in sports leads to increased or decreased academic engagement. Athletes do report forming satisfying and meaningful peer relationships (as the most satisfying aspect of athletics), and they report believing that participation in their sport helps them maintain self-discipline and get their studies done as well.8 It is beyond the purview of this report to explore the relationships between our students’ many cocurricular commitments and student engagement in their academic work and in the College community as a whole. But we are very much aware that engagement often—but not always—begets engagement, and that we would do well to learn more about the causal connections in these areas. The crucial finding of the Student Cultures Report—that the engagement of faculty with students, and vice versa, is at the core of what we do best, when we do it right—reaffirms the central finding of our strategic planning process that is reported in the 2001 Distillation Report. That report quotes a faculty member as saying, “What we do best is putting teacher and student together to read, write and discuss the ideas of our disciplines” (8).9 Although we have been doing just that for decades, we have come to the sense that we must also work together to create more of an “ethos of engagement,” as one faculty member put it during the open discussions of this report. In these discussions, faculty voiced a wish to shift the tone on campus—so that more students would be “caught up,” more spontaneously, of their own volition. As another faculty member said, “We want students to be inner-directed, self-motivated, not just dutiful.” In pursuit of that goal, we are discussing just how to make more widespread use of the particular pedagogies and curricula that we know to be most engaging for our students.

***

8 This information is reported in a lengthy study conducted by student Keith Ganzenmuller as part of collaborative research and a senior project (2003). 9 On the Opinion-Gathering Phase of the Strategic Planning Process: A Report from the Distillation and Report-Writing Subcommittee to the Institutional Planning Committee, January 30, 2001.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 11

The confluence of our work with these data, faculty work on our academic vision and curriculum, and the strategic planning process has led us directly to our overarching topic for this self-study. Within that focus, as we have seen, there are three areas of student engagement on which we will concentrate: the students’ first year in the residential college; the natural sciences; and intercultural education and understanding, understood as a consequence of increasing the domestic and global diversity of the College’s populations, curriculum, and cocurriculum. In our self-study design, we framed our project around these three areas as follows: [W]e want to make further progress in refining, building consensus around, determining benchmarks for, and implementing objectives, determining next steps and assigning responsibilities in each case: • We seek to engage our students more fully in their education, recognizing that we need to make the largest gains here in their first year; • We seek to engage our students more in the sciences: to gain greater balance in the student body and the curriculum by increasing the numbers, visibility, and engagement of science majors, minors, and students enrolled in science courses; • We seek to engage our students more fully in learning about cultural diversities, both domestic and global. . . . [T]he focus on student engagement allows us to perceive each of these planning areas as serving the most important aspect of our mission: “The principal mission of Skidmore College is the education of predominantly full- time undergraduates, a diverse population of talented students who are eager to engage actively in the learning process.” How eager are they? And how engaged? How might we engage them more in their own education as we understand it? Those are the questions that frame our charge. Subsequently, we posed the core questions: • What do we know about what most—and least—engages our students in their education? • In what particular areas do we hope to engage them more? How are we planning to do so, with what goals and objectives? • What resources do we need to make progress in these areas? • What governing bodies and leaders within the College are responsible for implementing any recommended changes or next steps? • How will we recognize progress? Each focused area of our self-study addresses these questions in somewhat different ways, in part because each project is at a different stage in the planning and implementation process. When we chose this topic for the self-study in spring 2004, our Committee on Educational Policy and Planning (CEPP) was working on a possible proposal to revamp the first-year curriculum; since then, the faculty has enacted sweeping changes to the curriculum and implemented the first semester of our new

12 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

First-Year Experience. Consequently, this chapter of the self-study emphasizes starting up the new program and assessing the results. In contrast, we are in earlier stages of our initiative to strengthen the sciences at the College, so the chapter on the sciences necessarily is the most concerned with questions of resources and planning; as one member of the Steering Committee puts it, our first priority is to secure both the students and the basic resources with which to engage our students in the natural sciences. In the area of intercultural understanding and cultural differences, we are in the process of reconceptualizing and developing new strategies, both for student learning and for the more general transformation of the community. Here too the focus on student engagement sometimes yields the floor to considerations of priorities, rationales, planning, and resources. In all cases, we have found student engagement a powerful lens through which to consider these matters, though often the result is that we recognize how little we know about our own means of engaging our students. One of the valuable discoveries that we have made in the course of this self- study is the degree to which these three topics are interrelated. For example, as we work to engage our residential students during their first year, we are deliberating in particular about where and how they learn about natural science, how they encounter and make sense of cultures and subcultures that differ from what they have known before college, and how they understand themselves as Americans—or studying in the United States—in a global context. As we consider how to recruit more students into the natural sciences at the College, we take note that a disproportionately high number of students in our Higher Education Opportunity Program and Academic Opportunity Program (HEOP and AOP) major in the sciences (roughly 30%), so that increases in those programs will likely have a secondary beneficial effect. As we plan to increase opportunities for our students to study abroad, we will look for attractive opportunities in the sciences and hope to make study abroad more feasible for students who major in the sciences. And as we consider the kinds of globally-minded, intellectually flexible and engaged citizens we aim to graduate, we realize that the problems the world will be facing over their adult lives—problems such as climate change, the exhaustion of petroleum resources, pandemics, and water shortages—will quite often summon knowledge and capacities in the natural sciences and in intercultural understanding. Clearly, although the chapters in many ways treat their subjects as discrete, they are also profoundly interrelated. One of the most important leitmotifs among the three chapters is the need for close collaboration across divisions of the College, particularly among Academic Affairs (including Special Programs as well as the residential college), Student Affairs, and Admissions and Financial Aid, but also including, unquestionably, Financial Affairs and Advancement. Each of the emerging initiatives we are supporting will require continuing teamwork and effective communications at all levels of leadership and implementation. Members of the academic leadership, too, must work closely with the Library, the Information Technology (IT) leadership, and the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery to develop specific ways to advance our shared goals as interlocking initiatives. The desire to encourage more effective collaborations has been key to the dramatic structural and administrative changes the College is currently undergoing.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 13

Most significantly, in recent months we have separated the Vice President of Academic Affairs from the Dean of the Faculty and assigned the Dean of Special Programs to report to the Vice President for Academic Affairs, creating a new VPAA staff that will reinforce the ties between the residential college and Special Programs. A second major change is to realign the academic affairs and student affairs functions of the Dean of Studies Office: the Dean of Studies now oversees advising and mentoring and other matters related to the faculty and students’ academic work and reports to the Dean of the Faculty, while a reinforced team, under the aegis of Student Affairs, provides strengthened and more extensive academic support services to students, especially those at risk. In addition, we have created a new office within Academic Affairs, the Director of the First-year Experience and an Administrative Coordinator. Finally, we anticipate searching jointly this year to fill two new positions, again designed to work collaboratively: a faculty Director of Intercultural Studies, and a Director of Student Diversity Programs. These two will work closely with the Assistant Director of Equal Employment Opportunity and Workforce Diversity in Human Resources, a new position in the process of being filled as this chapter is being revised. All of these new structures are designed to foster stronger collaborations, especially between Academic Affairs and Student Affairs, and to enable us to strengthen student engagement, increase retention, and support a higher level of excellence throughout the College. Similarly, the faculty are collaborating more intensively with Admissions and Financial Aid as well as Special Programs to generate a shift in the make-up of our residential student body as we aim to recruit more diverse students from the United States and abroad, and more students in the sciences. Indeed, engaging the faculty and the administrative staff in effective collaboration lies at the very core of achieving our mission. If collaboration is an informing theme here, it is surely appropriate to our goal of fostering greater engagement among our students. Collaboration has nowhere been more evident than in the process of shaping, writing, and revising this report itself. One of the surprises for us has been the way that the self-study has been not only a passive observer of change but also an agent of change in the processes we are studying. Over the course of a year we have written, revised, and revised again, sometimes to update narratives or data, other times to reflect more voices as they have spoken out. Initially, the three subcommittees met independently, gathered information, and submitted drafts of their chapters.10 The Steering Committee then read and discussed the chapters, suggested revisions, and reconsidered them. At that point the individual chapters still seemed very much the product of their separate subcommittees (and, in the case of Chapter III, of two subcommittees, one on domestic diversity and the other on global education). There had been some differences of opinion in the Steering Committee discussions, but they resulted only in modest revisions and a general position of polite resignation. After this initial round of revisions, the committee made the drafts available to the College community and opened them up to public discussion. In addition, CEPP assumed responsibility for reading and discussing each chapter in some detail and for returning to the document after the final revisions. A series of public fora took place,

10 The Middle States Steering Committee and the three subcommittees are attached as Appendix B.

14 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

two on each chapter, and a number of groups met specifically to discuss one or another chapter. The steering committee also solicited community input on the drafts via e-mail. A complete list of the most public discussion meetings is appended to this report (Appendix K: Middle States Self-Study, Dates of Public Discussion); in addition, the steering committee chair reported twice at length to the Board of Trustees’ Committee on Academic Affairs, with some discussion. The public meetings revealed some significant differences of opinion among the faculty and other members of the community. At times, debate became heated. In some cases, the draft was updated almost daily as negotiations proceeded about how to capture changes that were in the process of being implemented. In other cases, individual faculty took issue with the way the report framed certain key concepts. Many, for example, believe that we should be more concerned about academic rigor and challenging our students than we should be about engaging them. Others were disturbed by the loose way the draft used the term “diverse” and argued for a tighter and more rigorous conceptual framework for that chapter. These debates, in some cases, revealed fault lines that had not been clearly visible and in some instances created stresses along the lines. But the differences of opinion have made the process vibrant and, yes, engaging, and have certainly resulted in a self-study that more accurately represents a range of opinions within the community. This self-study process, consequently, has felt both more chaotic and more unpredictable than our previous self-studies. It has also seemed a valuable part of the process that is necessary to building consensus and bringing about institutional change. This final version of the self-study feels anything but final; yet more changes are taking place as we finish our last round of revisions. Several years ago, the American Association of Colleges and Universities published a report issued by a national panel, Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College.11 The report calls for colleges to help students “become intentional learners who can adapt to new environments, integrate knowledge from different sources, and continue learning throughout their lives” (xi). It goes on to say that college students, in the course of their education, must master knowledge and skills, but they must also learn how to “transform information into knowledge and knowledge into judgment and action” (xi). The report argues that education should cultivate integrity, responsibility, active citizenship, an ethical sensibility, and a “deep understanding of one’s self and respect for the complex identities of others, their histories, and their cultures” (xii). These are the very qualities that our strategic planning has led us to embrace and our curricular revisions are aiming to address. As our Mission Statement says, “The College seeks to prepare liberally educated graduates to continue their quest for knowledge and to make the choices required of informed, responsible citizens.” The Strategic Plan elaborates on this, stating that Skidmore seeks to become a college

11 Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College (Washington, D.C.: AACU, 2002).

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 15

• “that involves students immediately and passionately in a life-altering learning experience, from their first days on campus—a process that leads to significant individual academic achievement by the time of graduation, along with demonstrable personal development that will position all our alumni to embark with assurance on the next phase of their lives”; • “that offers its students a balanced curriculum, reflecting strength across the arts, humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, and selected preprofessional programs, one that enables its students and faculty to make insightful connections across disciplinary boundaries”; • “that expects every student to develop increased appreciation of the value of difference in human society, in which each student progresses in his or her ability to interact successfully with persons of unfamiliar background, and that provides every graduate an entrée to the understanding necessary to function effectively not only as a citizen of our country but also as a citizen of our increasingly interconnected world”; and • “that expects responsible behavior of everyone within our community, that empowers and inspires all of our students to make the choices required of informed, responsible citizens throughout their lives, and that itself acts as a responsible corporate citizen.”12

Embedded within these goals articulated in the Strategic Plan are the three topics of this self-study, as well as, implicitly, our primary focus on engaging and challenging our students in each case. As a community, we are bringing our creativity to bear on developing new programs and taking exhilarating risks as we embark on institutional change. Our vision for Skidmore retains the core of who we are and have been, but it includes a student body that is more engaged from the start and meets greater challenges, in a curriculum that is more balanced, stronger in the sciences, more international, and more genuinely diverse. The self-study that follows explores both our recent history in these areas and our plans for the future.

12 Engaged Liberal Learning: The Plan for Skidmore College: 2005-2015, Executive Summary, available online at http://www.skidmore.edu/planning/executive_summary/index.htm.

16 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

I. The First-Year Experience Re-examined

The Introduction to this report sets the scene especially well for our consideration of student engagement during the first year of learning and living at Skidmore. As this chapter will suggest, Skidmore has long been a restless, self- examining institution, seeking to improve upon its successes and to acknowledge its shortcomings. The information described in the Introduction about our students’ engagement and disengagement with their academic lives made us all the more determined to revamp a curriculum that had been for years a hallmark of our program. This section of the Middle States report briefly traces the efforts of a quarter century to develop the best possible first-year program; describes some of the challenges we are facing as we implement the new program; and outlines plans for evaluating its success, especially its success in engaging our entering students fully and effectively as they shape their Skidmore education.

The Liberal Studies Program 1985-2003 The current First-Year Experience, in its first year, replaces the Liberal Studies curriculum, launched in 1985 and modified repeatedly over its nearly twenty years as a bold and ambitious experiment in interdisciplinary learning for our entering students. The curriculum in its inception consisted of Liberal Studies I: “The Human Experience” (LSI), an interdisciplinary core course required of all students in their first semester, followed by three further interdisciplinary courses. Through large lecture sections shared in common and through small discussion groups led by individual faculty, in LSI all new students explored the means by which different disciplines raise questions about their objects of study, employ various methodologies and types of evidence, discover or create meaning, and might undertake complex problem solving in concert with one another.13 The LSI course was “question driven,” asking faculty and students to take risks, eschewing expertise and embracing challenge. It was flexible and responsive, self-conscious about its mission, invested in new pedagogies, and creative in its conception and implementation. Over the next three semesters students chose from a number of individual interdisciplinary courses organized within three categories: Cultural Traditions and Social Change (LSII); Artistic Forms and Critical Concepts (LSIII); and Science, Society, and Human Values (LSIV). From its inception, the Liberal Studies curriculum posed logistical challenges that the College struggled to meet, even as the curriculum helped to propel the College to a position of greater academic excellence and prominence. Most significantly, the leadership found it difficult to deliver enough sections of each of the LS courses to meet the needs of all of the students while keeping enrollments at a manageable level for seminar-like learning. After ten years, the faculty voted to collapse LSII, III and IV into one required interdisciplinary course, LS2, and to institute a breadth requirement based on core disciplinary learning that we expect of our students. Like the earlier iteration of

13 Report of the Summer Study Group on Curriculum and Calendar to the Committee on Educational Policy and Planning, September 1982, pp. 15-16.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 17

the Liberal Studies curriculum, this version lasted a decade and bears credit for much of what Skidmore is today. Our many interdisciplinary courses, our close faculty collaborations across disciplines, our facility with problem-based learning, our appreciation for courses that address big questions from multiple disciplinary perspectives—these have all emerged and been strengthened during the years of the Liberal Studies curriculum. LS1 faculty, in particular, made excellent use of the advantages offered by the model of the core course: in refining and sequencing reading and writing assignments, in mutual coaching on pedagogies, in opening up areas of debate and controversy within the readings and within the faculty. The course became a kind of workshop for some of our faculty to try out new pedagogies based on learning theory, for collaborations between faculty and Student Affairs leadership in the Higher Educational Opportunity Program, and for the development of a peer-tutoring program closely associated with the course. Throughout the life of the LS curriculum, there were some problems with Liberal Studies 1. One primary challenge was the difficulty of producing engaging lectures for several hundred students each week. Another was student discontent with taking a required core course rather than having some range of choice. Finally, even after the shift from four to two required LS courses, it remained a challenge to recruit faculty in sufficient numbers, especially for LS1. Conscious of these problems, in 1997 LS1 leadership conducted a self-study, subjecting the Skidmore gateway course to a full-blown review. The review determined that LS1 continued to meet its goals of “creating a common experience, providing experience in interdisciplinary thinking and emphasizing critical thinking.”14 Yet the faculty as a whole continued their reluctance to invest in LS1, so that by the 2002-2003 academic year nearly half of the faculty teaching the course were adjuncts and non-tenure-track faculty. A significant number of faculty remained dedicated to the course and to the Liberal Studies curriculum. But the numbers indicated an unavoidable fact: the faculty were ready for a change. The Committee on Educational Policy and Planning (CEPP) took up the work, again, of revising the curriculum.

The Emergence of a New First-Year Experience 2003-2004 CEPP, aided greatly by the leadership of then-Dean Charles Joseph, began a systematic examination of the objectives for our first-year students in 2002-2003, and by the end of the summer of 2003 the committee shared with the faculty an overarching academic vision.15 The critical section outlines an educational vision for our students in their first year and beyond: A Skidmore education should enable our students to think differently about the nature of the world . . . to deal effectively with an array of emerging issues, challenges and dilemmas . . . to investigate ambiguities and

14 Liberal Studies 1 Self-Study, Report of the Steering Committee, September 1997, p. 6-1. 15 Academic Vision Statement, August 2003 (Appendix G).

18 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

complexities and to formulate solutions imaginatively . . . [and] to hold both our students and ourselves accountable. These overarching themes of excellence and accountability, of academic rigor and assessment, became the foundation of a new curricular proposal from CEPP: the First- Year Experience. CEPP decided that, with the exception of the first-year curriculum, the general education program breadth categories were successful in assuring students’ familiarity with the science, social science, arts, and humanities disciplines, but they needed better articulated common purposes. Some of that clarity, CEPP proposed, would emerge from four informing educational goals: critical thinking, communication, citizenship, and collaboration. Attention to these principles across the curriculum, and foregrounding them in the first-year experience, could provide the focus we had lacked in previous iterations of our mission. Keeping an attentive eye on these “four pillars” of the Academic Vision Statement, CEPP articulated particular objectives for the course components of the new First-Year Experience, a plan approved by the faculty in October 2004. Our first-year curriculum should engage students from the start as active partners in a challenging learning experience; and it should emphasize rigor throughout the spectrum of courses taken by first-year students, not only in the First-Year Experience but as well in introductory 100- and 200-level courses. CEPP’s detailed objectives for student learning in the first year appear below in the learning goals established for the first-year seminar program. Our overarching goal is for our students to develop a passion for learning as early as possible in the college career. To be fully engaged they must care about examining objects, phenomena, and issues in new and different ways; boldly explore difference and diverse ways of thinking and living; and embrace the value of both collaboration and independent inquiry. In their first year Skidmore students should also begin thinking about a major linked with their emerging interests, even if the formal choice does not occur until late in the sophomore year. They should become aware of how internships, study abroad, and independent research could enrich their educational plan. They should connect with some aspect of cocurricular life at the College. And they should raise their own standards for learning and engagement, strive for a more rigorous academic experience, and find a productive balance between their academic and social lives. CEPP’s proposal placed greater emphasis on faculty mentoring of first-year students. Faculty instructors of first-year seminars, which would draw upon our faculty’s scholarly and intellectual interests and passions, would serve as the students’ academic advisors and mentors, for they would be best positioned to interact regularly with the first-year class. The faculty were also asked to take a stronger interest in students’ lives outside the classroom and to help students anticipate their personal and professional interests after college—as these would be shaped in part by a liberal arts education. The committee, and the Dean of the Faculty, asked the faculty to be prepared to assess the effectiveness of such curricular and institutional change, and to commit the necessary resources to deliver the program effectively.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 19

This focus on the first-year experience of our students, determined after serious and lengthy consideration by CEPP, was influenced by the study group devoted to the retention of our students alluded to in the Introduction to this self-study. The report on Strategies for the Improved Retention of Students (December 2003) began with an assessment of the reasons behind an attrition rate of approximately 19-20% from the freshman to the start of the junior year, and explored whether we could increase the size of our student body and at the same time preserve or improve the quality of our students’ academic and cocurricular lives.16 The study recommended a number of steps and action plans, both short- and long-term, that would enhance our students’ experience. Among them, three focus on the first-year: • “develop a more intellectually and socially challenging orientation in September, one that introduces new students to the highest expectations and the exciting opportunities of our learning community”; • “elevate the importance and effectiveness of the faculty mentoring system for first-year students—an activity that should be linked with first-term courses and is assessed and rewarded”; • and “develop more intentional housing assignments for new students in theme houses, within learning communities directed by faculty and staff teams. . . .” 17 Informed by an abundance of Skidmore-related data and providing a range of strategies for enhancing freshman and sophomore connections to the College, the Retention Report played a key role in CEPP’s proposal to replace the Liberal Studies curriculum with a first-year seminar program labeled “The First-Year Experience.”18 The new FYE would also link an expanded concept of advising/mentoring to the seminars and attend more thoroughly than we had in the past to building out-of-classroom opportunities for exercising the interests and values fostered in the classroom. After extended faculty discussion from the spring of 2004 through fall 2004, and after several CEPP revisions and clarifications, the faculty embraced a modified version of the original CEPP proposal. They approved the proposal by a 2:1 margin, endorsing change while expecting that two key elements of the Liberal Studies curriculum— interdisciplinarity and the development of critical thinking skills—would remain central to the new First-Year Experience. CEPP articulated, and the faculty endorsed, a set of goals for student learning in all of the seminars that focus on “knowing, particularly about ways to identify problems, formulate productive questions, and go about answering those questions.” Students in these seminars will demonstrate these abilities: to distinguish among, and formulate, types of questions asked by different disciplines; read critically, and gather and interpret evidence; distinguish among the evidence and methodologies appropriate to different disciplines; consider and address complexities and ambiguities; make

16 Strategies for the Improved Retention of Students, December 19, 2003, p. 1. 17 Strategies, p. 4. 18 CEPP Curricular Reform, The First-Year Experience, proposed and withdrawn spring 2004; emended summer 2004; approved October 1, 2004.

20 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

connections among ideas; recognize choices, examine assumptions and ask questions of themselves and of their own work; formulate conclusions based upon evidence; communicate ideas both orally and in writing; and relate the results of the course to their educational goals. The faculty agreed that these goals would constitute the bedrock principles for student learning in the new curriculum and that each seminar would provide opportunities to assess student achievement of these goals.

Delivering the New First-Year Experience 2004-2005 We entered the FYE implementation process with a strong faculty consensus for change, with the legacy of many pedagogical and interdisciplinary successes deriving from our previous efforts to inspire strong academic engagement among the first-year students, with a sharper vision of what we want to achieve across the years for our students, with unprecedented strengths in our applicant pool, with colleagues in Student Affairs and other areas eager to join with faculty in learning partnerships, and with a Strategic Plan that presents as its highest priority engaged student learning during the first year. The Strategic Plan reflects a serious commitment by President Glotzbach, Vice President Joseph, and members of the Institutional Policy and Planning Committee. The plan incorporates the data “that suggest we are not engaging enough of our students at the beginning of their academic careers”;19 it identifies the need to enhance critical thinking skills through effective teaching and mentoring;20 and it emphasizes the need for us to involve “students immediately and passionately in a life- altering learning experience, from their first days on campus.”21 The plan calls for us to “[i]mplement the First-Year Experience proposal to create First-Year Seminars that will place each entering student in a small course offered by a faculty member who is passionate about the course’s subject matter and who, with the assistance of a student peer advisor, becomes that first-year student’s academic mentor . . . [and c]larify the College’s expectation that all faculty members will perform their fair share of the work of mentoring students and provide assistance in ensuring that they develop the skills to perform this aspect of faculty work effectively.” This is a powerful endorsement of the emerging First-Year Experience program. The three core values of the new program as adopted by the faculty in fall 2004 also provide a crucial level of support and guidance as we move forward: in their most succinct form, the foundational values are choice, challenge, and excellence. The faculty sent a clear message during the deliberations of fall 2004 that it wanted broad latitude in designing FYE seminar topics and structures that would respond to disciplinary differences, and broad curricular choices for new students as they register

19 Engaged Liberal Learning: The Plan for Skidmore College: 2005-2015, “The Context for Planning,” available online at http://www.skidmore.edu/planning/index.htm. 20 The Plan for Skidmore, “Distinctive Identity”: “Ultimately, we want our students to know how to appraise, for themselves, the worth of an idea, an argument, or a work of art independently of the identity of its author. . . . Through systematic and effective mentoring (the responsibility of every full-time faculty member), we empower them to develop their own pathways through the myriad possibilities within our academic programs.” 21 The Plan for Skidmore, “Goals and Priorities.”

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 21

for the seminars. At the core of the Scribner Seminars (as they are now named) lie the freedom of faculty to offer topics close to their own passions as scholars while meeting common FYE goals (interdisciplinarity, pedagogies that promote student engagement, attention to student writing, and mentoring of students), and the freedom of students to choose seminars close to their emerging or established academic interests. We think mutual choices that bring faculty and students into the same classroom will maximize the opportunities for engaged, collaborative learning. The forty-seven Scribner Seminars offered for fall 2005 ranged from robotic design to modern republicanism, from minority rights to African cinema, from detective novels to genetics. Drawing upon Liberal Studies 2 courses, departmental curricula, and new course designs, the faculty created seminars that are very often central to their own intellectual agendas. Students entering Skidmore in September 2005 selected their seminars based upon what interests them, what excites them, what galvanizes them to engage. As part of our commitment to excellence, we committed to using tenure-line faculty in the Scribner Seminars, with only the rarest exceptions. These are the faculty who have gone through our campus’s most rigorous process for hiring and retention, for reappointment and tenure, and bring with them exceptional credentials as scholars and teachers. This was the mandate from the faculty: if we seek excellence from our students in the first year, then we must field our finest faculty in the first-year classroom as well. We have asked these same faculty to challenge our students: to design courses that raise provocative issues, require the students to question assumptions, challenge received opinion, and strive for excellence. The student who just wants to get by should feel uncomfortable in this setting and should not be rewarded beyond his or her actual accomplishments. As reinforcement for engaged student learning, we will create opportunities in the spring semester for showcasing Scribner Seminar projects from the fall, thus elevating the general intellectual tone in the first semester and hoping to use that as momentum to begin the spring semester. In order to lend stronger faculty and administrative support to the reconfigured FYE (which had been managed since 1985 through a very part-time appointment of a faculty member), the Vice President of Academic Affairs/Dean of the Faculty created an Office of the First-Year Experience, appointing a tenured faculty member, Michael Arnush, as its Director, and a key member of his own staff as the Administrative Coordinator. The new FYE staff necessarily gave immediate attention in spring 2005 to developing the Scribner Seminars to be launched in fall 2005 on campus (and in London, where we bring thirty-six incoming first-year students for a semester of study every fall)—to developing a more intellectually stimulating Orientation for new students, and to integrating the new curriculum into a broader first-year program. The FYE office is responsible for a much more ambitious agenda of planning activities and oversight authority than in past iterations of the first-year program.

