Report of the External Review Committee for the Department of Psychology Ohio State University November 22, 2010 Committee Members: Michael Domjan, University of Texas at Austin Richard Gonzalez, University of Michigan Lynn Hasher, University of Toronto E. Tory Higgins, Columbia University Members of the External Review Committee visited Ohio State University October 20 to October 22, 2010. During the visit they met with the Chair of the Department of Psychology (Richard Petty), and faculty in various areas of the Department (Social, Quantitative, Developmental, Cognition, Behavioral Neuroscience, and Clinical). They also met separately with all untenured tenure- track faculty, groups of graduate and undergraduate students, select staff members, members of the Departmental Graduate Studies Office, members of the Departmental Undergraduate Studies Office, Dean of Social and Behavioral Sciences Gifford Weary and her senior staff, Vice-Provost and Executive Dean of Arts and Sciences Joseph Steinmetz, Executive Vice President and Provost Joseph Alutto and his senior staff, Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School Patrick Osmer, and the Vice President for Research Caroline Whitacre. This report is based on those meetings as well as the extensive self-studies that were prepared by the current and previous chair of the Psychology Department (Richard Petty and Gifford Weary, respectively) with help and input from other psychology faculty. The report is organized in the following sections: I. Background II. Current Interdisciplinary Activities III. Strengthening Cross-Cutting Links within Psychology IV. Strengthening Links between Psychology and other Related Disciplines V. Role and Treatment of New Faculty VI. Minority Faculty Recruitment VII. Graduate Training in the Interdisciplinary Age VIII. 2010 NRC Rankings of Psychology at Ohio State I. Background The Department of Psychology at Ohio State University has a long and distinguished history. Numerous internationally prominent psychologists have been on the faculty of Ohio State or received their training at OSU, including Carl Rogers, Julian Rotter, Claude Steele, John Caccioppo, Walter Mischel, Tony Greenwald, and 2 George Kelly. The quest for excellence continues today. The Department has an outstanding record. The faculty are excited and ambitious. The proportion of faculty with funded research projects is outstanding. New faculty hires are all among the elite in their specialties. Given the size of the faculty, the Department teaches a remarkably large number of Ph.D. students (about 145) and has an excellent record of placing these students in good positions after graduation. The Department also carries a huge undergraduate teaching burden. Currently there are about 1800 students majoring in psychology, and numerous non-majors have contact with the Department when they take Psychology 100. Despite the large numbers of students served, the Department provides considerable personal attention to undergraduates. The Psychology 100 is taught in relatively small sections (80 students each). Numerous undergraduates also participate in the honors program, which provides research and practicum experiences. The faculty and staff should be commended on this impressive achievement. Ohio State achieved its eminence in psychology by focusing on a number of core areas of psychology (social, clinical, cognition, quantitative methods, behavioral neuroscience, and developmental), and building strong research and graduate training programs in these areas. This was the “standard” model in the field of psychology for much of the twentieth century, as research psychologists worked hard to establish psychology as a core science discipline. Through those efforts, psychology became the prominent fulcrum among the sciences, positioned between the social sciences on the one hand and the biological and physical sciences on the other. Having become a core science discipline, with the largest student enrollment among the sciences at many universities, psychology is now at a crossroad. There is much important work left to be done in the core areas of psychology. However, the position of the discipline at the interface between the social and biological sciences has also created numerous new and exciting opportunities for interdisciplinary research. Psychology is fundamentally concerned with human emotion, cognition and behavior. How we think and act is integrally involved in the solution of all major societal problems. As Steven Jobs well knows, modern technology is effective only if it is user friendly and people are wiling to put the technology into practice. Efforts to reduce waste or shift to new transportation strategies are successful only to the extent that they can change age-old behavioral habits. Public health and preventative medicine work only if they successfully interface with people’s behavior and encourage healthier life styles