The Territory Ahead for FYE Planning We are mindful that a truly engaging first-year experience requires the collaboration of many faculty and staff, for we must together challenge new students to develop their best qualities of mind and character inside the classroom, in their

22 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

residential living, in their complex interactions with faculty and fellow students, and eventually in the choices they make in their lives after the bachelor’s degree. Raising the intellectual tone and expectations of academic rigor for the first-year experience starts with our presentation of Skidmore College to prospective students and their parents, proceeds through our recruitment and retention strategies, becomes evident in a formal way in our Orientation of students each September, achieves its full educational potential in the Scribner Seminars and other course experiences during the first year, is bolstered by faculty mentoring of students, and is complemented in students’ residential environments and cocurricular involvements. This section of the FYE report will outline what we have put in place and need still to accomplish to meet our goals for engaged learning.

The Scribner Seminars The faculty, and the FYE office, are cognizant that the College will face challenges staffing the seminars in the coming years, nor do we assume that all faculty are prepared to take on the responsibilities of mentors as well as instructors of first-year students. The early returns for faculty support of the seminars, however, are most promising: in addition to a full roster of interdisciplinary seminars for fall 2005, we already have more than fifty faculty lined up for fall 2006, and half as many for fall 2007.22 We continue to tap tenure-line faculty for the seminars and want to build into each department’s curriculum and each faculty member’s course assignments the responsibility for participating in the seminars. If we are to avoid the fate of Liberal Studies I, all academic departments must attend closely to the need for staffing the Scribner Seminars, just as they do for staffing their own gateway and 300-level courses. And all of the liberal arts and preprofessional disciplines must contribute a fair share of their best, tenure-line faculty to the first-year program. At the same time, the administration of the College must remain committed to providing the faculty resources needed to support departments in their multiple teaching, research, and governance responsibilities. Our experience thus far with the Scribner Seminars is most encouraging. The topics offered in fall 2005 were extremely diverse and interesting, and all the courses honor our long-term commitment to a serious engagement with interdisciplinary materials, ideas, and methodologies. Every seminar as approved by the Curriculum Committee states the goals for student learning on its syllabus, and these will be assessed as we implement the program. In keeping with the faculty legislation, the seminars also advance the cause of expository, analytical writing, both for the sake of developing students’ essential writing skills and also as one of the best means of developing critical thinking. That being said, not all faculty are yet committed to providing the amount or types of writing instruction suitable to the seminars, and it will be a work of time to draw more faculty into actual writing instruction. Each discipline approaches the roles and types of student writing with distinct expectations, and so establishing a uniform expectation of it is a challenge. The First-Year Experience Director has suggested that faculty bear in mind a set of detailed guidelines for writing

22 The full list of Scribner Seminars is online at http://www.skidmore.edu/fye/seminars/index.htm.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 23

experiences covering length, frequency, feedback and critiquing, revisions, and peer mentoring.23

Mentoring and the RAP Mentoring is another activity integral to the FYE seminars and program as a whole. The long tradition at Skidmore has been to describe “advising” as an important aspect of teaching, as an opportunity to engage students in a discussion not just of their immediate course choices and fulfillment of degree requirements but of their broader academic, professional, and, to some degree, personal plans. The Dean of Studies Office cites examples of faculty known for their treatment of advising as a genuine mentoring process, and the Faculty Handbook presents advising among the “Rights, Obligations, and Responsibilities of All Faculty”: “Faculty members are responsible for giving conscientious and informed guidance to students” (Faculty Handbook, VI.A.3). When it comes to “Evaluative Criteria for Continued Service,” however, the Handbook represents advising under “Community Service” as a responsibility that “Skidmore assumes rather than rewards” (Handbook, V.A.1). Thus advising occupies, as at most colleges and universities, a limbo land where good will is the only inducement for faculty to commit time and thought to a function which students rate among the more important factors in their relationship with faculty. As the Skidmore Senior Survey for 2001 reminds us, our advanced-level students rate faculty advising as “Higher Importance/Lower Satisfaction” (Survey, 9) among the many factors that enrich, or diminish, their college experience. Now we stand at a moment of extraordinary opportunity for making “mentoring,” as we wish to characterize it, an integral part of the first-year curriculum, for expanding the scope and impact of these important interactions for both students and faculty, and for including the time for mentoring as part of both faculty and student workload through a fourth credit hour of required and recommended activities. Recently, with the advent of an online degree-audit system and the more recent shift to online course registration, students can now take on, with confidence, many of the more information-driven functions regarding all-college, major, and minor requirements for degree completion. Further, so much other information about academic options and expectations is now available online, particularly on the Registrar’s and the Dean of Studies’ Web sites, that the mentoring experience can be refocused to engage students in broader activities. Faculty mentors may use the advising times to discuss the reasons for required courses and the avenues available for fulfilling requirements; students’ intellectual interests and progress; long-range academic planning, including the choice of a major and the enrichments of study abroad, internships, and independent or collaborative research; discussions of cocurricular and other resources to enhance the student’s education as a whole person; and inquiries into the uses of a liberal arts education for both personal and professional development. We are clearly at the threshold of a new mentoring paradigm at Skidmore.

23 Writing in the Scribner Seminars, online at http://www.skidmore.edu/fye/faculty/writing.html.

24 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

While our data regarding course-linked faculty advising are slim and of mixed results, we do have a number of favorable anecdotes from faculty and students in pilot programs,24 and the national information (for example, that disseminated by the National Academic Advising Association) suggests that first-term students generally respond well to a mentor who is also their teacher. While Skidmore students report the value of knowing the faculty better in the first semester through mentoring, some also express concern that they be allowed to choose a faculty mentor whose disciplinary interests they share and with whose personality they feel comfortable. We will have to see how well the many variables of such connections come together. The Dean of Studies and the FYE Director must also work with faculty on advising strategies that have better potential for engaging students in truly exploratory discussions. Some faculty have accepted over the years a more checklist-approach to advising and have acceded to many students’ desire for quick signature approvals on forms. This older mode of perfunctory interactions will need to be challenged among both students and faculty. We think that peers can serve an essential function for first-year students, as exemplars of good academic work and responsible citizenship. In the initial stages of the FYE, we do not expect that every seminar will have a peer mentor; but with time, if the data are persuasive, we may eventually convince the faculty that peer mentors can and should be an integral component in every first-year seminar. The former LS1 peer tutors with whom we spoke realize the value of peer mentors as older students who are dedicated to and excited about their studies. The Scribner Peer Mentors will enroll in a the course ID201: “Peer Mentoring Seminar,” taught by the FYE Director. The course will examine learning theory and mentoring goals and strategies and apply such insights to selected Scribner texts or projects: An introduction to the theory and practice of collaborative learning and mentoring as they relate to the interdisciplinary issues raised in Scribner Seminars. The course examines the role of mentors, the ethics of mentoring, and common mentoring problems. Students engage in a consideration of the readings and topics in selected Scribner Seminars, placing them in wider intellectual and pedagogical contexts, and undertake a term project on mentoring. Required for all students serving as Scribner Seminar mentors.25 The peer mentors will usually participate in their assigned Skidmore Seminar, attend a number of the mentoring workshops during the semester, and hold two “open-door hours” for their peers each week. Peer mentoring is an ambitious undertaking and, we believe, of potential value as another point of connection and support for new students. To initiate the mentoring connection, the FYE includes a “Reflection and Projection” (RAP) submitted electronically during the summer by each incoming student to the student’s faculty mentor (and seminar teacher). The online RAP questionnaire asks new students to reflect upon their reasons for coming to college,

24 Advisee Survey, 2003. The survey revealed that first-year students advised by their instructors were “more likely to seek out their advisors when in need” and “tended to report advisors had a better understanding of their interests and were more helpful in goal setting, career life decisions and personal concerns.” 25 Detailed course information is online at http://www.skidmore.edu/fye/faculty/id201-syllabus.html.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 25

what subjects they found most stimulating in high school, what they would hope to say about their Skidmore “achievements four years after [they] graduate from college,” etc.26 The RAP serves as a prompt for the early interactions with faculty and a document for the student and mentor to revisit as they discuss the student’s evolving aspirations and plans. As a complement to the academic RAP, the Office of Campus Life developed a Campus Life RAP for the 2005-2006 academic year prompting first- year students to think about the kinds of out-of-class experiences they would like to pursue at Skidmore, based on the values and interests they have already formed. The RAP provides the opportunity for the College to explore whether Skidmore should adopt an electronic portfolio package for first-year, and eventually all, students. E-portfolios can, like the RAP, enable students to reflect upon their achievements and progress; in addition, they can serve as a storage medium for student work in all media, and the student owner of the materials can choose to allow access to faculty instructors and mentors, prospective employers, etc. The RAP, then, could become the first item in the student’s e-portfolio, the software for which we are in the process of exploring. However, some faculty are wary of adopting and implementing e-portfolios. Some have expressed concerns about the financial costs and time commitment associated with e-portfolios, and also perceive e-portfolios as potential mechanisms for assessing teaching rather than student work. Accordingly, our Information Resources Council (IRC) and others are studying this issue with caution. To meet our goals for student engagement, we need to treat the September Orientation of new students as a serious and stimulating induction into the academic community, while we also help students get settled and meet their new peers. We also need to see Orientation as an ongoing process of the first semester, perhaps of the entire first year. With a legacy of effective Student Affairs planning in this regard, and with the infusion of more faculty involvement in creating a more intellectually stimulating and extended orientation process, we hope to increase the engagement of new students on several fronts. The formal Orientation on September 4-10, 2005 (classes began September 7), introduced new students to their chosen Scribner Seminar; connected them with their faculty mentors and (in many cases) their peer mentors; and introduced them to major learning resources on campus, effective approaches to college study, our concepts of citizenship and community, and an abundance of cocurricular opportunities. We realize that every Orientation program is a whirlwind of compressed, easily forgotten activities. Thus we marshaled faculty and staff to present more than fifty “mentoring” workshops for new students distributed strategically across the entire first semester. Workshops, which can be recommended or required by the Scribner Seminar faculty, range in topic from time management to effective use of word processing and spreadsheets, from the art of note taking to academic integrity, from study-abroad opportunities to preparing for exams, from digital moviemaking to Web page design (see the FYE Web site for the full schedule). For the first time in Skidmore’s history, these workshops are offered as integral extensions of first-year teaching and mentoring, and they add up to a fourth credit hour for the students and the mentors/teachers.

26 Reflection and Projection (RAP), online at http://www.skidmore.edu/fye/faculty/rap.html.

26 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

The academic centerpiece of this broad-ranging induction into the Skidmore community is the First-Year Class Reads project, a legacy of the Liberal Studies program.27 For the inaugural First-Year Experience program, the class of 2009 read The Burial at Thebes, a recent translation by the Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney of Sophocles’ play the Antigone. As this project unfolded over the course of the fall, we believe that the text, the play (performed by students in the Theater Department in November 2005), visiting artist and scholar residencies, and performances, panels, symposia, and lectures have effectively excited the first-year students and helped them develop a cocurricular life beyond the confines of the classroom. The opening events during Orientation 2005 were by all accounts an extraordinary success. The fall 2005 project included dialogs on Seamus Heaney as poet and translator, on classical Greek theater, on women in ancient Greece, on feminist implications of The Burial at Thebes, and on the challenges of translating and adapting literary works. Our long-range planning will focus on creating a template for an annual First-Year Class Reads project, extending from a summer reading, to Orientation, to making connections in 100- and 200-level courses including the seminars, and, perhaps just as critically, folding the themes and discussions raised by the text into the spring curriculum and cocurricular program; the plans should include an assessment of Orientation, including information about levels of participation and engagement by both the seminars and individual students.

Residential Life and Student Affairs Our long-range goal is to create a stronger learning environment within the residence halls, perhaps even what could be described as clusters of “learning communities.” Some progress in this direction is being made in fall 2005, but several obstacles remain. First, registration for courses takes place over the summer, making it difficult to link seminar selection and residential assignment without substantial change in administrative systems; this work is under way. Second, the residence halls are composed of suites of single and double rooms. This architectural feature makes it difficult to concentrate first-year students on the same floor or hall without permitting some of them to live in single rooms (heretofore a privilege reserved for upperclass students). We may have to be content with concentrating students from a given seminar within one building. In addition, students have consistently identified sharing suites with upperclass students as a strength of the residential program. Finally, we need to find a way to build bridges between the residence hall and the classroom through programming within the students’ living spaces; this will require a significant change in our culture, and again is likely to require close collaborations between Student Affairs staff and the faculty. The Honors Forum, established in the 1997-1998 academic year, involves forty to fifty formal members in each incoming class. The first-year forum students benefit from a first-semester class of small monthly colloquies where the students present their own work to each other; discussions with faculty speakers on topics of interest (scholarship, current events); evening study-hall sessions with tutors; discussions about

27 See The Burial at Thebes Web site at http://www.skidmore.edu/fye/bat/index.htm.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 27

selecting majors; participation in extracurricular activities on and off campus; and, if they choose, residential grouping on an Honors floor. This program is led by a faculty director with Student Affairs support, and has supported the students’ intellectual engagement through a combination of classroom, mentoring, cocurricular, and residential living arrangements. It is a model living/learning community, nearly a decade old, and it was formed in part to provoke the very changes on campus that we are now attempting more broadly with the FYE. Thus the Honors Forum is a model that we would like to extend to all first-year students. Student, faculty, and administrative representatives of the Honors Forum are concerned that the creation of living/learning communities in the residence halls based upon seminar enrollment will result in the elimination of the Honors floors. Honors Forum students made clear the merits of the Honors floors, and we are reluctant to diminish an already successful program while developing the new FYE. One possible compromise involves designating some seminars as “Honors Forum seminars” and associating enrollment in those seminars with residence on the Honors floors. This approach has not been developed fully, and needs resolution during the 2005-2006 academic year. Similarly, we will need to decide when we are ready to replace our successful theme floors, which currently help build community in the residence halls, with communities based on the Scribner Seminars. Doing so will require a commitment to conceiving and delivering effective programming, again coordinating efforts between Academic Affairs and the Residential Life staff. From what we have discussed so far it will be clear that strengthened and new partnerships between Student Affairs staff and the faculty are critical to creating the environment and the cocurricular programs in which the life of the mind can flourish. The Dean of Students, the Dean of Studies Office, and the Higher Education Opportunity Program/Academic Opportunity Program (HEOP/AOP) have long been invested, as members of Student Affairs, in academic programming and academic support structures. Other areas of Student Affairs at Skidmore have also made bridges between their work and the work of the faculty. This past year, for example, was the first year of our Mellon grant (extending over three-to-four years) of initiatives that bring the faculty and Student Affairs members together to enhance the academic life of the College. The three parts of the Mellon-funded program must rely on faculty and staff working together to accomplish its goals. Together, we will recruit an increased number of talented students to the campus and provide an immediate advising, cocurricular, or research link with these students as they begin their college career. Further, the grant brings faculty, student affairs professionals, and students together in a joint exploration of service-learning opportunities—one of the better means of crossing traditional faculty and student affairs boundaries and for applying liberal arts learning to real-world challenges. The grant also is linking student affairs staff in Career Services with faculty and with student leadership to plan and host “living the liberal arts” alumni panels targeted to first-year and second-year students, and at the same time cultivate a

28 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

further cadre of alumni mentors.28 It will be evident that two of these programs target first-year students especially, and the third (service learning) also holds potential for FYE involvement. The Mellon grant, initiated through conversations among the Associate Dean of the Faculty, the Dean of Students, and the Dean of Studies, suggests the rich partnerships that can help the FYE become a successful program for engaging new students in their liberal arts milieu.

HEOP and AOP Over the years our Higher Education Opportunity Program and Academic Opportunity Program (HEOP/AOP) staff have developed a highly effective, successful program that has recently garnered national attention.29 High retention and graduation rates are indicators of the program’s success, but the strongest evidence comes from the overall successes of their students, from GPAs to careers, fellowships and graduate study. For example, HEOP/AOP graduation rates exceed non-HEOP/AOP graduation rates both overall and by race/ethnicity.30 The features of the program that contribute to its success include its recruitment process; the Summer Academic Institute; the advising, academic support, and academic intervention mechanisms; the academic backgrounds and experiences of the HEOP/AOP professional staff; and the creation of a caring community. All of these features have been elaborated over time in conjunction with the first-year curriculum, in particular Liberal Studies 1, all the while incorporating research on underrepresented populations and programmatic assessments. In fall 2005, a substantial number of the Scribner Seminar instructors offered their seminars as “Human Dilemmas,” following the LS1 syllabus and paradigm; this has enabled the HEOP program to continue its structure in close partnership with the LS1 syllabus and instructors. There are nine seminars following this model, enough to allow a mix of HEOP and regular-admit students in each of the seminars. The HEOP program has for

28 Proposal to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: Academic Communities, April 2004 (funded June 2004). 29 See L. Scott Miller et al., “Increasing African American, Latino, and Native American Representation among High Achieving Undergraduates at Selective Colleges and Universities,” Consortium for High Academic Performance, Institute for the Study of Social Change (University of California, Berkeley, 2005) online at http://www.skidmore.edu/administration/HEOP/CHAP%20Report%20Final%20Publication%20Version %202005.doc; and Susan Layden, Ann Knickerbocker, and Monica Minor, “Bridging the Gap between Achievement and Excellence: The Skidmore College Summer Academic Institute and the Skidmore College Opportunity Programs,” forthcoming, and online at http://www.skidmore.edu/administration/HEOP/Bridge%20Chapter.doc. This book chapter argues effectively that a summer bridge program serves as one effective support system for students at risk, and that with the appropriate guidance and support HEOP/AOP students can excel academically and socially. 30 An analysis of graduating GPAs by race/ethnicity for the classes entering in 1993 through 1996 reveals that despite the gaps in their entering profiles, HEOP/AOP students achieve at comparable rates—and most often higher rates—than their non-HEOP/AOP peers. In every category of student for which there are data (e.g. black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American), the HEOP students have a higher GPA than the non-HEOP students. Similarly, for those same classes, the six-year graduation rate for all students was 75.7%; for HEOP students, the rate ranged from 75% (white students) to 90.5% (black), 87.5% (Asian), and 89.2% (Latino).

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 29

some years aimed to enroll its students in classes in enough numbers that they don’t feel isolated and can reconnect with other HEOP students, while at the same time meeting non-HEOP students in significant numbers and gradually moving more completely into the courses occupied by the general student population. If, as may well happen, the “Human Dilemmas” seminars phase out—six will be offered in fall 2006, and we are unsure how many will be offered in the years beyond—the College will be challenged to sustain the successes of HEOP as the program attempts to adapt its strategies to a less cohesive group of offerings for their beginning students. We need to stabilize a plan for delivering sufficient “Human Dilemmas” seminars annually, pursue an alternative HEOP model that does not rely on “Human Dilemmas,” or develop a hybrid that faculty will deliver and that will continue to be effective for our HEOP students. Merging the model structures responsible for the success of HEOP/AOP students with the new FYE presents several challenges for the College. The Curriculum Committee established a study group in spring 2005 to review the difficulties and the differences of opinion about the process.31 Its report is not lengthy, though it is too long to quote in its entirety here; it provides a balanced summary of the concerns. The largest concern is how to shape the summer program and the academic support during the fall semester in the absence of the cohesive “Human Dilemmas” course: The summer course HE-HPG is part of the effort to enhance students’ preparation for college-level work. The course traditionally was anchored to Liberal Studies-1 (LS1), which all first-year students at the college were required to complete in the fall. LS1’s focus on improving student writing and teaching students to think and read critically made for natural complementarities between the two programs. HE-HPG therefore used readings and assignments similar to the ones that the students would encounter in the fall to structure a course of benefit to all incoming HEOP/AOP students. The HEOP/AOP office has found that having a strong relationship between what is done in the summer and what the students encounter in the fall is the key to success. The pedagogy informing the design of the summer course is learning theory. Students are given repeated exposure to a given topic with a layer of support taken away each time they face an assignment. And, while the students do not do the exact same assignments that they do in the fall, they do face assignments that are likely to be similar, so that they are adequately prepared for the types of assignments they are likely to see in the fall. (2) As we make the transition from the single core course to the Scribner Seminars, the HEOP/AOP staff will be challenged to duplicate the staged-learning process described above. At the same time, it seems likely that the “Human Dilemmas” seminars will not continue to be offered by sufficient numbers of faculty, so the HEOP/AOP staff and the Director of the FYE must work together to determine a structure that will support the kinds of successes for which HEOP has become known. The FYE Director and the HEOP/AOP leadership reached agreement on one major area: whether faculty teaching the HEOP/AOP students in Scribner Seminars

31 HEOP Study Group Final Report, May 2005 (Appendix L), also available online at http://www.skidmore.edu/academics/curric/heop_studygroup_finalreport_may23_2005.doc

30 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

should serve them as both advisor and mentor, or whether, as in the past, the HEOP/AOP staff should serve as official advisor, with the seminar faculty member only as mentor. The compromise agreed upon retains the HEOP/AOP staff as the official advisor, but includes the faculty member both as mentor and as a participant in the advising process. The main point of tension, however, still resides in the number and types of seminar that HEOP/AOP students will take in their first semester in college, specifically, whether the faculty create one or more clusters of seminars as an alternative to or replacement for “Human Dilemmas,” and with what frequency such clusters should be offered. Rather than elaborate upon those unresolved problems here, we will concur with the Study Group report that solutions must be found during the course of 2005-2006; a successful collaboration is essential to the ongoing success of HEOP/AOP as well as to the full implementation of the FYE.

Scribner Library and Information Technology The library is a center for student engagement. Students use a mix of print and electronic resources, and the library’s importance to our students as a place to conduct research, to study, and to write continues to increase. Library instruction is most effective when it is connected to an assignment. The FYE offers an opportunity for faculty to schedule library instruction for the Scribner Seminars, but unless the faculty design assignments that require the use of information resources, instruction in the use of the library will be of limited value. Information Technology (IT) and Scribner Library staff also provide ongoing training in the use of digital technologies and information resources for our students, and together they seek to expand core computing abilities so that every Skidmore student develops computing and information literacy before graduation. Information literacy—the ability not only to employ technological tools, but also to utilize them effectively in the identification, access, retrieval, and analysis of information—is central to a college education. One goal, then, is to introduce all of our first-year students to the art of using the library in all of its various states. The creation of a new librarian position as of fall 2005 devoted to first-year instructional needs is proving a powerful mechanism to do this. At the same time, IT staff can help more Scribner Seminar faculty use WebCT and other classroom technologies, and use in the classroom more of the technologies that students employ outside of the classroom, such as instant messaging, Weblogs, and wikis.

The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery Offering truly distinctive possibilities for our FYE programs is this center for “object study” across the disciplines. The Tang mission is “to foster interdisciplinary thinking and studying, to invite active and collaborative learning and to awaken the community to the richness and diversity of the human experience through the medium

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 31

of art.”32 The Tang has provided a valuable venue for student engagement in the first year. Since the year 2000, 50% of the Liberal Studies 1 students connected for instructional purposes with 21 Tang exhibitions: for example, “Power of the Word” (2002), “Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution” (2002), “The Tumultuous Fifties: A View from the New York Times Photo Archives” (2002), “Artists’ Reflections on Crime and Punishment” (2003), “Paradise and Plumage: Chinese Connections in Tibetan Arhat Painting” (2004), and the astronomy- and physics-oriented “A Very Liquid Heaven” (2004). Some of those visits had an impact on papers, others on final projects; some provided a venue for student art exhibitions, and others for inquiry and interrogation. Since the objects of study are remarkably different among the forty- seven Scribner Seminars in fall 2005, the challenge has been to find points of connection with Tang exhibits that could be shared among clusters of seminars. We will of course be collecting and assessing information about how the Scribner Seminars have made use of the Tang this fall and laying the groundwork for more in fall 2006. The more the faculty know about their colleagues’ work for the FYE (syllabi will be posted on the FYE Web site), the more readily we can respond to scheduled exhibitions or create special exhibitions for FYE instruction. Visual, aural, and tactile phenomena—in short, object exhibition—can play a powerful role in FYE pedagogies.

The Assessment of First-Year Experience Outcomes How will we know whether the new first-year program has engaged new students effectively with our goals for their intellectual and personal development both inside and outside the classroom? Some assessment tools are at hand; others must be developed. The Office of the Registrar and Institutional Research has for many years now administered several surveys relevant to assessing the effectiveness of the FYE. The rich archive of data and related discussions of those provide important benchmarks the new FYE can use to assess effectiveness. The Admitted Student Questionnaire (ASQ) and the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP), for example, provide information about admitted or brand-new students’ reasons for coming to Skidmore; their aspirations and opinions on various matters; the schools with which we share the most cross-applications; alcohol and drug use; and other factors critical to student engagement and eventual success in College. These surveys chronicle changes in the institution’s admissions profile and provide a basis for program evaluation. The Skidmore First-Year Survey (administered in the spring semester) and the Advisee Survey gather students’ assessments of advising and program effectiveness. While these surveys are largely measures of student satisfaction, we believe they are relevant because of the close relationship between satisfaction and engagement. We will also continue to administer the eye-opening National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) to first-year and senior students: it would make sense to use this survey toward the end of the 2006-2007 year (two years into the new FYE) and in 2009 (before the next Middle States review). As successive generations of students

32 See the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, online at http://tang.skidmore.edu/tang/mission/index.htm.

32 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

participate in this research, the College will have another source of longitudinal data to consider for assessing program effectiveness. With luck more schools we consider peers or aspirants will participate in this survey and provide a better basis for external comparison. The Withdrawn Student Survey, while it captures only a small number of students who have left the College on their own volition, is a critical source of data for assessing the first-year program. This survey provides a detailed demographic profile of the students who withdraw and full discussion of the reasons they withdraw. The report is a very useful complement to the first-year survey. The Senior Survey and Alumni Survey provide the perceptions of graduating and former students. These surveys provide a sense of the enduring benefits and problems of the program. Finally, the College has also administered the Core Institute Alcohol and Drug Survey, and may choose to do so again. The FYE is fortunate to begin its work with such a strong and ongoing institutional assessment program already in place. The FYE may thus focus its further assessment efforts on discrete questions most relevant to program development and improvement. For example, the Reflection and Projection (RAP) answers written by students before they came to Skidmore will provide an interesting baseline for a qualitative analysis. We will ask students to revisit the original RAP at later stages in their college career to assess how their aspirations were fostered, modified, or disappointed by their first-year experiences. We also expect to sample the other academic materials placed in their e-portfolios and assess the quality of the work. The students’ papers, exams, and projects and their self-appraisals will provide the data we need to assess intellectual development, engagement, and excellence. In spring 2006 we will implement a direct assessment of students’ written work in the seminars, supported by matching funds under our grant from the Christian Johnson Endeavor Foundation. As part of our overall assessment work, we are working with the FYE faculty to develop evaluation forms for the Scribner Seminars that address the academic, cocurricular, and mentoring aspects of the courses. The seminars are more ambitious than other classes at the College, and they involve unique program elements that make our usual course evaluations insufficient. We are especially interested in learning what contribution the “fourth” hour makes to engagement. Using the instruments and questions described above, and undoubtedly incorporating other assessment strategies as well, we will conduct a preliminary assessment of the FYE in the spring of 2007, at the end of the second year of the program, and report to the community on our progress and the challenges we face. This study will ascertain the effectiveness of the Scribner Seminar curriculum; the relationship between the seminars and the rest of the curriculum; the cocurricular programming; the residential plan for first-year students; the peer mentoring program; the link between faculty instruction and mentoring; the new Orientation and First-Year Class Reads project; and the success of the FYE as a bridge between Academic and Student Affairs. We expect that this assessment will serve as the basis for a longer- range study that the office of the First-Year Experience will undertake before the five- year review by Middle States in 2010-2011. At that juncture, the program will have been in operation for five years, and we should have a full appreciation of its strengths

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 33

and weaknesses, and the extent to which modification and revision of the program are required. We look ahead with measured confidence as we experiment with and refine the First-Year Experience. This top priority of our Strategic Plan is key to many of our other aspirations for the improvement of academic life at Skidmore College.

Recommendations The decision to create and implement the First-Year Experience emerged from institutional commitments to elevate our students’ interest and investment in their own education, to offer both the students and the faculty choice in the subject matter studied in the first semester, to increase the rigor of the introductory curriculum, and to create a program sustainable into the spring semester. The recommendations build upon what we have already achieved in launching this program.

1. Strengthen and enhance Orientation to engage and introduce first-year students to the academic expectations of the faculty, beginning with a summer reading and continuing throughout the first year. • Embed within Orientation and the FYE a series of programs that help students develop intellectual integrity and a commitment to learning. • Consider developing an on-campus Orientation program for FYE London students in August before departure and refine the integration of FYE London students into the campus community when they return in January. • Assess the effectiveness of the new Orientation. 2. Develop and assess the Scribner Seminar curriculum with an emphasis on introducing students to the lively interplay among intellectual disciplines and helping them develop a passion for learning. • Do this through a commitment to mentoring, effective use of the RAP, continuing emphasis on interdisciplinarity, and strengthening connections among and between the seminars. Consider adopting an e-portfolio or develop an in-house means of digital storage for students to build on the RAP beyond the first year. • Continue the level of academic rigor to which faculty introduce students during Orientation; develop a college-wide standard for written and oral communication skills beginning in the Scribner Seminars. • Develop workshops for the faculty on writing and oral communication skills and on the distinctions between mentoring and advising. • Train the peer mentors to serve as supplements to Writing Center tutors, to provide first-year students with an additional resource to help them hone these skills. • Standardize faculty participation in the FYE at a frequency of approximately once every three years, drawing regularly on the tenured and tenure-track

34 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

faculty—and, when appropriate, adjunct full-time faculty—who will mentor the students throughout their first two years. • Assist departments in the development of long-range planning to staff the FYE sufficiently, providing additional staffing help where necessary. Sustain departmental and program participation in the FYE so that the Scribner Seminars represent the full range of disciplines in the curriculum; focus particularly on domestic diversity and global awareness, citizenship, and science—priorities of the Strategic Plan. • Coordinate between the HEOP staff and the faculty the development of Scribner Seminars open to HEOP/AOP students to help HEOP maintain its level of success in the retention, education, and graduation of students. • Assess student achievement in writing in the seminars, faculty mentoring of students, and faculty participation in the FYE. Plan further assessments of the seminars’ learning goals. • Assess the relative degrees of rigor and expectations between the Scribner Seminars and other introductory, first-year student courses and, if needed, recommend to CEPP some steps necessary to achieve and sustain high levels of rigor and expectations throughout the first-year students’ curricula. • Assess the impact of the Scribner Seminars on the overall curriculum and determine whether they should remain an independent part of the curriculum, or if some number might be cross-listed with and count towards departmental or program requirements. 3. Deliver a robust cocurricular program, in coordination with Academic Affairs and Student Affairs, to bridge the gap between engagement in the classroom and life in the residence halls. • Engage students in those areas outside the classroom that provide resources to support their academic work through an effective fourth credit-hour program and other cocurricular opportunities such as the library, the Tang, IT, etc. • Emphasize the role of the first-year student in the community; develop programming that educates students about the balance between rights and responsibilities, intellectual integrity and honor; link that programming to the seminar classroom, the residence hall, and the paradigmatic role of the peer mentors. • Coordinate a thematic approach to an FYE program in the spring to sustain student engagement in serious issues and ideas. • Implement collaborative and independent research opportunities in the summer after the first year and again in the fall of the sophomore year so that engaged students have the opportunities to develop their scholarly and artistic interests.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 35

• Create living/learning communities where first-year students live in close proximity to their classmates and peer mentors. Consider shifting to first- year residence halls or assigning students in a specific Scribner Seminar to the same residence hall. Preserve those theme floors that remain essential to attracting and retaining engaged students—e.g., the Honors floors.

36 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

II. The Natural Sciences: Current Strategic Planning and the Role of Student Engagement

In the last several years, leadership within Academic Affairs has urged a “rebalancing of the curriculum,” an initiative that proposes to strengthen the natural sciences in order to attract more students to study science, and to help the natural sciences to join the social sciences, arts, humanities, and preprofessional programs as equal partners in the intellectual climate of the campus. This initiative, led by Vice President for Academic Affairs Charles Joseph and guided by recommendations from the Science Planning Group, informs planning for the current capital campaign about the aspirations of the natural sciences, outlines strategies for achieving our objectives, and identifies resources we will need to move forward.33 Our objective is to achieve not only a more balanced curriculum but also a more fully engaged student body. We believe that strengthening the natural sciences will yield a student body that is more intellectually diverse, more engaged, and academically stronger, within the sciences and across the College. Indeed, we believe that we cannot continue on our historical trajectory of consistently strengthening the College academically unless we invest significantly and strategically in the natural sciences now and over the coming decade. The very term “student engagement” necessarily has a different meaning for this chapter than for the others in this report. Even as we consider where and how our students in the natural sciences are most engaged, we are reminded at every turn that an even more urgent matter for us is increasing the numbers of students who study the natural sciences at Skidmore, and at the same time increasing the faculty and the resources available to provide the appropriate science education to those students. These concerns, in this instance, are and remain integrally connected. In every way that student engagement is being defined in the public discourse, the natural sciences as they are being practiced at Skidmore contribute positively and significantly. A recent issue of the journal Peer Review, dedicated to student engagement in the sciences, opens with an essay by Stephen Bowen that attempts to define what it is that we want students to engage with: with learning itself? With objects of study? With the contexts of knowledge? With understanding the human condition? Bowen then notes that these widening circles of engagement correspond roughly to several different conceptions of engaged learning. As we are fostering active learning, experiential learning, multidisciplinary learning, and service learning, we are working to engage students more fully to take charge of their own education.34

33 The Science Planning Group, convened by the Program Development Officer for the Natural Sciences Robert DeSieno, consists of all the chairs and interdisciplinary program directors in the natural sciences, the Corporate and Foundations Officer (Barry Pritzker), the Registrar (Ann Henderson), and the Associate Dean of the Faculty (Sarah Goodwin), the latter replaced in this capacity by Dean of the Faculty Muriel Poston in fall 2005. The group meets monthly during the academic year to consider strategic and tactical issues in the sciences and make policy recommendations to the College’s senior leadership. 34 Stephen Bowen, “Engaged Learning: Are We All on the Same Page?” Peer Review (Winter 2005): 4-5.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 37

In the natural sciences at Skidmore today, we are doing all of these things, whether building courses on the basis of inquiry-based labs, shaping interdisciplinary programs and majors, or collaborating on a community-based initiative. Skidmore’s scientists and mathematicians today are among the leaders in the College in curricular innovation, assessment of student learning, and crossdisciplinary collaboration (especially, but not solely, within the natural sciences). They have undergone (or are undergoing) valuable program reviews and are making effective use of the reviewers’ recommendations. Their vision for the sciences emerges from the sense that their students are extraordinarily engaged, and that we are well positioned to take the next steps of dedicating more resources for faculty, space, instrumentation, and support. The consequence will be a boon for the entire College, as we become more intellectually diverse and attract stronger students in the natural science disciplines. For this reason, the natural sciences occupy a major role in the Strategic Plan and a central one in the capital campaign. The Strategic Plan emphasizes balancing the curriculum by strengthening the natural sciences to increase the number of science majors and enhance the science literacy of all Skidmore students. Specifically, the plan says we must: • Strengthen the natural sciences and enhance their visibility at Skidmore by providing additional support to departments and programs, increasing the number of science majors (in part, by raising awareness of existing targeted student scholarships and, where possible, creating new ones), and encouraging more of our students to pursue science-related graduate and professional work. Add four (4) faculty positions and two (2) technical support positions to the natural sciences to support this effort. • Strengthen interdisciplinary science programs as a distinctive focus. • Develop curricular resources and enhance programming (e.g., external speakers, symposia) to raise the level of science literacy and awareness of the connections of science and public policy among all Skidmore students.35 This chapter of our self-study for the Middle States process, then, aims to provide both information about and more detailed recommendations for this initiative; it takes as a primary assumption the belief that the initiative to strengthen the sciences is, in its every aspect, directly or indirectly an initiative to strengthen student engagement at the College. The decision to strengthen interdisciplinary science programs lies at the heart of this initiative: Biological Chemistry emerges as we acknowledge the evolving importance of complementary scientific perspectives in the solution of challenging bio- medical problems; Environmental Studies as we recognize the essential roles of geosciences, chemistry, biology, and computing in understanding the character and vulnerability of our planet; and Neuroscience as we witness how biology, chemistry, psychology, and computing strengthen our grasp of how the human nervous system operates. In each case, these emerging arenas of scientific research and inquiry are

35 Engaged Liberal Learning: The Plan for Skidmore College, 2005-2015, Goal I: Student Engagement and Academic Achievement, online at http://www.skidmore.edu/planning/goals/goal1.htm.

38 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

informed by urgent questions, so that our faculty and students together do research whose applications and consequences have an immediate reality for them. As the President and the Institutional Planning Committee worked on writing the Strategic Plan, the Science Planning Group contributed substantially to the process by conceptualizing both our planning in the natural sciences and our needs for the capital campaign. This group has deliberated over the mission and aspirations of science programs, and offered the following observations to the Vice-President for Academic Affairs and to the leadership of the capital campaign as a way to explain the importance we assign to our initiative to strengthen natural sciences education for our students: The Sciences are a central component of liberal education . . . because the choices we make, as individuals and as a society, depend upon humanistic and scientific understanding of the challenges that we face. One need only consider the challenges of global climate change, AIDS, the economic and cultural disruptions of globalism, the spread of infections, the molecular roots of human maladies, gene-based therapies, drug safety, stem cell research, species preservation, environmental safety, information processing and sharing, and natural resource consumption to see how pervasive and essential scientific thinking must be if we are to choose wisely among responses we can summon to deal with these issues. Liberal arts colleges and Skidmore in particular must help our nation respond by educating our students in the foundations of contemporary science and by providing those students with substantive, meaningful research experience that prepares them to be scientists in the 21st Century. Our concerns thus lie very much at the heart of the question of what it means to be liberally educated today. We are addressing not only the needs of our students who major in the sciences, but also the ways that all of our students engage with the natural sciences in the course of their education here (or, conversely, fail to), and the outcomes of that engagement as they leave the college.36 The character of science education at Skidmore contributes in substantial, indeed crucial, ways to the intellectual development of our students. The foundations of work in the natural sciences are mathematical, conceptual, systematic and analytical. All of the natural sciences on our campus (defined here as Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Environmental Studies, Exercise Science, Geosciences, Mathematics, Neuroscience, Physics, and Psychology) embody these properties and strive to help students grasp their importance and their application to the solution of scientific problems. Science education is multidisciplinary: physics, chemistry and mathematics provide a conceptual platform for their sister sciences, and form one basis for a shared language and for analytical methods. Each of the sciences develops its own fundamental concepts (e.g. natural selection in biology; notions of forces, electricity and magnetism in physics; definitions of equilibrium in chemistry; limits to computation in

36 A Vision for Science at Skidmore College: Aspirations and Challenges (2004).

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 39

computer science) that students must understand as they proceed toward specialized knowledge in the disciplines and in interdisciplinary studies. Discovery in the sciences depends increasingly upon interdisciplinary cooperation. Our programs in Neuroscience, Environmental Studies, and Biological Chemistry (under development by Biology and Chemistry) respond to this circumstance and educate students in the foundations and the intersections of traditional disciplines in the natural sciences. In contemporary science education, there is increasing emphasis on molecular concepts, particularly in the life sciences, where chemistry and molecular biology have become essential parts of the knowledge we wish our science majors to gain and apply. Similarly, there is increasing emphasis upon computational science and upon mapping through GIS (Geographical Information Systems), two circumstances that call for further collaboration and sharing of resources among our natural scientists. Computational resources and methods play an evolving role; from real-time data acquisition, to high-speed calculations, to modeling of physical systems, computing serves the needs of research and aids the presentation of scientific concepts. Finally, we cannot emphasize strongly enough that collaborative research joins traditional courses and laboratories to engage students actively in learning the concepts and methods of natural science. Collaborative research summons students to solve sequences of problems, to test their solutions against the standards of established science, and to build those solutions into verifiable discovery. In other words, collaborative research is learning science by doing science—by developing a hypothesis, analyzing data, and interpreting results—and it will figure repeatedly and centrally in this chapter. One of the key recommendations this chapter makes is to restructure and revitalize our students’ collaborative research opportunities, both to recognize the faculty work involved in delivering them during the academic year and to increase the numbers of students and faculty doing research during the summer.

Some Historical Background The current initiative builds on and accelerates a process that has been underway for some years. In the College’s early years, the natural sciences were not emphasized as they were in some of our peer institutions; Skidmore built its reputation first in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, and then gradually through growing strength in other disciplines. During the 1990s, we made a concerted effort to support the sciences with new space in the form of the Dana Science Center addition, completed in 1996. In part because of the success of this initiative, we find ourselves setting new benchmarks and goals for new staffing, spaces, programs, grants, and, most important, students. Over the past three years, the College has intensified efforts to make progress. In 2002, the Program Development and Sponsored Research Officer for the Natural Sciences, Computer Science Professor Robert DeSieno, submitted his report, The State of the Sciences at Skidmore College, in which he presented both key indicators and some proposals for future planning. DeSieno’s report emphasized both gains made during the 1990s and areas of serious shortfall as of 2002. Perhaps the most serious ongoing shortfall The State of the

40 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

Sciences mentioned is the number of students who majored in the natural sciences. The figures cited there are sobering, and a later report provides figures that are both more accurate and even starker: in a cohort of peer colleges, students in the natural sciences—excluding Psychology—amounted to roughly 26% of all majors; at Skidmore, according to that report, they amounted to 12.5%, or less than half that average.37 In addition, The State of the Sciences noted that the number of tenure lines in the natural sciences at Skidmore was fewer than at the peer colleges, and had not increased in 12 years; in those colleges, “the average total number of tenure lines in these departments is 24: (Biology: 10.6 [Skidmore, 8], Chemistry: 7.6 [5], Physics: 5.8 [3]” (3). Equally sobering, the report cited data showing a paucity of external funding at Skidmore: Skidmore faculty, in the interval 1990-2000, pursued federal funding in support of science less frequently and attracted fewer dollars than their colleagues at eighteen other small liberal arts colleges with comparable populations of science faculty. In the interval 1995-2000, Skidmore received average annual federal funding for the sciences of $112K. In the same interval, the cluster colleges received an average of $350K from federal sources. (3) As the report went on to note, the College funded the expansion of Dana Science Center in the 1990s largely from our own budget, without the kinds of major grant support that our peers have been able to leverage.38 Finally, the report noted that Skidmore was the only college on the list of peers that did not have separate Chemistry and Physics departments. Not surprisingly, the report recommended separating Chemistry and Physics; increasing the number of lines in Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Computer Science; and planning for increased space and resources to support these new lines. In turn, it recommended exacting a commitment from the scientists to curricular enrichment, especially in interdisciplinary sciences, and to more active pursuit of external funding

37 These figures are for 2002 and 2003 and are taken from the College’s Institutional Research data as posted online and cited in the paper, A Vision for Science at Skidmore College: Aspirations and Challenges (2004), p. 1. The colleges used for comparison in this instance are the SCAFRO (Corporate and Foundations Relations Officers) colleges (Allegheny, Amherst, Bennington, Bowdoin, Bryn Mawr, Carleton, Claremont, Colgate, Colorado, Connecticut, Denison, Grinnell, Illinois Wesleyan, Kalamazoo, Macalester, Mt. Holyoke, Oberlin, Pomona, Reed, Skidmore, Swarthmore, and Union). The State of the Sciences identifies a somewhat different peer group based on endowment and number of students (Allegheny, Bates, Connecticut, Dickinson, Gettysburg, Goucher, Kenyon, Lewis and Clark, Skidmore, St. Olaf, and Wheaton [Mass.]). Neither of these peer groups is the one currently used by Skidmore for benchmarking purposes, but there is considerable overlap. The State of the Sciences report predates our current peer group list, which is based on endowment per student as well as geographical location and other factors. 38 DiSieno’s report cited data from the National Science Foundation’s WebCASPAR database showing Skidmore well below peers in federal support for science education from 1995-1999 (see Appendix M), and from the Research Corporation’s 2001 report, Academic Excellence, showing how far Skidmore lagged in number of faculty and funding for facilities (see Appendices N and O); Skidmore’s position has been superimposed over these charts, which summarized data but kept sources anonymous; the full Academic Excellence report is online at http://www.rescorp.org/ae/ae_study.htm).

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 41

(albeit while not forgetting “our commitment to the values and responsibilities of teaching and learning at a small liberal arts college” [6]). Almost immediately upon receipt of this report, the College’s administration began to implement some of its recommendations. Thus in the academic year 2002-2003, the faculty approved separating Chemistry and Physics into two departments. The administration approved new tenure-track lines in Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, and Psychology. New laboratory spaces were developed immediately within the existing walls of Dana Science Center, and planning for meeting future needs for lab and office space began, haltingly, as it became clear that the existing Dana Science Center could not accommodate much more new lab construction. During that same time (2002-2004), several departments and programs underwent external reviews: Biology, Mathematics and Computer Science, Exercise Science, and Neuroscience. (The Department of Chemistry has just completed an external review, and Physics and Environmental Studies are currently in the self-study phase, with reviewers slated to visit in spring 2006.) As these reviews are completed, we have made significant changes in programs, curricula, and faculty, sometimes but not always with new resources. Mathematics and Computer Science, which had recently established a Linux-based lab associated with a new tenure-track hire, increased the laboratory hours in its curriculum while granting teaching credit for the longer hours, added a tenure-track position, and began a multi-year expansion and revision of its offerings. Neuroscience is in the process of significant curricular revision, although that action is delayed at present because of the departure of two of its key tenure-track faculty and the need to hire appropriate replacements. Exercise Science separated from Athletics and Dance to become a free-standing department, and oversaw major improvements to its laboratory spaces where the faculty and students pursue research in exercise physiology; it has also recently hired a new tenure-track faculty member into an existing line who will bring to the College increased strengths in physiological research and funding from the National Institute of Health (NIH). The external reviews of all of these programs offered high praise for the faculty, instrumentation, and some of the facilities and curricula. Some of the reports issued forceful recommendations to hire additional faculty; these have been among the motivating forces behind our current drive to increase further the number of faculty positions. Biology offers an excellent example of a department’s comprehensive response to an external review, poised as they were to move forward with significant changes. The reviewers were very impressed by the program, the faculty, and the facilities. They concluded that “this is not a program in need of a major overhaul”; indeed, “The Biology Department is clearly a leader in proposing and implementing curriculum enhancement within the department and across the college.” Their report continues, “The single most important example of this effort is the extent to which the faculty have created research opportunities for their students. The Skidmore research experience for undergraduate students would be the envy of many other biology programs. . . . The Biology Department’s leadership in proposing and implementing interdisciplinary programs is highly commendable.” In sum, the reviewers recognized that Biology was already nimble and forward-looking and that its curriculum and faculty were engaging students intensively.

42 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

In addition to all of this high praise, the reviewers made many suggestions. They encouraged the department’s efforts to revise its curriculum, with particular attention to the four introductory courses then required in sequence: the report states that “a two- semester introductory course should be required of all majors and minors. Following the model of virtually all courses in the department, it should be inquiry based with challenging laboratory experiences and some cooperative learning. [In addition,] the faculty should consider using a team teaching approach to deliver this course.” These courses, they said, “should reflect current trends in the discipline . . . should include knowledge that is foundational to more advanced courses, and should appeal to students’ interests.” Within a few months after the review’s completion, the department submitted a curriculum proposal that followed all of these recommendations and substantially revised almost the entire curriculum. It included new goals for student learning, as well as detailed plans for direct assessment of student learning at all levels. The curriculum also prepared the way for increased participation in interdisciplinary programs, in particular the development of a major in Biological Chemistry.

Current Planning The College’s new President, Philip Glotzbach, arrived in 2003 and immediately took up the thread of strategic planning, and in launching our Campaign for Skidmore, both he and VPAA/Dean of the Faculty Charles Joseph signaled to the scientists a need to shape a more detailed planning initiative. What resulted, by fall 2004, was a planning document to carry us forward, following through on most of the recommendations of the State of the Sciences report and going much further in the vision for the curriculum and for the future of collaborative research at Skidmore. The planning document for the current capital campaign in the sciences, Science and the Liberal Arts: The Future of Science Education at Skidmore College (2004), summarizes our most recent achievements outlined above and expresses our aspirations for the sciences: Building upon these investments and taking up the charge of the College’s Strategic Plan for our science programs to play a more central role in the College’s curriculum, we are launching a $15 million initiative that will achieve the following objectives: • Strengthen our interdisciplinary science programs in Biological Chemistry, Neuroscience, and Environmental Studies • Expand support for our student-faculty collaborative research effort • Add to our science teaching and research facilities, and • Launch the Science Literacy Project to promote wider understanding of the most pressing scientific and technological issues of the day.39

39 Science and the Liberal Arts: The Future of Science Education at Skidmore College, online at http://www.skidmore.edu/planning/documents/Science_at_Skidmore.pdf.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 43

This planning document describes the addition of four tenure-track lines staffed by faculty who will help us strengthen our interdisciplinary science programs in Environmental Studies, Neuroscience, and Biological Chemistry. It addresses the related needs of equipment, information technology, and laboratory support essential for our faculty to sustain strong disciplinary programs and to build upon that foundation the bridges of substantive interdisciplinary science education. In committing to “[a]dd to our science teaching and research facilities,” the document stops short of planning for a major new building or wing but points to the growing need for new space as these programs expand. The consequence of this initiative, the document claims, will be a significant (50%) increase in the numbers of students majoring in the natural sciences in the next few years, a significant enhancement of the academic experience these students have, and a substantial increase in our students’ awareness of key scientific issues. These three results are integrally tied to each other: as the quality of the science education we can deliver increases, so too will the numbers of students; as the numbers increase, so too will the general presence of science in the college community. When we have doubled the number of our students who are majoring in the sciences, as we hope to, we expect to feel the effects well beyond the labs, as those students bring their perspectives to classroom and residential discussions with their peers. The plan above reminds us that interdisciplinary science takes us to frontiers that compel our students and our community to think about the consequences of scientific discovery. For this and other reasons, our aspirations include a project to promote the public awareness of science, particularly among our students. This initiative formally addresses questions about the impact of scientific discovery and technological change— and does so deliberately within our curriculum, the College, and the surrounding community. The plan thus serves as a collective response to questions we have been posing in the context of the Middle States self-study: what engages our students in the natural sciences? What aspects of natural science must engage all of our students? And what must we do to further these goals? The answers, in sum: we seek to increase the numbers of science faculty and laboratory support staff; continue to develop and strengthen our interdisciplinary programs; support and further develop opportunities for collaborative research; continue to practice and enhance engaging pedagogies; reconsider our general education science requirement; develop an effective cocurricular program to enhance awareness of science throughout the community; continue to strengthen technology and library resources in the sciences; collaborate with other areas of the College, particularly Admissions and Special Programs, to recruit more students into the sciences; and plan for future leadership in the natural sciences. Let us elaborate on each of these.

Faculty and Staff Most crucial to engaging students in the sciences are strong faculty in adequate numbers, with active research programs, and with laboratory space and instrumentation

44 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

sufficient to support their work. Since numbers of faculty are typically driven at least in part by enrollments, our shortage of faculty matches the low numbers of students in the natural sciences compared with our peers, with the exceptions of Psychology and Exercise Science, both departments unusually strong by other measures as well. The consequences of this shortfall of faculty are many and serious. Clearly, for example, we cannot sustain the breadth of courses possible at colleges with larger numbers of faculty, putting us at a serious disadvantage in developing curriculum and recruiting students. Our smaller departments must do everything possible to deliver reasonable breadth in their disciplines, which means increased need for independent studies and new course development. There are also simply fewer faculty than in our peer schools to provide leadership for both departments and interdisciplinary programs, oversee assessment of student learning, represent the sciences in College governance, recruit potential students, attend conferences and workshops on curriculum development and issues specific to the sciences (such as animal care, hazardous materials, grants programs, and instrumentation maintenance) and serve as liaisons to other areas of the College—all time-consuming work that does not contribute directly to faculty research programs or teaching. The administration has wisely determined to hire new faculty rather than to wait until enrollments increase. It remains for the supporting funds to be identified and allocated.

Interdisciplinary Programs Interdisciplinary programs—such as Environmental Studies, Neuroscience, and Biological Chemistry—are particularly compelling for students, one reason these programs are at the forefront of our initiative. Enrollments and majors in the first two of these interdisciplinary programs have grown steadily since their inception, and faculty report growing student interest in courses and research projects located at the boundaries of biology and chemistry. This is a trend not just at Skidmore but nationally as well: data from the CASPAR site of the National Science Foundation report that students exhibit great interest in the biological and life sciences (125,000 graduates in 2001 contrasted with 10,000 in chemistry and 3,800 in physics). The recent report from the National Research Council, BIO2010: Transforming Undergraduate Education for Future Research Biologists, notes that the future of biological education entails revising curriculum and pedagogies in response both to the work of biology today and to the need to engage students. The report recommends building a strong interdisciplinary curriculum with collaboration across traditional barriers, cultivating research opportunities for students, redesigning laboratory experiences, and evaluating the impact of medical college admissions testing on undergraduate biology education.40 Although not all aspects of this NRC report dovetail with our own aims for Biology or interdisciplinary science, this summary corresponds in most particulars to our strategies for both strengthening interdisciplinary science education and engaging more students in the sciences. In addition to our interdisciplinary programs in Environmental Studies, Neuroscience, and Biological Chemistry, we have cultivated

40 National Research Council, BIO2010: Transforming Undergraduate Education for Future Research Biologists (2003), available online at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10497.html.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 45

student interests across disciplinary boundaries in other areas. For example, Physics faculty have collaborated with faculty in Music and Computer Science in offering a cluster of interrelated courses for students who wish to pursue interests in that crossroads. We would do well to investigate the degree to which this cluster draws more students into Physics, and to use that information in planning.

Collaborative Research Collaborative research, both during the regular academic year and during the summer, engages students effectively, represents the sciences’ most potent pedagogical tool for engaging students, and should be expanded and supported. Indeed, there is evidence that the opportunity for advanced research trumps all other priorities for engaging students in the sciences. Richard Light, in Making the Most of College, describes the information his study gathered from students at Harvard about their work in the sciences. Nearly all of the students interviewed (forty-two out of fifty) set as their highest priority the opportunity to work with faculty who were actively pursuing a research agenda.41 About half, twenty-four of them, identified work on their senior thesis as the high point of their college work. For these students, the collaboration with faculty on meaningful research amounted to engaging teaching, regardless of other factors. As Light points out, “When asked about the trade-off between working with faculty who emphasize teaching and working with those who emphasize research, nearly all of these twenty-four students said they found that an unnecessary choice. They described faculty with active research programs as generally the most compelling teachers” (71). Our own science students, in a November 2, 2005, forum to discuss an earlier draft of this chapter, concurred. They believed that student engagement follows directly from faculty engagement, and that the faculty’s excitement about their research is the most important factor in engaging teaching. As one student put it, “There’s real excitement when the faculty stay on top of things, maintain their own excitement— when they show how much they’re science geeks, finding out about new developments in their field.” This group of students has been fortunate to participate actively in their professors’ research, and clearly they relish it. Our students in the natural sciences have such opportunities, both as part of their coursework and during the summer as paid internships. The outcomes of these research projects include poster sessions at our Academic Festival, presentations at conferences, and, often, joint-authored publications. Skidmore currently supports fewer collaborative research teams in the summer than we might, and fewer than do many of our peers, although our data on this are unreliable because we track officially only the students who are funded through our College’s program; the numbers of students working with faculty who are funded through external grants appear to be growing, and we need to develop a more comprehensive way to track these numbers for public reporting. Collaborative research in the summer affords undivided attention to problem solving and genuine research, builds stronger connections between faculty and students, and delivers results that are more likely to support faculty needs for peer-reviewed

41 Richard J. Light, Making the Most of College: Students Speak their Minds (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

46 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

publication. We must work to expand the numbers of research teams in the sciences active in the summer. We could gain on this objective by increasing to $3,000 the stipend (now $1,550) we provide for students who enter summer collaborative research and by continuing to cover their costs of room and board for ten weeks. This level of support would attract students who wish to pursue summer collaborative research and who rely upon summer earnings to help pay for academic year tuition and fees. Virtually every report from the sciences in the past ten years mentions the need to increase the number of collaborative research projects students engage in, to fund them more significantly, and to recognize the related faculty work involved in some formal way. We are in the process of adapting to that development and seeking ways to recognize directed studies across the curriculum as part of the faculty teaching load, a project undertaken during 2004-2005 by an informal task force assembled by the VPAA/Dean of the Faculty (the “Icarus” group). A recommendation from that group came to the Dean of the Faculty in fall 2005 and is in the process of being considered in administrative budget discussions.

Engaging Pedagogies In introductory courses, we prepare for the more advanced work of collaborative research with vital, engaging pedagogies. Inquiry-based, problem-based, discovery- based, and field-based learning engage students and are central to the natural sciences, and should continue to be developed and supported. Our scientists are agile in developing new ways of engaging students with the material, from the entry-level courses on through their programs. Several years ago, the Physics faculty revised their curriculum so that its gateway courses are taught as workshop physics, with some subsequent modifications in response to students’ input. Biology’s new gateway courses incorporate new discovery-based labs throughout, though here too they are finding they need to adjust the lab designs so they mesh effectively with the developing knowledge and skills of the students. One Chemistry professor summarizes his department’s struggles with finding the right kinds of labs to engage students at different levels of the curriculum: We have certainly thought a lot about this kind of pedagogy, but have found it difficult to apply in our particular discipline for a number of reasons. Primarily, the synthesis of chemical compounds and collection of chemical data requires a sophisticated knowledge of techniques and instrumentation that our students must first develop before they are able to think about designing experiments on their own. Hence, we do very little inquiry-based labs in our lower level labs (general chemistry and organic chemistry). There are a few labs in these courses that require students to formulate an algorithm (step by step procedure) that can be considered as an introduction to problem-based work, but this is not the norm. We have found that younger students are overwhelmed in the laboratory to begin with and that they become very frustrated and turned off when procedures don’t work—a recipe for disaster when trying to incorporate problem-based learning.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 47

In our upper level labs, we must spend a great deal of time teaching students more sophisticated and discipline specific (e.g. analytical, inorganic, biochemical etc.) techniques which prevents us from doing a lot of problem- based labs. Nonetheless, we do incorporate more of this in upper level classes. For example, in my Inorganic Chemistry class this past spring, students carried out projects that were research oriented. They synthesized compounds according to literature procedures, but were responsible for figuring out how to characterize these compounds using various techniques. … For the most part, our curriculum provides students with the tools that they need to become independent thinkers and to prepare them to do research. It's really not until we get them in the research lab that they really experience the true nature of science. It is at this point that they are able to formulate procedures and deal with a certain amount of failure. Chemistry is different from other disciplines in that very often, what we set out to do does not work. We have to learn to accept that, step back, and formulate a new approach. Students don't realize this until they work with individual faculty members on a research project and watch how someone experienced with research struggles with a problem and overcomes it. This is why research is such a vital part of our curriculum. It represents the culmination of a student’s career, tying together all of the fundamental concepts and techniques that they have learned, and adding to that, the experience of ultimate inquiry/problem-based learning. While we have a difficult time imagining how to incorporate more inquiry/problem-based learning into our curriculum, we are working on this, particularly in our lower level classes. . . . I should also point out that we intend to develop problem-based labs for the new biological chemistry program that students will encounter in their sophomore and junior years.42 Our Chemistry Department has been guided strongly in its curriculum and pedagogies by American Chemical Society standards, which until recently have been traditional in their approach. The ACS Education Division is, arguably, modernizing its guidance. As the department undergoes its self-study and external review this year, the challenge of engaging students in chemistry at all levels will be one of the primary concerns. One other aspect of laboratory work is proving a valuable way to engage students in the sciences at Skidmore: using advanced students as assistants in the labs. This is a rich opportunity for our students, helping to prepare them for research, teaching, and other leadership in their fields. As one Neuroscience professor describes her student assistant: “Her duties include set-up and tear-down of the lab, assisting students with lab activities by guiding them through exercises and answering their questions, holding review sessions for students, and helping to prepare an in-class lab practicum on functional neuroanatomy.” Similarly, Chemistry introduced student assistants into its introductory labs this past year, with good results. Biology has work-study students working as lab assistants who hold formal “lab hours” where they demonstrate key technical skills for first-year

42 E-mail communication from Associate Professor of Chemistry Steve Frey, August 16, 2005.

48 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

students: how to load and run an agarose gel, or how to use sterile technique, for example. A rather different kind of student-mentoring takes place in the Physics Outreach Program that brings physics education into local elementary schools. This program represents a collaboration between faculty in the Education Department and Physics students, who participate in a service-learning experience while also teaching young children about basic principles of physics in a way that is engaging for both tutors and young pupils. In addition, fieldwork is an important component of many courses. Biology and Environmental Studies faculty capitalize on the North Woods of our campus to pursue fieldwork and research. Geosciences faculty incorporate extensive fieldwork in their courses, making full use of the geological richness of Saratoga Springs’ setting and the relatively easy access to the Adirondacks. As one geoscientist asserts, “[W]ork in the field in direct contact with Earth materials and processes is probably the most engaging activity that could possibly occur during a student’s undergraduate career.” He goes on to describe one particular kind of fieldwork, by way of illustration: Each spring four weeks of labs in GE102 The History of Earth, Life, and Global Change are devoted to field trips to local outcrop localities during which the students record observations and collect specimens for interpretation and the writing of a major lab report. Estwing hammers fly and armloads of specimens are brought back to the lab. Upon returning from the field, students often crowd about my office door to proudly show off what they have found and inquire about the names of specific fossils. Two weeks ago one such student brought me a fossil that I identified as Matthevia variabilis Walcott. When I explained that this is the fossil of an enigmatic critter, that we really don’t have a clear idea of what kind of animal made the shell, and that he may have found the oldest specimen ever found, he became very excited. Since that day he has returned to the outcrop on his own time to collect more material, has inquired about the literature on this taxon, and asked me to put him in contact with a colleague at the National Museum who studied it some years ago. This student has embarked on research of the most independent kind, for it is being done totally at his initiation and for no formal academic credit. Engagement does not get any better than this. The anecdote is just one of many collected during our work this year identifying and defining student engagement. Here the student in question has attained that degree of engagement we describe as “extend[ing] their learning beyond an individual course, and even beyond their academic curriculum.”43 Many others who experience field-based research are doing the same, our faculty tells us. Given the importance of fieldwork to engaging students and conducting research in the sciences, the College should continue to support fieldwork opportunities to the fullest extent possible. This will entail both continuing to develop its plan for the

43 The full definition, given in the Introduction, is: “We understand students to be engaged when they demonstrate that they are learning actively and energetically; when they extend their learning beyond an individual course, and even beyond their academic curriculum; when they pose questions, undertake extra work, collaborate effectively with each other, draw connections, think critically, take responsibility, and show enthusiasm for their learning—in a combination of some or all of these.”

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 49

North Woods, if possible expanding access to the Adirondacks for Biology and Environmental Studies courses, and improving access to reliable transportation to the field, a recurrent problem that needs to be resolved. One more area where students have been intensely engaged in their work in recent months is in the GIS (Geographical Information Systems) Center, working on projects relating to courses not only in the natural sciences, but across the curriculum. The GIS Center is proving to be a powerful means to enable students to make intellectual connections across disciplinary boundaries. Students in Geosciences and Environmental Studies, in particular, make use of the center’s resources for projects that frequently turn into rich crossdisciplinary collaborations. In addition to teaching engaging laboratories and field study, the College’s natural science faculty have twice attended SENCER workshops, developed service- learning opportunities in Environmental Studies, undergone a Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL) review in Neuroscience, attended a PKAL workshop on designing interdisciplinary research and teaching spaces,44 and received major grant funding from both the Rathmann Foundation and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation for the interdisciplinary Water Resources Initiative, featured in this report’s Introduction. Students taking part in this latter project, which includes summer collaborative research teams as well as semester-long research, are experiencing firsthand the power of science to address real-world problems with reliable, methodically gathered information. They are also experiencing the complex interface between scientific research and its applications, as they grapple with conflicting needs of various constituencies in the community. As we assess interdisciplinary projects like these, we should determine whether service learning of this sort draws students into the natural sciences who might otherwise major elsewhere; evidence suggests that this may be the case.45 Such collaborative, open-ended work, again, is an aspect of engaging science education promoted in the BIO2010 report, and it is a feature of some science courses that students singled out for approval in a focus-group discussion of engaging pedagogies in April, 2005.46 Students from the natural sciences who attended the November forum on this draft had some pointed suggestions to make regarding courses and pedagogies. They agreed to the observations above, and said they would like to see more of some things, especially interdisciplinary sciences and ongoing connections between the natural sciences and the rest of the curriculum. Not only do they respond with enthusiasm when a science professor points out the “real-world” implications of their work, they also would like to see their other professors relate their courses more to the sciences: one

44 SENCER is the National Science Foundation-funded Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities; Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL) is a leading advocate for building and sustaining strong undergraduate programs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. 45 As Judith A. Ramaley writes in Peer Review, “Should scientific content be introduced through service- learning programs that link science to concrete community issues? Evidence suggests that women and underrepresented groups are more successful in learning settings that emphasize hands-on, contextual, and cooperative learning (Goodman Research Group 2002). Is a community setting a better laboratory for some students than a virtual laboratory in cyberspace or a campus science lab?” Ramaley, “Engaged and Engaging Science: A Component of a Good Liberal Education” Peer Review 7:2 (Winter 2005): 4-11. 46 Middle States Academic Council Student Forum, April 6, 2005 (Appendix P).

50 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

said, “I don’t think it should be the burden of the scientist to connect coursework with science issues.” These students also voiced the wish for smaller introductory courses with more honors sections for advanced students, and they all agreed that more science students should be working with Admissions to recruit students and make the sciences more visible in the admissions process.

Women and Underrepresented Populations in the Natural Sciences at Skidmore One other aspect of collaborative work is perhaps worth mentioning here: the favorable conditions specifically for women students in the sciences at Skidmore. Skidmore was once a women’s college, and we continue to attract and enroll more women than men (approximately 60% of our students are women). Enrollments and majors in the sciences, broken down by gender, reflect the strong presence of women at the College as well as the welcoming conditions for women who wish to study science. In addition, as of 2004, over the previous fifteen years, 43% of the tenure-track faculty hired into the natural science faculties were women; of the total faculty remaining in 2004, 40% were women.47 A rough count of collaborative research teams by gender since 1988 shows sixty projects led by female faculty and forty-nine led by male faculty. Where some colleges are struggling to hire women and engage female students, we have a strong track record already, at least in this area.48 We have not tracked the presence of faculty or students of color in the sciences. We do know that a disproportionate number of our Higher Education Opportunity Program (HEOP) students major in the sciences: of seventy-nine HEOP students most recently, twenty-five (32%) majored in Biology, Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, or Psychology, a higher proportion than found in our non-HEOP student population. In other words, there may be potential for increased recruitment of this particular student population, to the advantage of both. We know little about the circumstances for these students, or for our limited numbers of science faculty from underrepresented groups, an area we would do well to consider more formally.

Science and General Education In addition to fostering engaging pedagogies throughout our science curricula, we must also pay particular attention to the goals and effectiveness of a laboratory science requirement that can be satisfied by enrolling in only one (of several) lab science courses designed for nonmajors. Our first foray into assessing student learning in general education, which took place in 2004-2005, focused on students’ writing and

47 Science Hires for 1989-2004 (Appendix Q); sciences included are Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Environmental Studies, Exercise Science, Neuroscience, Physics, and Psychology. See also Women as a Percentage of all Skidmore Bachelor’s Recipients by Major Field Group, 1999-2000 (Appendix R). 48 See Caryn McTigue Musil, ed., Gender, Science, and the Undergraduate Curriculum (Washington, D.C.: AACU, 2001) for exposition of this set of problems in contemporary science education. Skidmore would do well to gather data on gender and science here more formally and present it more publicly, given this particular strength, as well as to address the issues in Musil’s volume in public discussion as part of our initiative on the public understanding of science.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 51

critical thinking skills and did not address learning in the sciences. The faculty group who debated how to go about assessing the students’ general learning agreed after some discussion that the courses that fulfill our breadth requirements are not as coherent as could be on student learning. We might well consider what, precisely, we wish our students to learn from our lab science requirement—and whether in fact they are learning it. Our one-course natural science requirement is described in the catalog as follows: Natural Sciences: Students actively engage in the process of understanding the natural world through the use of scientific methods. Students study phenomena that are the product of natural processes and are known through the senses rather than only through thought or intuition. Through the laboratory component of courses meeting this requirement, students will design and execute experiments (where appropriate as dictated by the discipline), collect data by observation and/or experimentation, and analyze data. Student learning goals thus include mastery of both content and process. Courses in this category are typically, but not exclusively, offered in biology, chemistry, exercise science, geosciences, physics, and psychology.49 The natural science departments report that they offer sufficient numbers of courses for students who are not science majors, and that the content of these courses introduces students to important scientific concepts and to the consequences of scientific discovery. Most departments, but no interdisciplinary programs, have courses specifically designed for nonmajors. These typically focus on a specialized topic in the discipline and make a point of incorporating discussion of ethical issues and political issues derived from, or related to, natural science. Entry-level (100-level) courses in the interdisciplinary programs, however, are designed to focus on broader issues as well, to a greater extent than disciplinary courses. Some departments and both of our existing interdisciplinary programs have 100-level courses that are required for majors, but are also commonly taken by nonmajors to fulfill the core natural science requirement, with prospective majors and nonmajors treated alike in the course. Some departments and programs note that this is problematic in that neither audience is optimally served in this case; others indicate that these courses are satisfactory in both respects. The faculty have yet to develop these assertions with evidence of actual student learning in hand, though most of the departments have begun doing direct assessment of student learning in their curricula. Despite these efforts, we know little about our students’ general conception of science. We have some modest evidence that significant numbers of our students are not learning what we hope they will—or perhaps do not know that they are. In a survey conceived by student participants in the Middle States process, in April 2005, we posed several questions about the sciences to 378 first-year students and sophomores.50 The results took us somewhat by surprise. Most disturbingly, 61% of the respondents disagreed or disagreed strongly with the assertion, “Understanding of natural sciences is

49 The Curriculum, Skidmore College Catalog 2005-2007, online at http://www.skidmore.edu/catalog/2005-06/academic_environment1.htm#foundation. 50 Middle States 2006 Student Survey Results (Appendix S); other Middle States committee members edited and administered the survey, with the participation of a group of faculty.

52 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

essential for an engaged citizen.” A hefty 46% disagreed or disagreed strongly that they “enjoyed taking a science course as a breadth requirement” (though the majority, 54%, agreed or agreed strongly). Again, a significant portion, 45%, disagreed or disagreed strongly that they find it easy to make connections between science courses and other work (with 56% agreeing or agreeing strongly). And 68% would not be interested in taking more than the one required natural science course. In sum, answers to all of these questions confirmed our sense that many students do not understand the purpose of the science requirement, that the sciences are somewhat marginal in our student culture beyond their own departments and programs, and that we must do more to help our students outside the sciences to understand the compelling reasons for a strong education in the sciences within the liberal arts. The leadership in the natural sciences thus proposes an initiative to enhance the public understanding of science, both among our students and within the larger community. Public lectures and symposia by outside speakers provide additional ways to engage students in science, whether majors or nonmajors. Most of the departments sponsor lectures annually that are oriented towards majors and faculty in their programs. The Science Planning Group determined in fall 2004 that we should develop more programming aimed at a more general public. In 2004-2005, George Saliba delivered two public lectures on Islamic science that drew large and lively audiences; the Environmental Studies program sponsors an annual conference on environmental issues. The science faculty are seeking to expand these kinds of events with appropriate planning to engage students directly with visiting scholars. The science faculty have also long been firmly committed to doing their share of delivering the core curriculum, and our new interdisciplinary Scribner Seminar program for first-year students may enhance their ability to reach and recruit new students into their programs. Eleven of the forty-seven faculty (23%) offering new Scribner Seminars in fall 2005 were from the natural sciences, and science chairs have pledged to continue their support in the coming years, despite the strain that this places on departmental and program curricula; we should encourage them actively to engage students in doing and learning about science as much as possible in these seminars. This commitment on the part of science faculty and their departments is essential to our initiative to engage more students in the natural sciences. We also recommend that the leadership of the First- Year Experience look for ways to build some understanding of natural science into the FYE, whether through Orientation, the common reading, the fourth credit hour, or shared programming of some sort. Clearly this will require the full engagement of the nonscience faculty teaching those seminars as well, and the College’s leadership must look to build that engagement.

Cross-College Collaborations Also essential to our initiative to strengthen the natural sciences is collaboration between the natural science faculty and other areas of the College. Admissions and Financial Aid, the Scribner Library, Information Technology, the summer pre-collegiate programs in the Office of the Dean of Special Programs (Science Institute for Girls), and the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery also contribute

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 53

significantly to these efforts, and some believe we would do well to take better advantage of these contributions. For the past several years, Admissions has increased its efforts to recruit potential science majors, working with the faculty to host Natural Science Open Houses for prospective students and emphasizing the sciences in their literature and outreach. Fifty percent of the student, alumni, and faculty profiles in the College’s viewbook that is sent to prospective students are now related to the sciences. Our most effective recruiting tool is a substantial merit-based scholarship that we have offered for the past several years. The Porter Scholarship, named after former College president David Porter, is awarded on the basis of superior accomplishment and exceptional promise in science or mathematics. Each Porter Scholar is awarded a $40,000 scholarship ($10,000 per year).51 Admissions and Financial Aid staff work with faculty to recruit Porter Scholarship applicants, the brochure provides information about specific science and mathematics activities at the College, and the Web page profiles an actual Porter Scholar. A new seminar for Porter Scholars, taught by Professor of Psychology Hugh Foley and supported by funds from the Mellon Foundation, ensures their rapid engagement once they arrive on campus. Perhaps most important, these exceptionally strong and enthusiastic students have had a dramatic impact on the sciences in the few years that the scholarship has existed. Porter Scholars have led the students’ Honors Forum, undertaken significant collaborative research, worked with Admissions, and served on the Middle States Steering Committee, among many other contributions to the College. Despite our considerable ambivalence about merit scholarships in the admissions process, and our determination not to pursue further opportunities for merit scholarships because of our commitment to access for applicants from all backgrounds, we appreciate the crucial gains that the Porter Scholarships have allowed us to make in drawing strong students in the sciences. Admissions has also increased its recruiting efforts in other ways. Admissions counselors scrutinize applicants for factors that might indicate a proclivity for math or science, such as high math SAT scores. Recent special recruitment efforts have included a mailing to 10,000 students selected from among higher-end PSAT scores (of whom only 1,000-1,800 respond and eventually eleven or twelve apply). This year, too, Skidmore joined the Venture Scholars program at a cost of $750 per year to obtain the names of students who are particularly interested in the sciences. We sent a mailing of 200 to the first group this year. And Admissions and Summer Special Programs have begun work to better coordinate their efforts, specifically for Admissions to focus on recruiting potential students from among the graduates of our Summer Sciences Institute for Girls and Pre-College Program in the Liberal Arts. Currently two alumnae of the Science Institute are enrolled in the class of 2009, having had a few others precede them, and annually seven to ten students from the Pre-College Program enroll at Skidmore; just how many go on to major in the sciences we have not tracked carefully, and this is certainly something we need to do.

51 The Porter Presidential Scholarships in Science and Mathematics, online at http://www.skidmore.edu/administration/financial_aid/porter_scholarship.htm.

54 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

It is difficult to say how these efforts are affecting our overall numbers in the sciences, since most of them are very recent. We do have heartening data on our Science-Math Open Houses:

Year Senior Conversion to Accepted Enrolled Attendees applicants % yield accepts 1999-2000 58 29 ( 50%) 18 8 (44.4%) 2000-2001 57 28 (49%) 19 9 (47.3%) 2001-2002 58 34 (58.6%) 25 9 (36%) 2002-2003 66 46 (69.7%) 36 14 (38.9%) 2003-2004 71 49 (69%) 34 11 (32.4%) 2004-2005 71 40 (56%) 27 24 (52%)

As the number of students attending the Open House has shown a substantial increase, the proportion of those enrolling is not as great as it was in earlier years, although the absolute number of students enrolled has increased. On the whole the numbers suggest a happy return on the time and effort invested, and we will continue to hold these events. Nevertheless, students (and, importantly, guidance counselors who advise applicants in the high schools) persist in viewing Skidmore as a harbor for the arts and the humanities—clearly a perception we value—but also, therefore, as a place insufficiently equipped or staffed to meet the needs of students serious about majoring in the sciences. It is a vexing circumstance, and it is one that is disconnected from the reality of our students’ opportunities to study natural science in strong departments staffed by highly qualified faculty and equipped with modern instrumentation. One particular effort seems essential: science faculty must work with Admissions to provide up-to-date information about their programs that will be compelling for prospective students; and they must recruit their best, most articulate and charismatic students to serve as tour guides for Admissions. Faculty frequently complain about tour guides who take groups of students through the halls of Dana Science Center reciting inaccuracies with little enthusiasm for what goes on inside the labs they are passing by. Science faculty must regularly collar potential tour guides and send them to Admissions. Clearly both the science faculty and Admissions will have to continue to increase our energies and creativity, to find ways to reach out effectively to potential applicants and prospective students. Both Information Technology (IT) services and the Scribner Library provide essential support for the sciences’ efforts to recruit and engage students. A library use survey reports that science majors are using the library, whether or not they are there to use the collections for work in the major. The library must expend almost two-thirds of its materials budget on the natural sciences, and the staff do not anticipate a reduction in the near future, unless open-source publications in the sciences take hold more quickly than we expect; the current cost of professional journals in the sciences is simply

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 55

exorbitant. This must be considered and planned for as we continue to expand our faculty and curricula. That said, it is not clear we know how much the science faculty and curricula are making use of these essential but expensive resources. Very few natural science faculty bring their students to the library for bibliographic instruction; this is largely because of online resources that faculty and students can use from their offices, labs, and dorm rooms. Scientific literature is most valuable when it is most recently published, and increasingly electronic forms of that literature dominate the field. For example, our Chemistry faculty and students rely heavily upon a search engine sponsored by the American Chemical Society called Sci-Finder Scholar; it supplies an efficient path to a range of peer-reviewed journals from the offices and laboratories of the department. The faculty use this resource to support their research and to teach students how to explore the scientific literature by modern technological means. Nevertheless, it seems possible that the library and the science faculty could collaborate more closely on helping our students learn to navigate and make use of these resources, an important goal for student learning throughout the sciences. Collaborations with IT are of course routine and essential in the natural sciences. The departmental computers represent an investment of approximately $650,000, and IT staff support and maintain the laboratory computers as well as multimedia equipment in some classrooms and now also labs. There are some tensions around questions of how much discipline-specific support IT can provide to the sciences as well as to other disciplines, and our faculty must arrange for maintenance contracts for our sophisticated instrumentation such as that found in the Microscopy Imaging Center. The LINUX laboratory used in Computer Science courses is supported by a dedicated technician; developing this two-year old lab and providing support was a crucial step in rejuvenating our Computer Science program and in attracting Ph.D. computer scientists to teach in our program. There is no question that our technology-rich spaces engage our students. Mathematica and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are two software systems used regularly, in addition to the systems physiology teaching simulation web-HUMAN located on Professor of Biology Roy Meyers’ Web site. The College also maintains subscriptions to SPSS, SAS, and Sigmaplot. These are resources that are essential to our students’ work in their majors and that some of these “net generation” students find especially and intrinsically compelling. This lengthy exposition of areas of the College with which the natural sciences collaborate in engaging our students concludes with a case that is our most unusual one: the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery. Just five years old in fall 2005, the Tang Museum has regularly collaborated with the sciences in producing compelling exhibitions of extraordinary reach and complexity. “Paradise Now” (2002), “Mapping” (2001), and “A Very Liquid Heaven” (2004-2005) each incorporated rich materials from the natural sciences, the first two on genetics and the last on astrophysics. “Paradise Now” included a section curated by Biology Professor Bernard Possidente; “Liquid Heaven” was co-curated by Associate Professor of Physics Mary Crone Odekon, Associate Professor of Art Margo Mensing, and Museum Curator Ian Berry. In February 2006, the Tang opens an exhibition on the brain, curated by the director John

56 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

Weber in collaboration with Neuroscience faculty. Another major interdisciplinary exhibition related to the sciences, “Molecules that Matter,” is in the planning stages, co- curated by Chemistry Professor Ray Giguere with Ian Berry, and supported by major funding by the Chemical Heritage Foundation. This exhibition, an interdisciplinary look at ten molecules in the twentieth century that changed the way we live, will be a powerful tool for promoting the public understanding of science. Those faculty and students most involved in the work at the Tang report finding it rewarding. A pedagogy workshop held in the Tang by Mary Crone Odekon, Ray Giguere, and our Luce Distinguished Visiting Professor of Object Exhibition and Knowledge Fred Wilson in spring 2004 drew a large audience of science faculty who engaged in a lively discussion of the meaning of “object” and “exhibition” in the context of scientific research and reporting. Giguere’s exhibition on molecules of the twentieth century has already been the subject of two chemistry research seminars. Perhaps most important, some believe, the Tang exhibitions offer creative, often breathtaking means of disseminating public understanding of science, and of engaging our students in new ways. We are still learning how to take the fullest possible advantage of these exhibitions to engage our students, and are also wary of the time faculty must invest in curating a show when their primary research is put on hold. This is a profound conflict, one deserving of more discussion. Some believe that given the limited staffing for the natural sciences, this work in the Tang deflects our scientists from the primary task of shaping what natural science will be at the College over the next decade. Some of us ask: will we become a community that offers students the best of collaborative research at a liberal arts college, that attracts external funding to support that research, and that uses the research to enrich, deeply, the content of robust interdisciplinary science courses? Or will we devote extensive time and effort to a fusion of art and science, experiences that become a hallmark of science at Skidmore, and an attractor for students who wish to study at the interface of two distinctly different ways of exploring the world? Again, some believe that we cannot afford to do both, and that they are thus diverging paths, between which we must choose. Others see collaboration and reinforcement rather than conflict, and indeed the recent report from the external review of the Chemistry Department pointedly voiced enthusiasm for the “Molecules that Matter” exhibition project that is currently in the planning stage. As several faculty have pointed out during the open meetings on earlier drafts of this chapter, the Tang can become the visible sign of how we do interdisciplinary science here, and can contribute substantially to our initiative to raise the public awareness of science. And yet the countering voice of caution, that stresses how essential it is for our natural science faculty to strengthen their research programs and their work in collaborative research with the students, must also be heeded.

Conclusion This self-study chapter has touched on many different aspects of our planning for the natural sciences, our current efforts to engage our students, and our imperatives for the future as we pursue the present initiative to strengthen natural science education

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 57

and balance our curriculum. As we summarize where we are and look to the next steps, one very important fact, as yet unmentioned, stands out: we have just hired, for the first time in the history of the College, a Dean of the Faculty with a Ph.D. in biology. At the same time, we are preparing with regret for the retirement of our program development officer for the sciences, Computer Science Professor Robert DeSieno. DeSieno has chaired the Science Planning Group, led countless discussions with various working groups, helped to gather materials for and then drafted the Vision for the Natural Sciences and the campaign statement for the sciences, and lobbied ceaselessly for all aspects of our current initiative. With Professor DeSieno’s retirement, we must plan immediately for the future structure of sponsored research and leadership in the natural sciences. As we implement the steps outlined in the Strategic Plan to strengthen the sciences, it has become clear that we need to continue to build support for this initiative throughout the College. Faculty who attended the open discussions of this chapter in draft form noted that few faculty outside of the natural sciences attended those sessions, and that, conversely, few natural science faculty attended the discussions of the other chapters. Faculty who did respond to this chapter raised some important questions and voiced some criticisms. For example, one professor noted that our goals for student engagement in the sciences are at best vaguely defined. With respect to the students, is the most important goal simply to increase the number of majors? In a word, no. We wish to assemble a critical mass, a population of students and faculty sufficiently large to infect the campus with more awareness of science and its consequences, to deliver seminars and public exploration of science, to populate at reasonable levels the multiple interdisciplinary science programs that must constitute twenty-first-century science education, to energize our summers with collaborative research, and to invite an atmosphere of excitement about science that compels our students to engage deeply the fundamental scientific concepts we wish them to learn and apply. Several of our faculty are apprehensive about building larger student populations in the natural sciences and fear that these gains will occur at the expense of numbers of majors in other disciplines. Other faculty in the arts and humanities believe our scientists are insufficiently sensitive to issues outside the sciences and inadequately engaged in the wider intellectual life of the College, and these fear that a larger scientific community will invite larger dimensions of isolation than those we inhabit now. These are reasonable concerns, and strengthening of the natural sciences at Skidmore must elicit centripetal and centrifugal forces if the entire College is to prosper from this initiative. The success we are able to realize in engaging our students in the natural sciences is crucial to the future of the College. If we can realize our goals, we will continue the remarkable trajectory that Skidmore has known since its earliest days. A more balanced curriculum; greater intellectual diversity among both students and faculty; greater numbers of students engaged in lab work, fieldwork, internships and service learning in the sciences; more students attending graduate school and other advanced degree programs; more external funding supporting our work in the sciences; more students from the sciences engaging in debates and discussions within the College, raising the level of campus discourse about issues touching on the natural

58 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

sciences—we think that we can reach these goals, and that the College as a whole will be positively transformed when we do.

Recommendations The natural sciences at Skidmore are led by forward-looking, energetic faculty who seek to engage their students effectively in the best of contemporary science education. They are hampered by the College’s history as an institution that is strong in the arts, humanities, and social sciences rather than in the natural sciences. In this context, engaging more students more effectively is overshadowed by the urgent need for the resources to do so. Our Strategic Plan’s recommendations for strengthening the sciences provide the context for this chapter, and our overarching recommendation is to follow the commitment of the Strategic Plan. In particular, we reiterate the plan’s goal of adding four tenure-line faculty positions to the natural sciences. With respect to engaging our students, we recommend the following:

1. Build the infrastructure that is essential for engaging more Skidmore students in learning about natural science. Enhance the resources of Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Exercise Science, Geosciences, Physics, Psychology, Environmental Studies, and Neuroscience so that all Skidmore students have access to adequate facilities and strong faculty, excellent courses, and collaborative research offered by these departments and programs. • Invest in space that fosters cooperation among these disciplines; in laboratories; in modern equipment and instrumentation; and in more laboratory assistants. 2. Use these resources to assure students learn and apply both essential fundamental disciplinary concepts in the majors of each natural science and also interdisciplinary concepts essential to the practice of science today. • Develop more direct assessments to gauge the degree to which our natural science majors are mastering the fundamental disciplinary concepts, practicing advanced and sophisticated interdisciplinary science, and developing advanced fundamental communications skills (written, oral, and visual) in their majors. • Support continued pedagogical experiments in the sciences to see which methods for teaching are most effective for both learning and engagement. • Ensure both that the weakest students are learning the requisite material— providing supports as needed—and that our most advanced students have the opportunities to do work, including active research, at each level that challenges them to achieve their utmost. 3. Increase the numbers of students and faculty in the natural sciences who pursue collaborative research in the summers on our campus. Make summer collaborative research integral to the practice of science at Skidmore.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 59

4. Launch a formal, multifaceted effort that invites thoughtful awareness of science and technology and their consequences among our students, faculty, and the surrounding community. Use this effort to build collaborative curricular innovation between our scientists and colleagues in the social sciences, in the preprofessional fields, in the arts, and in the humanities. • Review the goals of the breadth requirement in natural science and assess the degree to which our nonmajors are attaining those goals in their learning about science. • Track the numbers of nonmajors who take more than one science course, and aim to increase those numbers. • Develop ways to ensure that every first-year student encounters science in an interdisciplinary context as part of the FYE, whether in the Scribner Seminar or in the cocurricular programming. • Offer incentives and training for nonscience faculty to engage their students in science-related experiences or in quantitative reasoning. • Develop curricular and pedagogical collaborations with the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery to cultivate innovative ways to engage students and the larger community in natural science learning. 5. Develop sustained cooperation between Admissions and the natural science departments and programs. • Set and track benchmarks for numbers of applicants in the sciences, applicants’ qualifications, yield, and retention. • Assign responsibility for these efforts within both Admissions and the natural science faculty. • Capitalize on these efforts to increase, by 50-75% over a decade, the population of students who major in these sciences at Skidmore. 6. Develop programs and connections to encourage students from underrepresented backgrounds to come to Skidmore to study the natural sciences. • Seek external support for such programs as possible. • Strengthen academic support services for all students in the sciences. 7. Establish an office to support proposal development and grants management to aid our scientists (as well as other faculty) as they seek external funding that helps pay for the costs of collaborative research, enrichment of the natural sciences curricula, and innovations in pedagogy. • Establish benchmarks and goals for numbers of individual and institutional grant applications, both those submitted and those funded. • Ensure that these proposals and grants support work that engages our students and that provides them opportunities to do science at the most advanced undergraduate level.

60 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

III. Student Engagement with Domestic Diversity, Global Awareness, and Intercultural Understanding

“In terms of diversity, we still have a long way to go.” 52

Among the chapters of this self-study, none has provoked a more engaged response than this one. The process of vetting and revising this chapter has shown clearly that the self-study both reflects the College and itself effects change. As we have attempted, for example, to define our terms (What do we mean by diversity, or by intercultural understanding?), to determine our subject (How does the global education we offer to our students affect their thinking regarding race-based inequities in the United States?), and to establish our goals, we have encountered lively differences of opinion in many quarters, including within the steering committee responsible for writing the report. At the same time, we have found the airing of those differences to be an essential first step in doing the very thing we believe we need to do. We have reached clear consensus on the need for further dialog and discussion, for more candor and more engagement, especially with matters of race and socioeconomic differences, throughout and across different constituencies on the campus. Here as elsewhere, when the faculty and the staff take our own education seriously, when we show that we are each committed to continuing to learn and change ourselves, when we become part of each other’s education as well, that is when we most engage our students in turn. The arenas of difference become the spaces where change can gain momentum. In the midst of these discussions in response to the self-study drafts, a series of race-related incidents occurred on campus, and as of this writing, the College is still very much in the process of responding to those incidents as a community. In the first incident, someone scrawled the word “nigger” across a wall in a dorm with a marker; this was followed some weeks later by two other incidents, one involving an anonymous flyer entitled “Fecal Times” that was distributed in some dormitories (evidently not the first edition on campus), and another involving more disturbing epithets written on a dorm wall: “Brooklyn Bitches,” “Niggom,” “Jew.” Although these incidents are not directly related to our work on the self-study, they quickly became part of it. At a meeting of students of color in November intended as an opportunity to discuss the draft, the students, faculty, and administrators present instead discussed the community’s response: who had responded, when and how, and what more we ought to do. One result of that meeting was renewed determination on the part of several who were there to bring the incidents into more public discussion, and especially to convey more clearly not only that these acts are reprehensible, but also why, the history and the impact of such behavior. Those of us present agreed that as a College we are much too reticent, particularly on matters of race. Some of us have come to believe that it is particularly incumbent upon white administrators and faculty to respond rapidly and unequivocally, and to do everything possible to make use of such a moment to educate

52 On the Opinion-Gathering Phase of the Strategic Planning Process: A Report from the Distillation and Report-Writing Subcommittee to the Institutional Planning Committee, January 30, 2001, p. 14.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 61

ourselves and our community further about our collective history and the violence embodied in such epithets. This chapter of the report aims in part to continue breaking through the reticence. As do the previous chapters, it outlines the College’s recent history, in this case with respect to student engagement in what we are calling intercultural learning— on campus, in the United States as a whole, and globally. It then presents some views on where we see our students engaging most in intercultural learning. We argue here for a strong link between domestic and international diversity, despite real ambivalence about drawing such connections on the part of some members of the community. Our Strategic Plan draws this connection, and the goals outlined there complement and inform our thinking here. For over three decades Skidmore has been striving to enroll a student body that reflects the increasing racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of the United States; to attract a more genuinely diverse faculty and staff; to create more courses and programs that examine both global and domestic cultural differences as defined by race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, gender, and sexualities; and to enhance study-abroad opportunities for our students—not, we should say, with much clear sense that these goals have been interconnected in much of our thinking before this.53 We have attempted all of this for the sake of equitable access to higher education and for the educational enrichment— indeed, for the transformation—of our students, and of our community as a whole. This report will examine candidly where we have made gains, where we have much room for improvement, how and to what extent these goals are interrelated, and what we hope to accomplish in the years ahead. One aspect of cultural difference this report does not attempt to address is religion. Our preliminary conversations have led us to think that differences in religious belief are among the most engaging and complex of all differences among our students. As a college, we have not, for the most part, addressed religious belief and affiliation under the aegis of diversity and multiculturalism in any strategic or sustained way. And yet we are aware of strong student and faculty interest, as well as compelling reasons in both the national and the global context, for strengthening curricular and cocurricular engagement in matters of religious difference. We have made some modest moves in this direction in recent years, adding a tenure-track line in Judaic studies for 2006-2007, hiring an Islamist in a tenure-track line in 2004, and adding a staff person to support the Jewish Chaplain in cocurricular programming in 2002. Nevertheless, we are aware that the College actually offers fewer courses now with Jewish studies content than we did ten or fifteen years ago, mostly not on religion, and we still offer relatively little on other major religions. We will recommend that the College in the near future undertake both an inventory of coursework related to religion and religious difference and an

53 Perhaps the first clear statement linking our goals for global education with our goals for a more racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse campus is the 2003 report from CEPP’s Subcommittee on Study Abroad and Diversity, online at http://www.skidmore.edu/classics/cepp-sads-finalreport.pdf. That subcommittee, however, split into two subgroups who issued separate reports, as did the steering committee for this report for the initial drafts. Many of us remain unconvinced that the two subjects should be linked, and this report will recommend further public discussion of the issue to probe its implications for our initiatives.

62 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

assessment of student learning, engagement, and interest in religion. This chapter also gives relatively short shrift to some of the most significant ways that students, faculty, and staff may define their identities. We have tended to focus on race and ethnicity, believing that those are the markers of difference that are most vexed and vexing in our community, our country, and the world today. Not all of us would agree, and some responses to an earlier draft argued vigorously for the primacy of socioeconomic differences over all others. Arguably, race and ethnicity recede in significance when socioeconomic differences are leveled; and, in turn, when stigmas attach to race or ethnicity one powerful and self-renewing consequence is socioeconomic disadvantage. Within academe, it has been argued, the most potent and least addressed form of “diversity” is socioeconomic status, and we ignore this at great cost.54 Clearly this is an area where we could benefit from further public discussion in our community. We have also alluded frequently to but not developed the roles of gender and sexual orientation in the fabric of our community, and the ways in which these too are markers of difference that may carry negative stigmas. Just as in scholarly arenas queer studies have led to theoretical frameworks that shed light on the workings of race in the U.S., and vice versa, so too, we believe, our students’ learning about intercultural understanding must extend to subcultures of gender and sexuality, and deserves wider attention. As we complete this self-study, in the fall of 2005, we can begin to believe that we have made some progress. After the departure of Director of Diversity Jack Ling, who left Skidmore in spring 2005 for a new position elsewhere, we are consolidating what we have learned from him and undertaking significant change. We have reached new benchmarks in recruiting more students, faculty, and staff of color; we have new programs abroad that are rapidly expanding the ways our students are learning about intercultural differences; we are sending more students abroad than ever before; we are reorganizing administrative structures to meet a wide range of goals articulated under the umbrella of “diversity.” We are drawing more explicit lines of connection among these different developments so that they can reinforce each other in their impact on our students. And our planning calls for a good deal more. At the same time, we must be honest: there are stresses and tensions in all this change, and we have seen some divisions, even bitter ones, emerge around some issues in recent months, and expect there will be more. Our recently completed Strategic Plan, Engaged Liberal Learning: The Plan for Skidmore College 2005-2015, places both domestic diversity and global understanding among our top four priorities for the coming decade. The plan locates our goals for a more truly diverse community firmly within a framework of our goals for student “understanding and achievement”:

54 Skidmore Visiting Associate Professor of English Janet Casey makes a cogent case in a recent issue of Academe for the importance of social class as an invisible but crucial difference among members of the academy. In an interview in Diverse Issues in Higher Education (Nov. 3, 2005, 20-23), she notes that working-class students, whatever their race or ethnicity, have much in common, including a sense of dislocation from home, a lack of entitlement, difficulties communicating with faculty and asking for help, and a sense that these differences are silenced and invisible. See also the article in Academe, online at http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2005/05ja/05jacase.htm.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 63

Though our concern with diversity begins with questions of access, it is ultimately not about numbers of students from specified backgrounds. Rather it is about understanding and achievement. We will succeed only to the extent that our graduates are accomplished at interacting with persons whose backgrounds differ from theirs—seeing difference as a positive feature and knowing how to forge relationships that span what once would have constituted divides within the human community. . . . This project begins with the composition of our student body itself . . . our long-term objectives must include not only a more diverse student body drawn from across the United States but also a substantial increase in the number of international students attending Skidmore.55 The plan also links our aspirations for student learning about cultural differences to not only the national, domestic context but to the global context as well: We need to do more to include global perspectives in our curriculum and foster global awareness throughout our community. Specifically, all Skidmore students need to understand that no one’s worldview is universal, that other people may have profoundly different perspectives and values, that world systems are interdependent, and that local choices have global impact. To become globally aware, students must study at least one foreign culture and language; understand the dynamics of international conflict, collaboration, and negotiation; learn to differentiate between phenomena that are area-specific and transnational; and develop the skills to identify and analyze complex international problems in their historical, technological, and ethical contexts. As the plan says, it is not just about the numbers—numbers of culture-centered courses available in the curriculum, or numbers of students, faculty, and staff from racially, ethnically, and nationally diverse backgrounds, or numbers of students who study abroad. There is, however, a critical mass of each of these required for certain educational engagements to happen effectively. Most obvious in this regard is the educational value for all students of having present in the classroom and the residence hall a wide range of backgrounds; every course and dorm room conversation will be enlivened if they are populated by students who have experienced life from a variety of ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic contexts and who can bring their multiple angles of vision to bear upon the questions and topics explored in the classroom. We have alluded throughout this self-study to the importance of relationships for student engagement: between faculty and students, but also within student communities. In the context of this chapter, those engaging relationships assume even larger proportions. We need to plan more strategically to cultivate a variety of communities—not just through recruitment but also through retention and programming—that engage all of our students in learning about racial and socioeconomic differences, about differences in sexualities, about national and cultural differences. Also important are the courses actually available for the study of race, ethnicity, gender, national histories and identities, and sexual orientations. The numbers of students who enroll in such courses and who undertake study abroad, and the sites and

55 The Plan for Skidmore, Goal II—Intercultural and Global Understanding, online at http://www.skidmore.edu/planning/goals/goal2.htm.

64 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

contexts of their study, are all part of the information we have gathered as we aim to understand what our students are learning and what appears to engage them. This report will try to distinguish the numbers that represent resources and participation from the much more elusive issue of engagement and educational impact. A student may take a course, certainly, and emerge from it unchanged; interact with a person or a group of a different race and learn little from the encounter; study in a foreign land and remain comfortably isolated from the host culture. We want and need better numbers for some of our resources. But most of all we want our students to experience an intensity of engagement that defamiliarizes their own cultural assumptions and values, challenges inherited views of other cultures and subcultures, and fosters greater understanding of belief systems and patterns of behavior that shape the lives of people from different times, places, and ways of life. We also recognize that such defamiliarization may require a complementary process of becoming more profoundly familiar with one’s own culture and subcultures. It seems possible that students who are most aware of their own histories and cultural identities are also the most likely to understand them as contingent, and to achieve the capacities for intercultural communication that we value. In our discussions of this chapter, many of us came to see the need for both these dimensions of students’ understanding and awareness to grow. Some readers of an earlier draft voiced concern that we might be encouraging our students to become unthinking cultural relativists, lacking a sense of enduring principles. We suspect that the faculty occupy a range of positions on this spectrum, but that we are, for the most part, in essential agreement about the need for our students to achieve both relativist nuance and informed personal convictions. As President Glotzbach has written in another context, [E]ven as we affirm the humanity of all persons and embrace a global perspective, we must avoid the easy slide into cultural relativism—the belief that ethical principles held by one group or individual cannot be legitimately criticized by someone else. An awareness of the humanity of all persons and the legitimacy of other cultures must be balanced by the recognition that the accepted practices of an entire culture or society can themselves be problematic. . . . In fact, a commitment to social justice that encompasses all people is incompatible with cultural relativism because the concept of social justice itself carries specific content that is inconsistent with numerous cultural (and individual) norms. Working out this dialectic of cultural acceptance and social critique across different ways of practicing humanity is one of the most difficult tasks on the human agenda, one that students should wrestle with across the entire liberal arts curriculum.56 We are committed to the project of that dialectic between acceptance and critique, between relativism and a commitment to justice, not only within the curriculum but throughout the College.

56 Unpublished statement provided by the author.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 65

In the process of discussing this chapter, we thus clarified two separate but related motivations for our goals of increasing student engagement with matters of cultural difference related specifically to underrepresented groups. One is our wish, articulated above, for our students’ education to lead them to greater intercultural understanding, analytic insight, and capacities for communication. A second, even more powerful motivation is for our students to learn about and advocate for social justice in the context of both American culture and the place of Americans in the world today. The racial and socioeconomic differences, for example, that have played such a significant role in the history of the United States are everywhere implicated in our international relations as well, both historically and currently. We wish for all of our students not only to learn more about these histories and the disparities of power embedded in them, but also to engage in that learning in a way that will stay with them well beyond their courses, cocurricular experiences, and dormitory conversations at Skidmore. The questions we must address now have to do with how best to make that extra degree of intensity happen. The value we place on diversity described above emerges in the context of the national conversation about race and underrepresented groups within the academy. Scholarly witnesses for the University of Michigan in their court case Gratz, et al. v. Bollinger, et al. articulated in 1999 the now famous case for the “compelling need” of racial diversity in particular as part of an excellent education for all students. Patricia Gurin summarizes the case: “Diversity of all forms in the student body—including racial diversity—is crucially important in helping students become conscious learners and critical thinkers, and in preparing them for participation in a pluralistic, diverse society.”57 Gurin’s report presents her findings from studies at Michigan that bear directly on Skidmore’s expectations for our own students’ learning and engagement. We quote her at length because her summary relates directly to our goals as articulated in the Strategic Plan. The studies she summarizes demonstrate a compelling causal relation between diversity in the student body and students’ learning and intellectual engagement: Students who experienced the most racial and ethnic diversity in classroom settings and in informal interactions with peers showed the greatest engagement in active thinking processes, growth in intellectual engagement and motivation, and growth in intellectual and academic skills. The benefits of a racially diverse student body are also seen in a second major area. Education plays a foundational role in a democracy by equipping students for meaningful participation. Students educated in diverse settings are more motivated and better able to participate in an increasingly heterogeneous and complex democracy. They are better able to understand and consider multiple perspectives, deal with the conflicts that different perspectives sometimes create, and appreciate the common values and integrative forces that harness differences in pursuit of the common good. Students can best develop a capacity to understand the ideas and feelings of others in an environment characterized

57 The Compelling Need for Diversity in Higher Education, Expert Report of Patricia Gurin, January 1999, Gratz, et al. v. Bollinger, et al., online at http://www.umich.edu/~urel/admissions/research/expert/summ.html.

66 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

by the presence of diverse others, equality among peers, and discussion under rules of civil discourse. . . . Education in a racially diverse setting is positively associated with a broad array of what I call “democracy outcomes.” Students who experienced diversity in classroom settings and in informal interactions showed the most engagement during college in various forms of citizenship, and the most engagement with people from different races and cultures. . . . These effects continued after the students left the university setting. Gurin’s brief, and the other reports posted with it online, articulate the value of a genuinely diverse student body for all students. Our students learn from each other; they are their own most engaging teachers. It makes sense for us to take full advantage of that fact as we try to shape what and how they learn, and that should include orchestrating interactions across various cultural borderlines in ways that the students can experience as positive, encouraging, and not threatening. This will likely mean taking similar care to shape faculty and staff interactions as well. In our open discussions of the draft of this report, however, a number of faculty criticized the way too often the word “diverse” functions as a code word for race, with the implication—sometimes all but explicit—that we seek more students and faculty of color to enhance the education of our white students. It bears repeating and insisting that diversity should work all ways, as the language in the Michigan brief conveys. Each of our students belongs to multiple subcultures and in that sense has a multifarious identity; each, we believe, stands to benefit from living, learning, and developing substantive relationships and bonds with students, faculty, and staff whose identities are quite different. Our aim as a college should be not only to create the most genuinely diverse community we can, but also to ensure that this diversity becomes a rich and integral part of the students’ education: in short, that they engage in cultural difference and are changed by the engagement. Our emphasis on the justice of ensuring this engagement complements our sense of its educational value. We believe, as the open discussions of this chapter’s drafts have borne out, that the College can contribute in important ways to Americans’ ongoing work to overcome the injustices in our collective past. Establishing more equitable access for underrepresented groups to higher education is an important part of that. More, as the Strategic Plan states, we need to ensure that all students have what they need to succeed here when they commit themselves to their education. Whether this means English-language tutoring (ESL) for non-native speakers, tutoring in math or writing for students from disadvantaged schools, a strong summer program for Higher Education Opportunity Program/Academic Opportunity Program (HEOP/AOP) students, increased support for non-HEOP/AOP students of color and international students, or ample opportunities for challenging and successful capstone work in their majors, we are committed as a college to provide these and to help our students achieve excellence and reach their highest potential. We see this as a project for the College as a whole—indeed, as the quintessential project of the College as a whole. On one crucial matter within the framework of this chapter, we may not yet have a consensus as a community. Despite our collective endorsement of the Strategic Plan, we may not yet agree fully on whether racial, socioeconomic, and other differences in the United States today should be connected integrally, as in the plan, to matters of

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 67

global understanding and international studies. Certainly we agree, collectively, that there are many issues here that are quite distinct. The history of race relations in the United States dates to the moment the indigenous peoples first watched European boats appear on the horizon, and it encompasses the long and terrible story of the African slave trade and all of its consequences. It may seem to belittle the pain and difficulty of that history, and also the somewhat later history of early immigrants from Asia, if we attempt to place these in the same context as our attempts to recruit international students, faculty, and staff, or our students’ study-abroad opportunities. These are indeed radically different concerns. And yet they are perhaps in some respects not so very different, particularly if we consider our students’ learning about cultural differences with respect to race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic power. “Domestic diversity” is not a discrete or tidy conceptual category. At a recent gathering of faculty of color called by the Dean of the Faculty to discuss an earlier draft of this report, nearly all of those present were born outside of the United States. At a gathering of ALANA (Asian, Latino/a, Asian, Native American) students to meet our new deans in October 2005, many of the students present were non-U.S.-born; others were first-generation U.S. citizens. Some, of course, were African Americans whose personal histories had doubtless been located in the United States for generations. But this is no longer an easy distinction to draw, and many believe there are compelling reasons not to sustain the distinction artificially. The most recent U.S. census reveals that 12% of Americans today were born outside of the country. Many of us travel back and forth between the U.S. and another country, and our children may have dual citizenship. Increasingly, interracial marriages are blurring the boundaries among racial and cultural groups. The line between domestic and global diversity is less and less clear. Perhaps more to the point, for the purposes of undergraduate education, we aim for all of our students to come to a fuller understanding of their place, not only in the United States but also in the world today. As Grant Cornwell and Eve W. Stoddard have argued in Globalizing Knowledge: Connecting International and Intercultural Studies, there are compelling reasons to connect the drive to “internationalize” higher education with the drive to “diversify” it.58 For Cornwell and Stoddard, “In this new paradigm U.S. diversity would be understood and taught as the historical result of multiple overlapping diasporas created by the evolving process of globalization. And, concomitantly, understanding deeply different cultural and political perspectives from outside the United States would help develop the intercultural skills students will need as citizens within an increasingly diverse and globally interdependent nation” (ix). The case to be made here—advanced in outline only by Cornwell and Stoddard—is complex, and requires more time and space than this report allows. And it has been pursued in various forms by a number of scholars and thinkers in recent years: Orlando Patterson, Martha Nussbaum, and Anthony Appiah, to cite just three key examples. Among the goals articulated by Cornwell, Stoddard, and others—and certainly echoed by some Skidmore faculty in our discussions—would be for all of our students

58 Grant Cornwell and Eve W. Stoddard, Globalizing Knowledge: Connecting International and Intercultural Studies (Washington, D.C.: AACU, 1999), viii.

68 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

to learn that they belong to a “race” and a culture, whether they are conscious of them or not. Some, clearly, are; but it is not at all clear that most of our white students recognize that they belong to a meaningful racial category—that whiteness brings with it certain cultural markers of privilege, not just in the U.S. but in the world as a whole, and that it has a global history of diasporas and encounters, as do other, nonwhite races. Truly recognizing and internalizing an awareness of the cultural construction of race in human history, and of the violence and damage done along the fault lines of racial difference, requires a degree of engagement, we believe, several steps beyond what most of our students are making. That those fault lines also tend to follow lines of national and continental borders is no accident. That an educated person should understand the histories of social injustices that have accompanied those differences should surely, by now, go without saying. And yet we do not know much about what our graduates know or understand about the global and domestic history of race relations and racial prejudice. Nor do we know whether they have any degree of confidence or ease working closely with people of races that differ from their own, nor whether they understand the ways race still, today, in the U.S. and globally, remains a strong determinant of economic and political power. Further, they may not understand how quickly the axes of power are changing in the international context, and they may be ill prepared for the ways these changes may affect their own futures. This chapter, even after revision in response to considerable discussion, reflects the College community’s ambivalence about linking domestic diversity to global awareness. Some of us resist that connection because of perceived costs to one agenda or another. Others of us believe—some fervently—that we must engage more with these questions as a community: that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift and must educate ourselves as to its meanings and its dimensions. One telling observation made in an open discussion may help us mediate our differences: a faculty member suggested that intercultural understanding, whether in the domestic or the global context, is one continuum, but that the two different contexts call for two very different paths to achieving it. This chapter outlines some of the College’s recent history of engagement with matters of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientations, as well as—to a lesser extent—socioeconomic difference. In each case, as we review the make-up of the student body and the staff, the curriculum, the cocurriculum, and administrative structures, we summarize the information we have gathered in the past, identify problems, and suggest solutions. Many of the solutions converge on the change in overarching administrative structures that is already under way and to which we have alluded in the Introduction. Most important, the College is in the process of searching for a new Director of Student Diversity Programs in Student Affairs, as well as a new Director of Intercultural Education within Academic Affairs. These two new leaders will coordinate our cocurricular programming and our curriculum. A new position in Human Resources will complement their work and the stepped-up efforts in Admissions. Finally, the new Office of Student Academic Support Services is providing support to complement the supplementary advising done in the Dean of Studies office in order to ensure greater achievement and retention among all student cohorts. We mention these changes now because the need for them becomes evident repeatedly throughout the report, and they are indeed well under way.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 69

Recent History and Patterns in Recruiting Faculty and Students Skidmore College has made efforts for more than thirty years to attract and retain students, faculty, and staff of color. Our efforts to increase the racial and ethnic diversity of the student body have yielded some modest improvement, while our attempts to recruit faculty and staff have resulted in very little permanent change over the years. Saratoga Springs is the least racially diverse community of its size in all of New York State. Thus we have little local base (even when we consider the Capital Region) for attracting students and faculty of diverse ethnic backgrounds; nor do we have a large local social base of African Americans or people of color with whom recruited ALANA students and faculty might interact, and we have done little to cultivate the base that is here. The ethnic diversity of our students has increased somewhat (about 3-4%) in the past five years: we have witnessed a small growth in black and Asian/Pacific Islanders, which has been partially offset by a decline in Latino/a student populations. And where one might expect an international background in some of these students, their numbers (by self-reporting, around 12-13% of overall student population, as indicated in Appendix T: Student Diversity at Skidmore) remain consistently too small to have a major impact on the College’s collective identity. Admittedly, progress in increasing the numbers of students of color in recent years has been slow but steady, with almost 17% of our first-year students on campus now self- reporting as ALANA students in 2005-2006—still short of our goal of 20% minimum for the student body as a whole. As we continue to make progress toward achieving that goal, we must also support and retain these students, providing a system of personal and academic support comparable to what we provide our HEOP/AOP students. Additionally, and importantly, Skidmore continues to draw its student body largely from the Northeast: 83-85% of our students are from the Northeast, and around two-thirds of all Skidmore students come from just the four states of New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey. And even with respect to our regional homogeneity, New York City and parts of New Jersey, to cite but two Northeast examples, have very diverse populations of young people whom we might recruit more effectively—especially if we centered more attention on urban areas and provided stronger financial aid packages (packages which have, indeed, improved substantially over the past decade). Our very limited international student presence (under 2%, and unchanged for five years, slightly up in fall 2005) also contributes to the overall sense of the campus as a white, middle-class, Northeastern enclave. Our slight increases in students of color and international students are felt widely throughout the campus, giving us a sense of where we might be if we can continue on that trajectory. The modest progress we have made in recruiting well qualified students of color is owing to special initiatives on the part of Admissions staff. Since 1999, median SAT scores of enrolled ALANA students have increased by about twenty points each year. New recruitment strategies and new Admissions personnel contributed to this success. For example, the Admissions and HEOP staff, the President, the Director of Diversity, and ALANA students attended a special event organized by Skidmore for high school counselors in New York City; and a targeted brochure was created and distributed to interested high school students of color. Some faculty and administrators wrote

70 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

personally to prospective students, and staff participated in student conferences on colleges. Also, the Discovery Program, which brought and sponsored accepted students of color to campus, continued every year with characteristic success, yielding a high percentage of actual acceptances: for example, the spring 2004 Discovery program enrolled, for the class of 2008, 70% of the students who participated. Financial-aid packages at Skidmore also constitute a crucial component accompanying all the other recruitment methods. We must continue these intensified efforts; in addition, increasing coordination among Admissions, HEOP/AOP, and the summer pre-collegiate programs is crucial to meeting our recruitment goals. In any case, the students of color and international students are hugely outnumbered on the Skidmore campus by the white, mostly Northeastern students, with the result that in the large majority of classes there will be either no student of color or international student, or perhaps one or two—too few for them to feel consistently a sense of ownership and belonging. And, of course, these few students can represent only their individual view of the world, not the various perspectives of a nation or ethnic group. At the same time, the white, largely upper-middle-class majority students possess, for the most part in all innocence, a startling capacity for assuming that the way they have lived is the benchmark for all other belief systems and cultural practices. These are formidable odds for diversity and global education. At least we can claim, on the positive side, that the graduation rate of students of color is on average consistent with the overall retention rate of all students. But within those averages, there are discrepancies that we must address: In particular, African-American students not participating in the HEOP/AOP program had significantly lower graduation rates than similarly classified HEOP students. Although the numbers are small, the 65% average graduation rate for this group compares poorly to the 91% rate for HEOP students—a remarkable distinction, given that the HEOP students are by definition less well prepared for college work at the point of entry and less able to handle the financial stresses of attendance at a school like Skidmore. In addition, 23% of the black, non-HEOP population was dismissed or disqualified, compared with 0% of the black HEOP group.59 Clearly, the average is consistent between African American and white students, but that is because there are two populations: those who are thriving with the support of HEOP, and a more mixed group who are not receiving the same level of support. This inconsistency, once remarked, poses a challenge to us: can we provide similar support to non-HEOP students from disadvantaged backgrounds, regardless of race? Can we do more to help every student thrive here who wants to, and who responds to the challenge? We believe we can, and have begun the process of establishing new support systems. The consequence of doing so will be positive on several fronts: not only will we see more students keep their footing and stay to thrive at Skidmore and complete their education; we will see less of the negative effects that arise for all of our students

59 Strategies for the Improved Retention of Students, December 19, 2003; data here were as of the report’s publication date and differ slightly from more recent figures provided elsewhere in this chapter.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 71

from having numbers of them who are disengaged and floundering. The result should be a more academically serious and engaged student culture. Our faculty, staff, and administration are also primarily white, and we have thus limited our students’ opportunities to work with adult leaders from a range of racial and ethnic backgrounds, although here again we have recently made some gains. The 1988 Middle States Diversity Study noted that in 1987 there were no minority trustees, only two minorities out of seventy-seven administrators, two minority secretaries out of 131, twelve minority service-maintenance staff members out of a total of 428, nine minority faculty in a cohort of approximately 187, and seven professional non-faculty out of 121. In nearly twenty years, such numbers have not changed substantially. Skidmore has tenured only one African American faculty member (and she soon left for another position); another has been recommended for tenure this fall. In addition, we have a number of faculty and staff members of color, as well as many who were born and raised in foreign countries around the world (in Latin America, the U.K., Europe, Canada, South Asia, East Asia, and North Africa), contributing in important ways to the diversity and interculturalism of the campus community. More recently, we are seeing increasing numbers of international faculty throughout the curriculum—in Management and Business, Economics, and American Studies, for example. Recruitment during 2004-2005 may have started us on a significant turnaround, as we hired a new Dean of the Faculty, Muriel Poston, an African American biologist and now a tenured member of the Biology Department; and recruited, arguably, the most racially and ethnically diverse group of faculty in the College’s history. While we have made gains in the hiring of women as administrators, faculty, and staff since our last Middle States report (and had two women serve as College President), we must continue our commitment to bringing in the strongest possible faculty from the broadest possible candidate pools, to be strategic and creative in our recruiting, and to continue to change as a community in order to be attractive to the candidates we aim to recruit. We also must develop strategies for retaining our faculty of color. For example, we should have a group of faculty of color who meet regularly to discuss issues of common interest, to mentor each other, and to provide an affinity group. We need to consider how best to mentor all of our faculty to support them throughout the pre-tenure process; we would do well to attend especially carefully to faculty who come themselves from disadvantaged backgrounds and may not be comfortable with some of the more traditional ways of networking at a college like Skidmore. And we should establish a faculty and student exchange program (as have many other colleges) with a historically black college and/or with a college that has a strong presence of Hispanic faculty and students. A working paper to the President in spring 2005 from then Dean of the Faculty Charles Joseph, Dean of Student Affairs Thomas P. Oles, and Associate Deans John Brueggemann and Sarah Goodwin outlines a series of possible strategies for recruiting and retaining more faculty of color, some of which are now being implemented.60 In short, developing a more heterogeneous campus community should be a high priority.

60 Student Diversity at Skidmore, working paper, spring 2005. (Appendix U).

72 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

Our goals for our students in this regard are several. First, we want to be a welcoming environment for members of underrepresented groups and international students, a place where their intellectual lives prosper and their personal interests are supported and nourished as well as challenged. Second, we want all students to discover that they come from a particular time and place, that their way of thinking and behaving is socially constructed rather than a universal imperative. We want them to socialize with, debate with, agree and disagree with students (and faculty and staff) who have emerged from different regional, racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Third, we want all of our students to learn to make informed choices: that is, to grow stronger; that is, to accept, to compromise creatively, sometimes to embrace, and at other times to reject a particular cultural outlook or practice (including their own)—and to do so with an understanding of their reasons, of the evidence available, and of the human impact resulting from what they choose to believe and to do. Finally, we also want a more diverse campus for the sake of faculty and staff growth and development. Faculty are not immune to provincial perspectives and narrow constructs, as we too need a working environment which immerses us in a community of different values, behavior patterns, and approaches to learning. As the Introduction to this self-study concludes, faculty engagement begets student engagement. If we are to engage our students in intercultural learning, we must engage ourselves in it as well.

Race and Ethnicity in the Skidmore Curriculum: Recent History The opportunities in the curriculum for learning about race and ethnicity in the U.S. present a mixed picture, if we are to judge by course titles and catalog descriptions. The Skidmore Multicultural Course Guide, updated in 1998 and renamed The Skidmore Guide to Culture-Centered Courses, identified courses clustered around specific cultures (African, Hispanic, Asian, Islamic, or West Asian), interculturally-focused courses (Asian American, Native American/American Indian, African American, Latino/Hispanic American), and culture-related interdisciplinary themes (e.g., race and ethnicity, social inequality, public policies, language, and music in society). Although that guide is now out-of-date, the number of culture-centered courses continues to be significant and substantial. Furthermore, as some faculty pointed out during public discussions of this chapter in draft form, we have no way to index “mainstreaming,” or the degree to which more traditional courses now embed more material that might previously have been considered “multicultural” but now is simply considered part of the core. Faculty note that there has been a significant shift in the canons within many disciplines in recent years. Other faculty note that many of the culture-centered courses listed in the 1998 guide address cultures historically, rather than as topics directly related to the world that students enter upon graduation. That historical underpinnings are crucial to understanding contemporary situations goes without saying, but some faculty argue that the curriculum lacks more current views of Latino, African American, Asian American, and American Indian experience in the U.S. in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Quite a few courses trace a broad sweep of cultural histories, but few give their full attention to contemporary times.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 73

The distribution of courses across the thematic areas is uneven, with some areas appearing to be much better represented than others. For example, courses on East Asia, in particular, have increased in number, as have enrollments in Chinese and Japanese language, and we have anecdotal information that a number of faculty outside of Asian Studies are increasing attention to East Asia within their courses in International Affairs and Environmental Studies, for example. Offerings on the Asian American diaspora and on contemporary Asian American cultures would make a valuable complement to these courses. These inventories of courses cannot in themselves tell us how much students learn in one or in several courses that touch upon race or ethnicity or treat it in depth. They do not address all of the categories that we include in our understanding of domestic diversity: we have not inventoried where analysis of gender and sexualities appears in our curriculum, for example. These inventories also do not tell us how engaged our students are in thinking in complex ways about intercultural communication and identities. Just as important, do our students apply the material they have studied about race and ethnicity to other areas of study and to their daily lives? As suggested in our latest Alumni Survey Report (administered spring 2004 to the class of 1999), they say they do not, when, as alumni, they reflect on their Skidmore experience. Since 2001, there has also been a significant change in the College’s course requirements, and it is too soon to say how well the newer requirement structure will engage our students in learning about race, ethnicity, and cultural differences. In the last few years at Skidmore a requirement that students achieve “intermediate competence” in a foreign language (which could mean various numbers of foreign language courses if the student did not demonstrate competency through language testing) was reduced to a one-course foreign-language requirement for all students, no exceptions. Further, what had been a requirement for all students to take a non-Western course was changed to a “culture-centered inquiry” requirement in which students took either a non-Western course or one centered on “cultural diversity” (CD) in the U.S. or elsewhere, with one of the CD cultures being of non-Western origin.61 The last iteration of the all-college Liberal Studies 1 (fall 2004) introduced all new students to several relevant topics, especially in the sections titled “Human Identities and Justice”; and a significant number of the LS2 courses addressed topics related to race, ethnicity, gender, or sexualities. Thus far, there is some reassuring evidence that faculty interests in these areas are flowing into the Scribner Seminars for first-year students: approximately 25% of the fall 2005 Seminars focused on the experience of underrepresented populations and experiences in domestic or global contexts. It remains to be seen how much our students will learn about intercultural differences, race, and ethnicity in the new First- Year Experience; certainly we should establish goals and assessments for this aspect of the Scribner Seminars and the first-year program. The numbers of opportunities and connections notwithstanding, the most important assessment question presents an even bigger challenge: What do students learn as a result of the courses and coursework about race, ethnicity, socioeconomic differences, gender, and sexualities in our curriculum? We do not know how engaged the students are in learning about these

61 See CEPP Guidelines for Culture-Centered Inquiry, March 26, 2001, online at http://www.skidmore.edu/academics/curric/CEPPguidelines-2.htm.

74 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

subjects and whether we achieve any common educational goals (other than those measured in an individual course, and sometimes collectively in a single program). Finally, the Honors Forum may have the potential to include more students of varying backgrounds, and to offer more courses that involve topics addressing cultural differences in both theoretical and practical terms. It is currently perceived as a majority-student program, but has recently made efforts to enlist more ALANA students, in particular, with some success. In recent years, the forum has addressed a variety of sensitive issues related to race, gender, and sexualities, in particular, in open student panel discussions known as the “Shades of Grey” series. But while the panels on gender and sexual orientations drew a full house for three days running, the one on race in fall 2004 was a major disappointment to many students who hoped to see a racially mixed and engaged audience. For many ALANA students, it reinforced their sense that they are heard by the converted, but that they remain largely marginal within the student culture. It was a painful moment for the Honors Forum leadership, and reminded College leadership of the need to do more, more effectively, to build connections and understanding among our student communities.

Opportunities in the Cocurriculum One arena in which border-crossings and bridge-building can and should take place is in the College’s Intercultural Center (ICC). Conversation around the establishment of an Intercultural Center (replacing the somewhat different concept of a “multicultural center”) was surrounded by controversy. Emerging from this was an observation that the College must provide regular opportunities for community members within underrepresented groups to communicate with and engage each other in relative safety on shared concerns as well as genuine differences; and that students must also engage in dialog with others from different backgrounds. The traditional majority-minority paradigm must be supplanted by one that empowers underrepresented students and also underscores the need to educate all students to comprehend and recognize the worth and validity of different cultural perspectives. Thus the proposal for the new Intercultural Center envisioned it as a space for these dialogs and programming to take place. During its first few years the center was led by the Assistant Dean of Multicultural Student Affairs; a new, academically-credentialed ordained minister served as the center’s Associate Director (and taught in Religious Studies); and members of the Campus Life Office and an ad hoc Intercultural Center Programming Committee of faculty, staff, and students helped design the center’s educational program. The results were quite encouraging, and included the funding of a series of programs around a single theme across a semester, for which faculty from across the curriculum brought in speakers. As a result of the structure and pre-planning, faculty knew ahead of time about events and even the speakers for the following semester. This enabled everyone interested to include these events in their course syllabi, thus making student attendance at these events meaningful. The basic model of faculty and staff working together to plan cocurricular events centered on an area of common interest is promising for the future.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 75

Since that administrative structure has been suspended, the ICC programming has not had the same coherence. The summary of Campus Life Goals 2004-2005 by the Associate Dean of Students for Campus Life cited 574 activities held in the ICC for 2004-2005: ALANA student social gatherings, discussions, retreats, leadership meetings, interfaith programs, pre- and post-lecture dialogs, study-abroad meetings, and so on. But faculty and students have both complained that too many events compete for their time; too few of them are well attended beyond their immediate interest group; and too little oversight takes place to ensure coherence in the cocurriculum. The new Director of Student Diversity Programs will assume the role of the ICC Director and will coordinate this programming along with the new Director of Intercultural Studies, a collaboration that we hope will bring increasing coherence and border-crossing into our intercultural events.62 To the extent that the ICC is also a space for events related to international and global studies, their collaboration and oversight will extend beyond the domestic arena as well. Given the concerns that a number of faculty have raised about the need to coordinate events across the campus as a whole, it is not clear that these two directors alone will meet that need; this is a question we should revisit when we assess the effectiveness of the ICC and the new structure, if not before. As in so much of the concerns in this chapter, cocurricular activities that focus on matters of cultural differences in the U.S. context are often integrally related to international and global matters. Thus, for example, the fall 2005 issue of Culture Connect, the campus newsletter of the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs, profiles the head of the student group Raices, whose family is from El Salvador; the head of the new Muslim student organization Hayat, born in Bangladesh, and her co-leader, originally from Egypt; and the president of the Asian Culture Association, born in Taiwan. It also features an article by an African American student from Colorado. As we work toward more coherent planning in the cocurriculum, it is in fact essential that international and global studies events be coordinated with events planned around race, ethnicities, and cultural differences in the U.S., both to avoid conflicts and to make the most of their interconnections. Student clubs and organizations comprise an important part of college life, but we have not gathered information systematically about their activities related to matters of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic differences, gender, and sexualities. We do know that the clubs have sustained for some years a lively and rich variety of programming. For example, the Leadership Activities Report for 2003-2004 lists a total of ninety events sponsored by Asian Cultural Awareness, Raices (Latino/Hispanic club), Skidmore Pride

62 In December 2003, a subcommittee of the Committee on Educational Policy and Planning (CEPP) recommended the creation of two new centers, the Center for International Education and the Center for Intercultural Studies, each “under the leadership of a separate director charged with coordinating the various programs into a holistic vision of an internationalized curriculum and cocurricular program” (CEPP Subcommittee on Study Abroad and Diversity Final Report). The main objective of both centers, working together, was to seek out and create opportunities of engagement for both faculty and students. Such structures, if approved and funded, would permit us to achieve the goals outlined in this chapter. To date, the Directors of Student Diversity Programs and of Intercultural Education have been approved, but the recommendations for a Center for International Education and a director for it remain dormant. The subcommittee that wrote this chapter strongly endorses that recommendation; wider discussion has yet to take place.

76 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

Alliance, SOAR (Students Organized Against Racism), and Ujima (Caribbean/African American Association). The summary for 2004-2005, probably incomplete, lists 68 events by the same groups, including performances by Eliot Chang and Steve Nacua, Latino Heritage Month, a discussion of Latinas and international drug trafficking, a sexuality panel for Coming Out Week, a lecture on Sudanese refugees, Caribbean Food Night, and Black History Month. In general, however, participation and attendance by students from other underrepresented groups and by white students tends to be uneven. Social and music events are clearly the favorite for all students, but participation in the more culturally-centered and academically-linked events tends to fluctuate, depending largely on the topic and on whether attendance is either required or rewarded by faculty members. Additionally, students tend to see a separation among student groups on campus. Some complain about the unwillingness of students to “cross borders” and engage with students who are different from them in both daily and organized events. This is also supported by survey results from the past five years which suggest that students from different social groups do not sufficiently engage each other on campus. The labor-intensive quality of this cocurricular work often takes a psychological and academic toll on committed and persistent student leaders; and some say that greater day-to-day, evening-time, and weekend support from the College’s Student Affairs staff is desirable. In her report on Campus Life Goals 2004-2005, the Associate Dean for Campus Life observed: “While students take great pride in producing these month-long and week-long cultural celebrations, they are often overwhelmed by the amount of time, energy and skill it takes to successfully deliver multiple programs in so short a time frame. They have been critical of the institution for not assuming greater responsibility for and lending more support to these programs.” She goes on to caution that the transition to a new planning mode will require the student clubs to give up some of their decision-making autonomy and for staff and faculty to invest more time “in taking on more of the tasks of program implementation.” We hope that the new administrative appointments will enable this transition to take place effectively. In the residence halls, students of color have achieved and sustained a significant presence in the competitive residential-life hiring process. In these campus leadership positions, they gain a visibility not often found elsewhere on campus. On residential floors with HRs (Head Residents), RAs (Resident Assistants), and HCs (House Counselors) of color, our students live in a racially-mixed environment with structured interactions that encourage communication and cooperation. This interactive experience becomes even more powerful when augmented by cocurricular programs offered campus-wide. Currently, very limited work on race and ethnicity is actually conducted in the residence halls at a time when there is an increase in the number of highly successful residence hall workshops on sexuality, gender, health, safety, car maintenance, and other campus-life themes. We expect to undertake more workshops and programming once the new leadership is in place. One cocurricular program that ALANA students particularly appreciate is the Multicultural Career Networking Reception, which connects students of color with ALANA alumni for discussions of career development issues. Skidmore provides a bus to transport students to New York City, and the event takes place at the site of a corporate sponsor where there is alumni representation and an interest in recruiting

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 77

ALANA students for jobs and internships. Alumni are encouraged to mentor students beyond the program by conducting informational interviews in the workplace, sponsoring job shadowers, and hiring interns/entry-level employees. ALANA students, who often are first-generation college students, meet role models in professional fields with similar backgrounds. More than fifty students and alumni typically attend this popular program, and students ask about it every year. Career Services also refers students to ALANA alumni volunteers throughout the year. Clearly this form of networking deserves continued support and, as the numbers grow, expansion. The Higher Education Opportunity Program (HEOP) and the Academic Opportunity Program (AOP) are quintessentially academic programs, but we include them in this section on cocurricular life for the extraordinarily successful mentoring they provide to students during the admissions process and extending into the students’ years at Skidmore. Student engagement within the program remains high, and many HEOP/AOP students also regularly participate in events organized on campus that relate to matters of race and ethnicity, gender, and sexualities, whatever their own cultural identity. Some of these students choose to take courses on these and related subjects, and a number choose to major in disciplines that lend themselves to community and diversity-based occupations. While all students from underrepresented groups have to interact with white students on a regular basis, it is not clear how frequently this necessary border-crossing behavior is voluntarily reciprocated among the white students outside of the HEOP/AOP program. Approximately 85% of our HEOP/AOP students are students of color; of the total number of our students of color at the College, about one-third are in the HEOP/AOP program. As one site of significant border-crossing, this program has models for programming, mentoring, and curriculum of considerable interest to the rest of the College. The College offers students opportunities for engagement with matters of intercultural learning in three areas outside of but integrally connected to the residential college curriculum: the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery; Special Programs; and international study abroad. In each case—though in very different ways—the leadership in these areas aims to complement the campus curriculum with particularly intense, provocative, enduring learning experiences for our students.

The Tang: A Space for Engaging Difference Skidmore’s Tang Museum has offered a kind of opening onto more daring programming, more provocative moments, more productive discomfort than we may typically find within our curriculum. From the moment it opened five years ago, the Tang has engaged faculty, students, and the community in thinking and talking about cultural differences, especially around race and ethnicity, but also around sexual orientation and gender. In its first five years, the Tang has offered us some unforgettable moments: artist Kara Walker, lecturing to a standing-room-only crowd in the Bernhard Theater, her quiet voice and small frame filling the room; Fred Wilson—currently our Luce Professor of Object Exhibition and Knowledge—swamped by students ten deep seeking

78 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

to talk with him after his presentation of “Objects and Installations”; Nayland Blake, in dialog before a packed house with Associate Professor of English Mason Stokes on race, sexuality, and identity—identity which, the catalog essay on his exhibition tells us, his works “envision as a compound process rather than a fait accompli.” 63 Among the very first Tang exhibitions was “Staging the Indian,” co-curated by Professor of Anthropology Jill Sweet and Tang Curator Ian Berry; the catalog and online materials continue to be mainstays of Sweet’s course materials.64 Another recent exhibition, “Hair,” co-curated by Professor of Art History Penny Jolly, brought together images and histories of hair from radically different times and sources, and provided the context for a remarkable art video series on hair as cultural artifact and expression of identity. Tang exhibitions have provoked countless dialogs and written assignments for students on subjects related to race and ethnicity, American identities, and the ways we narrate and represent our sense of ourselves. They continue to do so even as this report is being written. Exhibitions at the museum have also taken many of us beyond American cultures. Eight of the 16 exhibitions since the Tang’s opening have had an international focus, with an emphasis on non-Western cultures. Examples include “Brushing the Present: Contemporary Academy Painting from China,” “Paradise and Plumage: Chinese Connections in Tibetan Arhat Painting,” and a student-organized exhibit entitled “Africa Embodied: The Language of Adornment.” In spring of 2005, for example, students in a course taught by Professor of Anthropology Sue Bender mounted an exhibition in response to the Tang’s “Very Liquid Heaven,” a show on conceptions of the stars and their meanings in Western culture; Bender’s students exhibited materials from several ancient world cultures as a counterpoint to and commentary on Galileo, Stephen Hawking, and contemporary artists in the “Liquid Heaven” show. There is no other space on campus that has so consistently, provocatively, and intelligently brought these subjects to our collective consciousness. As the public face of the College, it has changed how we think of ourselves. Has it engaged our students? We believe so, but we also believe its potential to help us to emerge from our decorous reticence is nowhere near fully tapped, and we must also find the ways to document and capture what we see happening there.

Student Engagement in Special Programs, UWW, and MALS Under the organizational umbrella of the Office of the Dean of Special Programs, the College offers two degree programs for nontraditional and adult students and sponsors a wide and varied array of undergraduate and graduate credit programs in the liberal, studio, creative and performing arts; the College’s traditional summer sessions; pre-collegiate programs; several noncredit continuing education programs; and a significant summer conference program. While historically—and for largely administrative reasons—the College has viewed summer, adult, and nontraditional

63 See Exhibitions Overview, Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, http://tang.skidmore.edu/4/exhibitions/doc/848/. 64 See project description for “Staging the Indian: The Politics of Representation,” online at http://tang.skidmore.edu/4/exhibitions/doc/588/.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 79

programs as quite separate from the traditional undergraduate residential program, more recently the interplay between the two has been the object of increased attention.

University Without Walls and the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program Nontraditional students enrolled in Skidmore’s University Without Walls (UWW) and Master of Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS) bring diversity of age and experience to the student body. The average age of UWW students is forty-one, with graduates ranging in age from twenty-two to ninety-five; MALS students’ average age is forty-two, with graduates ranging from twenty-three to seventy-six. While both UWW and MALS enroll students all over the world, some local students take classes with residential students. Faculty members consistently comment on the ways in which these adult students add significantly to the quality of the classroom experience—and model for undergraduate students a deeply sophisticated intellectual engagement. Fourteen percent of current UWW students are students of color, and of the sixty-two students who graduated in 2004, 19% were students of African American, Hispanic, or Afro-Caribbean origin. Over the past five years, the number of students of color in the MALS program has risen from 6% to 8% of the student body. This incorporates students of African American, Hispanic, or Asian/Pacific Islander origin, as well as a new student residing on the island of Antigua. UWW has recently enrolled a growing number of Afro-Caribbean students, primarily teachers, from the Island of Antigua. While these students are off-campus, interconnections between them and Skidmore’s residential students are occurring in interesting ways: for example, having seen a dozen or so students from Antigua march across the stage at graduation in 2004, ALANA students invited the 2005 Antiguan graduates and their families to their graduation party. We hope to find ways to shape more interactions, including a travel program described below.

Summer Programs The summer provides a significant range of opportunities to encounter artists of color and of varying ethnic backgrounds. The Summer Dance Workshop regularly brings to campus African American and Latino dance companies (such as Ronald K. Brown and Ballet Hispanica) which offer performances and workshops open to the community; the Jazz Institute regularly features performances by well-known African American and Latino musicians; the Boys Choir of Harlem has had their annual summer residency on campus for many years, bringing several hundred students to campus and performing at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center; and several other programs, from the New York State Summer Writers Institute to the Summer International Film Festival, add to the array of cultural events in which racial and other cultural differences are featured fairly prominently in a variety of ways. Because all of the thirty to forty different programs on campus in the summer are largely single-focus activities occurring within a short time frame (from one to five weeks), it is difficult to determine both qualitatively and quantitatively the overall profile of the summer campus, and difficult as well to assess the impact this variety of students has on traditional undergraduate Skidmore students. In proportion to the size and scope of

80 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

summer programming (some 3,500 program participants on campus over the course of the summer, and total event attendance around 8,000) Skidmore student and faculty engagement in summer programs—whether through enrollment in programs or attendance at events—constitutes a fairly small portion of the whole. A few programs do serve the residential college population to a large degree, and these bear mentioning in this context. Unlike most colleges of our size and character, Skidmore has sustained a small summer term for several decades, enrolling some 15-20% of Skidmore’s rising juniors and seniors in courses that largely reflect the College’s curriculum. The students who are on campus can attend campus events, and share the campus with participants in all summer programs. While anecdotal information suggests many students take advantage of these opportunities, we wish that more would. Indeed, in addition to efforts to increase student participation in summer opportunities—events that we believe are exceptionally intense and engage our students in the ways this report is seeking to describe—we recently received funding to support a residency during the fall and spring semesters, which will bring to these times of year some of what has come to characterize the summer: the McCormack Visiting Artist/Scholar has so far brought Sri Lankan author Michael Ondaatje and African American jazz musician Joshua Redman for week-long residencies in which they teach, engage informally with students, and perform for the campus community; Nneenna Frelon, African American jazz vocalist, will be the McCormack Visiting Artist in spring 2006. The Pre-college Program in the Liberal Arts—which brings rising high school juniors and seniors to campus to enroll in courses offered through the College’s summer session—has for the last several years actively and successfully recruited students of color and directed a large portion of its budget towards recruitment of and financial aid for these students. Of the forty-five to fifty liberal arts students enrolled each summer, fifteen to twenty are typically African American or Hispanic and/or come from economically disadvantaged homes and schools. The program recruits these students through ongoing relationships with sources ranging from the Department of Migrant Education in Monterey, California; to after-school and mentoring programs in New York City and Chicago; to an English teacher in Charleston, South Carolina. For these students, for whom such opportunities simply don’t exist without full funding, the program provides an experience of college life and learning, an opportunity to study and live with students of backgrounds different from their own, and a chance to demonstrate—to themselves no less than to college admissions officers—their capacity for successful college-level study. Anecdotally, one learns from the students in this program that typically they come from high schools in which everyone else is largely from the same race, ethnic, and economic background as they, and the opportunity to engage with students different than themselves is significant. It should be noted as well that the program’s residential life staff of ten to twelve Skidmore College students likewise reflects similar proportions of students of color and white students. We would do well to pursue information about the impact of this program on the students who attend, in order to have information that is more than anecdotal. We might well strengthen the connections to the academic year in some ways as a result.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 81

As is indicated in the College’s Strategic Plan, Skidmore’s Office of Admissions is increasingly looking to all relevant summer programs, and to this program in particular, as a promising source for recruiting students—especially students of color— to matriculate at the College, and has achieved some success: nearly half of the pre- college students apply to Skidmore, half of these are accepted, and half again enroll, and a growing number of these have been African American students. Over the past few years, several students, including African American students, who first encountered Skidmore as pre-college students have gone on to enroll and then to serve as residential-life counselors in the program, providing a clear message to their high school peers about their own possibilities.

Travel Seminars In addition to a wide range of summer travel programs, the College sponsors two summer travel seminars that engage our students in powerful learning about two cultures composed at least in part of people of African descent: South Africa and Antigua. During the 2005 summer session two faculty members from the Education Department co-directed the third Journeys and Reflections Educational Study Program to South Africa. Fifteen college students visited private and government school settings in urban as well as rural areas and spent an afternoon in Kliptown, an informal settlement in Soweto where the students had time to meet with children and families in their home environments. Ongoing research projects include an oral history study across ethnic groups focusing on apartheid and post-apartheid eras and a study looking at reading as well as writing practice at different grade levels. Students in this immensely successful program return to the U.S. with projects on which they continue to work, several of them engaged in presenting work at conferences and other venues. Building upon this program, and taking advantage of the very successful relationship between the University Without Walls (UWW) and the Antigua and Barbudo Union of Teachers in Antigua, two other members of the Education Department are leading a short-term pilot program for six senior Education majors to guest-teach in classes in Antigua in January 2006. The Antiguan teachers are all graduates of UWW and have followed a curriculum very much like that of their residential program colleagues. The programs in South Africa and Antigua provide a good segue to the second part of this chapter, since it illustrates so many of the ways we have expanded how we think about making the College more racially and culturally diverse. Not only are we looking to every area of the College—from the Tang Museum to summer institutes and residencies sponsored by Special Programs—to increase the range of American and international subcultures all of our students experience here, but we are also looking increasingly to off-campus study as a way to enrich our students’ understanding of cultural differences, including differences of race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class. On trips like these, they cannot avoid drawing comparisons and contrasts to race relations in the United States, developing relationships with the people they meet, and finding their assumptions—about race, but also about many other aspects of the cultures they encounter—shaken and revised. The South Africa and Antigua programs provide

82 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

all this and more in a dramatic way, as do many other study-abroad opportunities for our students.

International and Global Studies As quoted earlier in this report, the second goal of the current Strategic Plan for Skidmore is to challenge all students to better develop their global awareness and intercultural understanding. As such, the Strategic Plan proposes to increase the diversity of the student body, faculty, administration, and staff; provide clear educational objectives and expertise; and increase global awareness within the Skidmore community. The Strategic Plan thus places the greatest emphasis on what our students learn about the diversity of human cultures and subcultures, and it implicitly connects our students’ learning about cultures beyond the United States with expanding their understanding of subcultures within this country. “There is more than just Black and White,” as Beverly Daniel Tatum writes in Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: When we look at the experiences of Latinos, American Indians, and Asian Pacific Americans in the United States, we can easily see that racial and cultural oppression has been a part of their past and present and that it plays a role in the identity development process for individuals in these groups as well.65 Tatum does not go on to suggest that developing a more global curriculum and fostering a somewhat different model of study abroad might contribute to our understanding of that racial and cultural oppression and to the identity development process of all of our students. These ideas lie outside the scope of her book. But they are at the core of our Strategic Plan, and of the inquiry that follows in this chapter. As we recruit and retain more African American, Latino/a, Asian, and also Middle Eastern students, faculty, and staff, we learn increasingly how richly varied these populations are, and how many different diasporas they and their ancestors have participated in. If we are open to surprising intersections and subgroups, they will enrich our learning. Thus a student recently arrived from China will have more in common with a Russian student, in certain respects, than with a fourth-generation Chinese American student from California. And yet racial differences, visible as they are, remain an important and inescapable signifier of difference in American culture. In moving beyond the binary opposition of black and white, this study does not intend to suggest that this primary marker of difference should be subsumed and lost within an immense and diffuse constellation of multiple cultural differences. Rather, we wish to acknowledge the privileged position that race occupies in any goals related to “diversity,” while at the same time recognizing that the drama of racial difference and conflict unfolded historically, and continues to unfold, in a global context. Increasingly, our students have access to that world beyond the U.S. borders in unprecedented ways. Some of us believe that we can plan more strategically for their study-abroad experience to help them learn more, in a deeply engaging way, about differences among cultures and

65 Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations about Race (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), 131.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 83

among races, and that the residential college curriculum can and should reinforce and develop that learning. Unquestionably, learning about other cultures outside the United States is an important way to enable students to see our own culture (and cultures) more clearly. As one student said to a fellow student researcher, “I went to Argentina for a semester, and that was a completely different experience for me, where I was living in another culture, and I was in a sense the minority student . . . As I started to experience diversity, if you want to put it in that sense . . . I sort of came to understand the importance of it.”66 “Experiencing diversity,” writ large, is perhaps the very core of the liberal arts education: we expect our students to “diversify” their assumptions, their foundational knowledge, even their questions, to deepen their understanding as they multiply the nuances and contradictions that inform it. We often say that we want every Skidmore student to say, “This isn’t like home.” We also want them, intellectually and literally, to leave home—and to return, but changed. The main objectives of our commitment to international education include encouraging students to immerse themselves in a culture other than their own; to understand and appreciate the role that different cultural features—including, potentially, race—play in social, economic, and political processes; and, whenever possible, to develop their competency in a foreign language. The implementation of such objectives, which we view as central to the liberally educated individual, involves the curriculum, international education, and connections between the curriculum and the cocurriculum. This section of our report attempts, again, to answer the questions in our self-study design. As will become clear, there is little direct evidence of student engagement in international studies and cultures either on- or off-campus. Like nearly all colleges and universities in the United States, we can track the numbers of students participating in courses and programs with an international focus, and we have anecdotal reports from students regarding their experiences abroad; but we have little evidence of actual learning outcomes. As in the first part of this chapter, we want to distinguish among quantitative data about students in courses and programs, their reported engagement with these experiences, and the actual intellectual and personal impact of their courses and programs of study. The difficulty is in finding qualitative information of the latter sort: we recommend that the College undertake to gather more such evidence as part of our next all-college assessment efforts. We turn, then, to study abroad: here is where the students leave the campus, their familiar subculture, and, we believe, engage most fully and deeply with cultural difference. It is also one of the areas where Skidmore has made the most significant changes in recent years, with the most far-reaching effects for engaging our students.

Study Abroad Skidmore College’s commitment to international education relies heavily on study-abroad opportunities to complement the on-campus curriculum. The Strategic Plan renews this longstanding commitment and proposes that in the next decade we

66 Student Cultures Report (Appendix J), page 17.

84 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

increase the average of our students studying abroad from the current 41% to an ambitious 60%. Our commitment to study abroad began 25 years ago with the Skidmore in Madrid and Paris programs and continued with initiation of the fall Shakespeare and India Programs (1990); an affiliation for graduating seniors and for faculty with Qufu Teacher’s University in Shandong Province (1990); spring-term affiliations in London for juniors studying abroad (1993); the First Semester Program in London (2001); and most recently, the semester-long program in Beijing (2004) and a new Seminar in Paris for disciplines beyond French (2005). Additionally, we offer annual summer opportunities in Florence (1990) and biannually in South Africa (since 2001), and have recently offered one-time travel seminars to Greece, to Britain and the Netherlands, to Rome, and to Freiburg, as well as winter or spring travel seminars to Ghana, Costa Rica, and Freiburg, with more in development. The travel seminars offer a flexible new model for connecting the on-campus curriculum with travel and study in another country; through these seminars we are refining our sense of how to build travel experiences for students that take them well beyond tourism and engage them fully in rigorous learning about aspects of the cultures they are visiting. We also have close ties with a number of the programs offered through the Institute for the International Education of Students (IES), with Advanced Studies in England (in Bath), with the School for International Training (SIT), and with other major providers. Further, we have recently implemented majors in Asian Studies (1994-1995) and International Affairs (2003-2004), as well as a minor in Latin American Studies (2002-2003). This rapid expansion of opportunities led us to establish the Office of International Programs (OIP) in 2000, enabling us to devote more resources to the development and oversight of program connections abroad. Most recently, the OIP has restructured student fees so that students on financial aid will remain eligible for aid if they study abroad, even if not in a Skidmore program. Consequently, nearly all departments and programs have established a list of approved programs for their students. In all of these developments, we note two major themes: the expansion of opportunities, so that more of our students have more choices in their study abroad; and a significant conceptual expansion beyond the traditional focus on Western European subjects in the curriculum and locations for study abroad. In the area of international and global studies, we are shifting from a simplistic binary relationship between the “regular” curriculum and “non-Western” subjects. Increasingly, we are moving toward a conception, in the curriculum and abroad, of several centers of gravity: Western Europe, certainly; but also Latin America, East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. And each of these parts of the globe reaches into subpopulations within the United States and neighboring areas such as the Caribbean. All of our students have the opportunity to choose courses and study-abroad options that will enable them to learn more about their own cultural identities and histories, or, conversely, to extend themselves into unfamiliar cultures. What choices must students make when deciding whether and where to study abroad? Some students may be hard put to make study abroad work for them. Students who major in fields that require substantial sequential curricula, and students who are involved in athletics, student government, and other cocurricular activities, may find themselves constrained in their choices and/or may require additional planning to

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 85

ensure that studying abroad does not hold back their graduation or limit their possibilities of achieving leadership positions in their on-campus activities. How much are student choices regarding study abroad related to the incentives or disincentives presented by their majors? In years 1999-2004, the departments whose majors spent the most number of semesters abroad were those with around 10-12% each of the College’s majors: Art and Art History, English, Management and Business, and Psychology—followed by Government and Foreign Languages (French and Spanish). In all, these seven programs accounted for 72% of all student semesters abroad. In addition, smaller majors with important student presence abroad include Sociology, Anthropology, and Economics in the social sciences; Theater and Music in the arts; and Biology in the sciences. Not surprisingly, almost half the semesters spent abroad were students majoring in the humanities (28%) and the social sciences (21%); the other half was divided among arts (Studio Art, Music, Dance, and Theater), preprofessional programs (Management and Business, Education, and Social Work), and the sciences (see Appendix V: Study Abroad by Student Majors and Fields, Class of 2000 to Class of 2004). Thus in areas where study abroad fits naturally into the program, these programs are already sending many (if not most) of their students overseas. On the other hand, only 20% of science majors study abroad, even when including Psychology students, as compared to about 41% of the rest of the student body. That is, if students—among them science students, and students in demanding preprofessional programs (with the exception of Management and Business)—receive little encouragement within their majors to study abroad and have little time in their curricula, they will need to be convinced to go abroad as part of their Skidmore experience. We may wish to plan strategically to increase opportunities for study abroad in these majors. Working with the faculty overseeing new programs, such as Environmental Studies and International Affairs, to help their majors plan for study abroad may be part of the strategy needed. It is also useful, especially in the sciences, for Skidmore faculty to make connections with science faculty in certain universities abroad: this process can build confidence in program quality and facilities and help Skidmore faculty place our science students in appropriate programs. Where are our students studying abroad? They chose to study in more than fifty destinations, from France, Spain, and England to South Africa, Mexico, Samoa, and Tibet. A closer analysis of the data, however, demonstrates that 88% of these semesters were spent in Western locations, 76% in Europe alone. Favorite locations in Europe were the U.K., France, Spain, and Italy (see Appendix W: Study Abroad Semesters by Region and Country, Fall 1999 to Spring 2004). Australia and New Zealand are the second most popular destinations, combining for 11% of all semesters of overseas studies. Outside of Western locales, students sought out Latin America (preferred locations were Costa Rica, Mexico, and Ecuador); Asia (preferred destinations were China, Japan, and India); and Africa (preferred locations were South Africa, Ghana, and Kenya). In short, students tend to stay in the West, though it seems that in increasing numbers they are exploring more distant and unfamiliar countries. That is not to say that a transformative cultural experience cannot occur in England, Spain, or France if the program helps integrate students with the host culture. Indeed, this study has confirmed

86 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

our sense that we must consider the program—its curriculum, faculty, and educational philosophy—along with the location if we are to achieve the kinds of student engagement with the host cultures that we believe to be transformative. Once overseas, how eager are our students to extend themselves into studying in a foreign language, in particular? Over half, or about 58%, of semesters spent abroad were in non-English speaking countries (see Appendix W). Most of these languages are Western languages—French, Italian, and Spanish—thus closely following our on- campus enrollments. It is quite natural, of course, for students to choose the countries which seem at the center of their linguistic interests, and we are pleased to see them go to places which exercise their language skills and extend their cultural understanding. Students with these language skills do, however, have opportunities, not often enough considered, to study outside of Europe, particularly in Latin America and Africa, and to engage individuals from these other regions while in Europe; some of us believe we should encourage them to explore such options with more strategic advising and preparation. Also, we cannot infer from these data that students always acquire more than intermediate competency in the target language, as a large number of programs are “island” programs in which students may take classes in English and live primarily with other foreign (U.S.) students; and many do not require foreign language competency of the students they enroll. Not surprisingly, students’ majors influence where they study abroad. The most adventurous are our Anthropology students: 56% of Anthropology majors chose programs in non-Western locations, with India as the most popular. The majors who have chosen the broadest range of locations are Psychology (29 locations), Anthropology (26 locations), English (23 locations), Management and Business (20 locations), and Sociology (20 locations). This breakdown, however, needs to be read carefully, as most of the locations chosen by Psychology, English, and Management and Business majors are in the West, and these majors spent the most semesters overseas. The focus on England and Australia, plus a handful of European destinations, has not yet changed substantially with the new list of approved programs (approved only in the last year), though departments may consider a variety of destinations in both foreign language and non-European locations. The data corroborate what we have known all along: a majority of our students are not as adventurous as many of us might like. The new approved programs list, generated by our faculty with the advice of the Office of International Programs and still provisional for a handful of departments, leads us to believe that the breadth of choices may not change significantly unless we effect more far-reaching changes in the way students and many faculty conceive of study abroad. To bring those changes about, the leadership will need to make a concerted effort to commit the College more fully to the value of study in less traditional, sometimes non-Western destinations. Of the 125 approved programs, 52% are located in Europe or the U.K. When one adds the programs in Australia and New Zealand, the percentage climbs to 64%. For the remainder, Latin America accounts for 15%, Africa for 11%, and Asia for 9%. Even these much smaller percentages represent some wonderful study opportunities, if only we can expand our understanding of what they offer educationally. Our own new program in Beijing is open to students in any discipline and offers a flexible context for field study in the topic of their choice;

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 87

students in the program so far have come from Anthropology, Environmental Studies, and Management and Business, for example. From the perspective of experiencing otherness and being forced to cross borders, especially in a community as homogeneous as Skidmore’s, nothing can replace immersion in a culture that is ethnically, culturally, and linguistically different from one’s own. Given that a majority of our students do not readily embrace such an experience, we might strategically ensure that our Skidmore programs in Europe include courses and activities that will expose our students to a variety of local populations. For example, London and Paris, and increasingly Madrid, have some of the largest Muslim populations in Europe. Several iterations of these programs have provided academic perspectives on students’ daily experience encountering multiple subcultures. European cities are the site of various diasporic movements. Many of us— but not all of us—believe that our on-campus and overseas curricula, whenever appropriate, should include rigorous and engaging study of these phenomena and of their impact on the host society and culture, so that even students who choose Britain as their host country, for example, would gain an understanding of and the ability to pose and answer questions about the “black Britain” of Indian and Caribbean immigrants, and the early “colonial” experience in Ireland and Scotland. Students in Germany, too, could learn about the important and long standing presence of Turks, largely economic migrants, and the ways in which predominantly Christian Germans and largely non- Christian Turks coexist in a country that is still struggling with its early twentieth- century legacy of a fascist and racist regime. Do different student communities make different choices about where to study abroad? We have no way of calculating choices made based on a student’s financial situation at this point, but we can make certain observations based on ethnicity. In general, students of color choose to study in much the same locations as do white students. ALANA students have completed 154 semesters abroad in eighteen different locations, representing nearly the same percentage of semesters overseas (11.8%) as students of color in the overall Skidmore student body (around 13%) during these years. In addition, Europe was the preferred destination for 77% of them, a proportion similar to that of the white students. However, among countries within Europe, students of color selected first Spain (43), then England (39) and France (22). This distribution contrasts substantially with the choices of white students: a much larger proportion of ALANA students chose Spain, understandably, since 38% of this student population is Hispanic. Our students’ choices for study abroad may relate directly to the on-campus curriculum. At the introductory level, we concentrate our international curriculum on Europe and Asia, providing few if any opportunities for students to begin gaining exposure to Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. Thus, it is not until the intermediate level that students are even exposed to certain cultures. Consequently, they have less time and fewer opportunities to prepare for study in these regions. More pressing even than general courses and language classes are innovative courses linked directly to and preparing students for study-abroad experiences. We have begun to explore these possibilities energetically with our newly evolving short-term study-abroad courses that are linked to seminars on campus. Equally desirable would be

88 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

a one-credit course required of all students before and/or after they study abroad to prepare them for the intercultural experience and help them to make sense of it in the American context after they return home.

Students’ Own Expectations for and Reflections on Study Abroad What are students’ expectations for their study abroad programs? How deliberate are students regarding their educational objectives and personal growth? How eager are they to challenge themselves as they encounter foreignness in other people? We were able to glean some answers to these questions from student essays included in their application to the Skidmore London, Spain, and Paris programs (our India program also requires a written form with essay-like answers). Unfortunately, because we do not require similar statements from students who choose non-Skidmore programs, our data is limited. Despite the limited number of anecdotal reports, the pre-departure essays we have, encompassing years 2002-2005, are quite telling. In general they present our students as fully engaged and excited about their upcoming educational and cultural opportunities. They write, “I want to leave England feeling as though I did everything possible to educate myself, both academically and culturally”; “The UCL [University College, London] geography department offers a range of courses with a global perspective that I do not have access to here at Skidmore”; and “Internship [sic] provides an opportunity for undergraduate students to explore the field that they are interested in and I believe that exposure to U.K. work practice will provide me this opportunity and invaluable experience.” Students also reflect on the meaning and consequences of immersing themselves in a culture other than their own: “By living and breathing French my understanding of French will change. The way I perceive the world is also likely to change as I will learn about how the French see world events and of those events that are important to them in their daily lives”; and “The other half is the riskier part: immersing oneself in a totally different culture, navigating a foreign place, and understanding what it is to be a minority. In short, learning the hard way.” In their essays, students also anticipate personal growth, thus demonstrating that they conceive their study abroad as an intercultural experience, requiring constant examination of their views, and of their willingness to cross borders. Many welcome the excitement of the unknown and do not seem to mind placing themselves in positions of vulnerability: “When I came to college, I knew that I wanted and needed to have a life- changing experience. I wanted to be surprised, enlightened, shaken”; and “In my opinion it would be impossible to go abroad for a semester and return unchanged. But instead of dreading or worrying about the changes, I welcome them; studying in Paris is an opportunity that cannot be passed over, and included in my decision to apply is also my acceptance of the personal growth that will come.” Most students anticipate the impact their foreign study will have on the rest of their education and beyond: “I simply wish to experience what it is like to be a student in England so I can bring that perspective to my studies and later to whatever career path I choose to follow”; and “[Once back,] I can contribute to the Skidmore community through academic as well as

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 89

volunteer involvements working as a language tutor, drill instructor or by participating in organizations involved in the Spanish culture or international politics.” These comments seem promising in that they express openness toward engagement with foreign cultures and course materials. However, the comments are taken from application essays, in which students might be expected to show enthusiasm for anticipated challenges, learning goals, and hopes. Additionally, it is one thing to anticipate living as a “minority” in a country where your core values are “shaken.” It is another to know whether, once overseas, students seek out such environments and, once engaged, whether the shaking up occurs and how the results affect the student’s choices and studies and life upon return to the United States. The data assure us that our students do often engage with other environments and cultures abroad, though probably less effectively in some of the island programs, and perhaps with less defamiliarizing impact in countries that offer comfortable points of cultural reference. The largest challenge for our future studies of engagement abroad will be in determining the degree and types of educational and personal impact—the outcomes, so to speak. The entire study abroad profession has been pursuing such questions for at least the past decade, and thus far we have little more than collections of students’ self-assessments. We do recommend making a concerted effort to do more direct assessment of student learning abroad, both immediately upon return and longer- term. We may wish to undertake a significant culture shift in requiring students rigorously to complete a written self-assessment upon their return, and in developing more forms of direct assessment of their habits of mind through their work in courses after their return. The student evaluations of study abroad we do have, probably because the submission process is voluntary, are quite telling. The majority are from students who studied in Europe (134) and Australia (125), with only six in Asia (in addition to our India program evaluations, archived separately), four in Africa, and one each in the Middle East and Samoa. Regardless of the destination, each of them recommended an international educational experience, however difficult or disappointing portions of their program may have been. Students in Europe, the vast majority, highlighted the enormous differences between the U.S. and the European educational system, which fosters independent study and does not generally offer faculty and staff guidance to students. As one student put it, “In Glasgow the burden is on you to do everything, whereas in America you are kind of led by the hand. I adapted very poorly…. ” (2004). Many of them, especially those without direct enrollment at a local university, were unpleasantly surprised about how little contact they had with the local population. They perceived this as a lost opportunity. Those who reported having made connections with the local people—in Florence, Paris, London, and Vienna—stress the effort it took. This aspect seems to differentiate clearly a European from an Australian experience, for example. Most students underscored how friendly the Aussies were, and how easy it was to be accepted by them. The amount of information contained in these surveys constitutes a tantalizing window onto potentially rich and useful data had we a larger and more representative sample. Another aspect of studying abroad that is central for meaningful advising of students regards program structure. Important structural differences include homestays

90 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

and direct enrollment at local universities and other institutions of higher education (e.g., Paris and Spain), where our students are in classes with French and Spanish students; or such London Program options as University College and King’s College, where our students are placed in university housing and in regular university courses— in contrast to alternative housing arrangements where our students are grouped with other foreign students, and sometimes in courses with American students only (for example, India, China, and several London program options). Such arrangements isolate our students from the local population, particularly those in their own age group, and limit their possibilities of immersing themselves in the host culture and society—unless very determined efforts are made by program organizers to provide other connections to local students and cultural experiences. Should we then distinguish between exposure and experiential programs when we advise our students regarding their foreign study? Another complication is that the so-called island programs often have the capacity to respond to our own academic and cultural interests, whereas a foreign university is very unlikely to diverge from its established protocols on our account. In our Beijing program, we have counteracted the island effect with Chinese student tutors, who may also come to Skidmore on exchange and form continuing friendships with our students, a process we are observing now with satisfaction during the program’s second full iteration. Homestays, fieldwork, and integrated housing are all options that would appear to increase students’ engagement with the host culture. Of these, we have the most firsthand reports of fieldwork and experiential learning. A student in Oaxaca provides a revealing commentary: “It’s renewed my faith in education, given me memorable experiences and helped me understand what I want to do with it all.” A second student writes of her fieldwork in Tibet: “It opened me in new ways, allowed me to really practice the language and really start to understand the culture.” These minimal reports confirm our intuitive and anecdotal sense that fieldwork engages students deeply and effectively in intercultural learning. It is one further irony about program structures that our students are far more likely to undertake fieldwork or experiential learning in the U.S.-led island programs or in our own programs than in opportunities based on direct enrollment. Another assessment we have initiated is ascertaining the long-term effects of students’ study-abroad experiences. In order to begin to address this question, the subcommittee working on this section of the self-study sent a questionnaire, by electronic and postal mail, to 400 alumni from the classes of 1990 to 2000. The questionnaire asked alumni to provide information regarding the long-term effect, both personal and professional, of their international experience. It asked them to describe their interactions with the native culture, the impact of their experience on course choice upon their return, and the effects of their study abroad on their post-Skidmore life. It also welcomed personal statements regarding their experience. We received ninety-nine enthusiastic responses. Although the majority of respondents studied with Skidmore programs in France, India, London, and Spain, a number of them had studied in Australia, Belize, Italy, India, and Scotland with non-Skidmore providers, or completed the Studio Arts Centers International (SACI) summer program in Florence. The questionnaire did not raise explicitly any questions about the degree to which the alumni believed they had learned about racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, or

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 91

other cultural differences. One consequence of enlisting two distinct subcommittees to write this chapter in two sections is that we doubtless missed other such opportunities to gain further understanding of their interconnections. We can deduce from the questionnaires that these alumni’s experiences abroad did indeed open their minds, shake them loose from habitual assumptions, and make them more open to the value of cultural differences. The degree to which such experiences might also help them to shed previously held, unexamined assumptions about race and ethnicity is a question for future study. Most alumni agree that their time abroad was a life-changing experience. They stress its value for developing self-confidence and self-reliance; the profound impact of living in a different culture; and whenever pertinent, the effects functioning in a foreign language had on their cultural sensitivities and on their views of their own culture. One graduate wrote that living in Paris was “a totally humbling experience.” Another, writing about his experience in Australia, said that “studying abroad gave me a profound respect for different cultures and ways of life.” Those who had access to homestays stressed the relevance of this part of their experience—however difficult it may have been at times—for their linguistic development and their immersion in the local social and cultural milieu. Many students on programs without homestays reflected on how alternative living arrangements limited their integration with the host culture. A considerable number stressed that living in a large European city helped them discover an interest in the arts, in music, theater, and dance, “after being around so much culture” in Paris, Madrid, Florence, and London. Some alumni wrote that the abroad experience moved them to include later coursework that furthered their newly- found interests, and most of them agreed that the experience abroad deepened their commitment to serious academic work. A number of them cited professional ramifications from their abroad experience (e.g., an MBA in international management; careers in Latin American Studies, or in teaching, acting, history, French, or Spanish; and various careers in Paris and Madrid). These hindsight reflections confirm what we have known all along: study abroad is an important component of a liberal arts education. Yet, we have not reinforced students’ experiences by systematically connecting study abroad to their on-campus learning. In sum, we would do well to study in much greater detail the basic outcomes of our students’ international academic experience. Skidmore invests precious resources in international education, yet we have not developed the mechanisms to assess the educational results of such investments. Furthermore, if we want our students to be engaged, we also want them to be as reflective and deliberate as possible about their experience abroad and not only about what they anticipate their experience will be. Finally, we must also explore ways in which we can best integrate students’ international study into their major, and we must develop assessment tools to better understand and document outcomes related to their work in the major. Given that each department and interdisciplinary program has recently approved a list of study-abroad programs for their students, we are in a position to begin these conversations both at the department and at the institutional level.

92 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

The On-Campus Curriculum in Global and International Studies A brief look at the course catalog suggests that we have many courses that foster student engagement with international themes and global diversity offered on a regular basis (see Appendix X: International (Global Diversity) Curriculum, Fall 1999 to Spring 2004). Patterns here resemble our students’ choices for study abroad. The curriculum offers students the opportunity to engage analytically with other cultures through the study of Anthropology, Art History, Classics, English, Foreign Languages and Literatures, Government, History, Management and Business, Music, and Religion, among other programs. Students may also encounter international or intercultural topics in their first-year Scribner Seminar and through a number of courses in the required breadth areas, especially in humanities and social sciences. Between fall 1999 and fall 2004, we offered 336 for a total of approximately 1,412 sections of courses with international or global content.67 Around half of these courses and sections focus on Europe and its traditions (see Appendix Y: International Courses by Region, Fall 1999 to Spring 2004). However, students also have a wide range of courses available for Asia: 65 courses, and 179 sections, taught by twelve to fourteen faculty. Since Skidmore has an Asian Studies minor and major (1978 and 1994 respectively), strength across the curriculum for these two regions—in the humanities, arts, and social sciences—is not surprising. These on-campus offerings complement and help prepare students for their international experiences in Europe, China, and India, among other study-abroad locations. Taken together, global courses covering Europe and Asia make up 74% of Skidmore’s international on-campus curriculum. It should be noted that foreign language courses are included in our calculations, and that they account for close to half of the offerings. We have relatively fewer courses addressing regions beyond Europe and Asia. Courses focused on Latin America, for example, only recently reached the critical minimum to support a minor program, which was created in 2001-2002 with faculty in Spanish Language/Literature, History, Government, Anthropology, and Art History (offering only 27 courses and 73 sections from fall 1994 to fall 2004). Visiting faculty members in Music, Economics, Sociology, and American Studies have offered additional courses, but as these positions are temporary, we did not count the courses in this study. Temporary faculty members have, however, offered an average of four courses per year and provide a means to increase offerings in any international area in the short term. Although Latin American Studies is smaller than the Asian Studies program, evidence suggests that with a critical mass of faculty (eight to ten) and courses (25-30), Skidmore can sustain its new program. With respect to the Middle East, our curriculum is lacking, as there are only three permanent courses in the catalog, and only two faculty members—in Religion and Government—whose expertise focuses primarily on this region. However, support for

67 We distinguish between courses in the catalog and sections of each course offered in this period. We did not include topics courses that were not a permanent part of the curriculum, but only courses approved as part of the official catalog offering. Though we were careful in conducting our calculations, our numbers are based on our reading of the College catalog. Results may differ slightly if data was reanalyzed.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 93

exposure to issues and knowledge of the Middle East exists in other curricular and cocurricular ways: for example, Special Programs oversees the Greenberg Middle East Scholar-in-Residence program, now in its third year. The program provides for a professor in Middle East Studies from Ben Gurion University to guest-lecture in the Government course mentioned above, to deliver one or more lectures, and to assist in bringing other speakers to campus. In addition to Israeli scholars, including Islamists, the grant has brought several Palestinians to campus as well, including a poet, a university president, and a scholarly researcher. That the engagement in these events and activities among the students in particular is growing suggests that they are likewise anxious for the College to do more in this area. In addition, the recently approved Title VIA Grant for International Affairs proposes developing three new Middle East courses with existing faculty: “Arabic Language and Culture,” “Islamic Religious Sciences,” and “Maghreb in International Affairs.” We are much closer to a critical mass for creating a substantive African/Africana curriculum (see Appendix Y). We have offered 15 courses and 33 sections on Africa and 9 courses and 34 sections on Africana topics. Faculty in English, Dance, American Studies, Anthropology, History, Economics, Government, Art History, and Foreign Languages and Literatures already contribute to such a program. In recent years several faculty have begun informally to coordinate cocurricular activities, and they could serve as the nucleus for future programmatic development. With a few strategic hires who work substantially on Africa/Africana issues, Skidmore has the potential to capitalize on its existing course offerings and engage students more systematically in an area of growing academic and world interest. Beyond the curricular offerings in specific regional topics, Skidmore offers a number of multiregional or transregional and multinational courses. For example, AN101: “Introduction to Cultural Anthropology” and GO103: “Critical Issues in World Politics” both provide students with theoretical foundations that they can bring to bear on specific regions; they also introduce large numbers of our students to transregional and multinational issues. And seven of the twelve new courses whose development will be supported by Title VI funding through International Affairs take global approaches to key topics such as AIDS, human rights, law, migration, and feminisms; it is clear that such multinational approaches are increasing within the curriculum. Throughout the curriculum, there are areas of particular strength in international or global content. For example, Management and Business may have only five courses (all at the 300-level) dedicated to international topics, but these have 24 sections and 704 students in these sections. Theater has just started offering a course in Asian theater; Dance has long offered both South Asian and African courses; Education has been a leader in short-term study abroad, in South Africa and now Antigua, as we have seen. In the sciences, Environmental Studies is increasing the sciences’ engagement with international and global problems; Geosciences has always, necessarily, been global in its reach. The numbers of courses may not be dramatic in these areas, but there is no question that the scope of the curriculum has shifted steadily and significantly over the past ten years. On the whole, however, our international curriculum is organized conceptually by region and by discipline, much less so by transnational connections or global challenges and issues, except within the International Affairs program.

94 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

Finally, we note that the change from a foreign language competency requirement (for students who did not reach certain foreign language score levels) to ensuring that every Skidmore student takes one semester of a foreign language on campus has shifted the effect of the requirement unexpectedly. While some thought this would reduce the number of students in foreign language courses, the new language requirement has paradoxically not had the effect of reducing majors: in the previous system of requirements, many students who had achieved foreign language competency before coming to Skidmore chose not to take any further language classes in college; in the new arrangement, these students with proven language skills are taking their one required course and then in many cases choosing to continue the language study, and the number of Foreign Languages and Literatures majors is growing. In the class of 2005 there were forty Foreign Languages and Literatures majors, in contrast to the more typical norm of around twenty majors in the 1990s.68 In sum, the curriculum continues to increase its scope beyond American and Western European content, even as its definitions of American and European expand to encompass a more critical study of the diasporas of the past five centuries. As a college, we have never, to our knowledge, undertaken a comprehensive review of the ways in which study of the many faces of American cultures complements international and global studies. What do our students know about their position in their world? More specifically, are we graduating students who are critically aware of their privileged position, both within the United States and in the global context? As Stoddard and Cornwell have pointed out: When we talk about “understanding diverse cultures,” we have to take account of the position of the knower as well as the viewpoint of the known. Students need the opportunity to reflect critically on their own social locations in the global matrices of power, privilege, and material well-being. That is, education in and for globalization should engage students in critical reflection on normative questions about power and equity. . . . Just as race studies in the United States have led to critical white studies and the realization that the dominant group needs scrutiny, so in the global context, U.S. students need to learn about their power and privilege in relation to most of the world’s population. This is not to reflect on their cultural superiority, but to see how their patterns of consumption affect those elsewhere and how the political prowess of the United States is seen from the outside.69 Stoddard and Cornwell also note that college students are preparing to be citizens, and their citizenship will be both local and global. The courses they take on campus and abroad must both take them outside of themselves and teach them more about their own cultural identities, both sympathetically and critically. With this self-study, exhaustive and detailed as the work has been in counting courses, enrollments, and students, we have only just begun the work of ascertaining where, how, and to what degree our students are engaged in this learning.

68 Skidmore College Institutional Research Fact Book, online at http://www.skidmore.edu/regisrar/ir/fact_book/fact_book.htm. 69 Cornwall and Stoddard, Globalizing Knowledge, 24.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 95

Conclusion This chapter has a reach that touches on many different aspects of the College and on their sometimes imperfect articulations: recruitment of students and faculty, academic support services for students, aspects of the curriculum and the cocurriculum, study abroad, and administrative structures that are changing even as we write. It is difficult, often, to find the student engagement in all of this, to distinguish learning from engagement, and to discern how to cultivate both. We have had to rely on indirect evidence, to count heads, and to begin gathering some firsthand accounts. We have much to learn about whether and where our students are learning to become true intercultural citizens (and we do not likely all agree on what that would mean). But it is clear that as a college we are in the midst of a paradigm shift, and that it is both exhilarating and, at times, difficult and even profoundly painful. Some of the changes recommended in the self-study’s first draft in spring of 2005 have already been implemented; others are under way. Still others will be part of future discussions about how best to manage, encourage, support, and oversee the many changes that we are undertaking. In this chapter, we have not addressed some of the more traditional reasons for studying abroad: a wish to visit the great museums of Italy or of France, to study German history or British socialized medicine, to learn about the European Union, or baroque music, or Spanish painting. We would not wish to suggest that that these subjects of study are in any way unimportant or less valuable now than a decade or two ago. We do suggest that in the paradigm towards which we may be moving—a paradigm that considers Western cultures more fully in the context of the world’s cultures as a whole—these subjects would be understood as European Studies, one among several area studies in the curriculum. Again, for some of us that shift seems inevitable, a needed corrective. For others of us, this shift in the center of gravity may be perceived as a loss or a distortion. Our collective discussions of this report in draft form make it clear that we have much more work to do in order to understand where we have consensus on these matters. Surely all of us would still wish that all of our students have the chance to stand in front of Michelangelo’s David in Florence, to see Turner’s landscapes at the Tate Gallery, or to visit Bilbao for themselves. But just as our notions of what a museum can and should do as a laboratory for learning have expanded, so too our understanding of how international studies relate to domestic affairs is growing and changing. Our wish for understanding how to foster a more just civil society in the United States necessarily takes its place next to a wish for greater social justice in the world as a whole. Many of us see these two arenas as substantially implicated in each other, and, further, understand each as offering potentially powerful tools to deepen our students’—and our whole community’s—engagement in learning and self-transformation. As a college, we have just begun to explore what those tools are, how we want to use them, and how they affect our students.

96 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

Recommendations The College faces multiple challenges as we seek to engage our students more extensively in learning about intercultural differences and communication, both in the U.S. and in a global context. This chapter makes recommendations on nearly every page. Many, even most, of them bear only indirectly on student engagement; we still require some very basic things—sufficient numbers of students, faculty, courses, administrative support—to achieve our goals for student engagement. These recommendations include those basic things in outline form, as well as suggestions specifically aimed at engaging our students. All aim to implement both Goal II (Intercultural and Global Understanding) and Goal III (Informed, Responsible Citizenship) of the Strategic Plan.

1. Orient our planning around what we expect our students to learn about intercultural understanding and what we know will engage them. • Plan a direct assessment of our students’ learning about cultural differences, domestic and global, and use the results in planning curriculum, pedagogies, and cocurriculum. • Assess student learning about cultural differences in their study abroad; develop pre-departure and post-return experiences, possibly for credit, to encourage them to deepen and extend their learning. • Cultivate engagement both on-campus and in programs abroad through homestays, internships, fieldwork, and service learning. • Increase and coordinate the numbers of courses addressing cultural differences—especially of race, ethnicities, socioeconomics, gender, and sexualities—in both U.S. and global contexts, both on campus and in overseas programs. • Coordinate cocurricular opportunities in these areas and link them more fully to the curriculum. • Prepare students and faculty to implement the goal of sending 60% of our residential students overseas in the next ten years. 2. Continue to recruit increasing numbers of students of color and international students. • Aim for 20% of the students to be students of color by 2015. • Provide the necessary support to retain those students and ensure their success. • Expand recruitment of international students.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 97

3. Continue to recruit and develop the faculty and staff necessary to this initiative. • Recruit faculty of color in tenure-track lines and in more flexible positions, taking advantage of and developing further possibilities for a variety of positions. • Provide additional resources and training to faculty members, administrators, and staff to meet the pedagogical needs of an increasingly diverse student population and to take advantage of the opportunities represented by a more multicultural classroom environment. • Provide increased mentoring for new faculty as well as programs designed to retain and support faculty. • Increase support for site visits, domestic and international exchanges, and faculty research and professional work abroad and at appropriate U.S. sites. • Provide incentives to faculty for course development, including workshops and stipends. • Evaluate the potential of establishing an African/Africana Studies program with existing or limited additional resources. • Continue to strengthen Asian Studies, especially in areas of the curriculum that are currently weak. • Ensure the continuation of a Skidmore program in China and appropriate on- campus curriculum. 4. Take fuller advantage of the resources available in Special Programs to cultivate unusual educational opportunities, recruit students and faculty, and make connections with communities beyond the College. 5. Develop institutional structures to deliver a strong, coherent program in diversity and international education that engages students across the curriculum and the cocurriculum. • Complete the search for a Director of Intercultural Studies, a high-level administrator with faculty status responsible for overseeing curriculum and hiring that promotes the Strategic Plan’s initiative outlined in Goal IV. • Complete the search for a Director of Student Diversity Programs who will collaborate with the Director of Intercultural Studies to coordinate efforts in the curriculum and the cocurriculum. • Launch into full activity the presidential task force on intercultural and global understanding, as called for in the Strategic Plan, to a) prioritize the College’s goals so that resources are appropriately allocated and b) develop a strategy for effective assessment of our achievements and aspirations in implementing Goals II and III of the Strategic Plan.

98 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

Afterword

As we complete revisions to this self-study in January, 2006, over two months after we wrapped up our community discussions and stopped soliciting suggestions for changes, we can see how much we have accomplished in the year and half since we began the process. To an unprecedented degree, we have been talking for all of these months about where and how and why our residential college students are engaged in learning. Some of those conversations have not taken us very far; others have opened up new ways of thinking about things. We have voted in and launched a new First-Year Experience, designed expressly to engage and to challenge our students; we now have all departments working on assessing student learning in their majors; and we have completed initial studies of advanced students’ writing and capacities for critical thinking. We have launched an ambitious capital campaign and are finding the funds to support some of the initiatives recommended in this report. We have hired twelve new tenure-track faculty, a new Dean of the Faculty, a new Dean of Special Programs, and other new administrators (most notably, our Vice President for Financial Affairs is new since fall of 2004, the Director of the Tang Museum, and our Director of Information Technology are new since spring 2005). It is a time of rapid institutional change. This self-study has both reflected and helped to shape some of the changes. At the outset, we were not sure we knew how to talk about student engagement in the natural sciences, in intercultural understanding, or in the first-year experience. We knew how to talk about hiring people, about developing courses or programs, about changing requirements or providing offices. Collectively, we knew little about how to recognize or gauge deep engagement, and equally little about how to structure courses or assignments so as to encourage engaged and enduring learning. But individually, it became clear, our faculty watch for the engaged student, plan for the unforgettable class, design the compelling assignment, and know a great deal about student engagement that they have been willing to share with colleagues. As we read narratives and reports and began to put them together and to generalize about them, a picture emerged of the kind of engagement we want to see pervasively throughout the College. It is a picture of students working long hours, arguing with each other, poring over books and computer screens, and writing intently. It is also a picture of faculty looking over their shoulders, collecting specimens with them in the Adirondacks, introducing them to teachers in Antigua, showing them how to use the microscope or the software, staying late after class, pushing them to take the next mental step. The challenge for us now is to turn this localized knowledge into models and also generalized habits of engaging teaching. We also began to notice how our seemingly distinct areas of inquiry in fact are deeply interconnected. As we develop opportunities for civic engagement in the curriculum, we may look to introduce our students to the ways science connects with public life and political process. And as we consider developing study-away opportunities for our students within the United States in addition to study abroad, we may strengthen both their access to science in the field and also their firsthand awareness of different subcultures within the borders of this country. The interconnections are many and subtle. Perhaps the strongest one of all is the growing

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 99

sense in the public discourse that American scientists increasingly will need to be capable of working on national and global projects with teams of scientists from many cultures and subcultures. Intercultural understanding and the advancement of scientific knowledge, to a degree that is perhaps unprecedented, are deeply connected. This self-study does not encompass all of the changes that many members of the College would like to see effected in the near future. It makes no mention of the impact that the new music building will have on the campus, of our work on the Honor Code and student integrity issues, of our revamping of Athletics, of our new dorms and dining hall, or of our reconsideration of the writing requirement. It barely addresses major conceptual changes that are underway because of the new administrative structure that brings Special Programs into Academic Affairs. These are just some of the major concerns that occupy us collectively as we also work on the initiatives treated here. Together they constitute a continuing process of self-interrogation, collection of information, reflection, planning, and transformation in the life of the College. We would like to end this report where we began it, with a story about one student’s engagement. A student intern at the Tang Museum works in their suitcase program, bringing projects out into libraries and schools for local children. One project involves making sculptures out of bubble wrap. The student encounters one extraordinary child and muses about the experience later to the program director: 5 year old Callie came in with her grandmother to our bubble wrap suitcase program at The Pine Hills branch library in Albany. Callie is a visually-impaired little girl yet made some of the best bubble wrap sculptures I’ve seen so far. Based on her family’s yearly visits to Martha’s Vineyard, she decided she would make a big beach basket with all of the appropriate contents: a fish, a crab, a snail, a pebble, a jellyfish, and of course, a blanket to lay on the sand. Each time I came to her spot she would hear my voice and ask who I was. She would then reach into the bag, feel the different forms, and from their distinctive sizes, shapes and textures be able to describe to me the newest addition to the basket. Her grandmother and she went home all smiles, and with a whole new collection of tactile, and sometimes sonic (when popped, of course) creations. Another success story in the world of bubble wrap. It really got me thinking of new ways to approach our introductions to the projects. In addition to asking questions like “What do you see here?” and “Does this sculpture remind you of anything?” there could be a place for questions like “What do you think this sculpture feels like?” and “What kind of noises might this sculpture make if it could?” The student’s phrase, “It really got me thinking of new ways to approach . . . ,” alerts us to that new level of engagement her mind has leapt to. From her own little student of bubble-wrap sculpture, herself so engaged, this student is learning something about how the mind works, and she doesn’t want to stop. The young artist has compelled her to question her own assumptions about what sculpture is and does. What kinds of noises might this sculpture make if it could? What questions might we ask our students to lead them to see their own world otherwise? And if they expose our own blind spots, can we revise our approach to the problem? If, as some

100 Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report

faculty have suggested, failure is necessary in their disciplines in order to advance knowledge or understanding, will we know failure to engage our students when we see it, and can we make good use of it? In this anecdote from one student’s project with the Tang, we are reminded of one central lesson of this self-study: engagement begets engagement. The student patiently describes Kelly’s sculptures and her smiles, and they are what prompt her to keep on thinking, and to make a remarkable discovery. This is the very work we have undertaken in this report. Like the student, we have been changed by the undertaking.

Skidmore College Self-Study Final Report 101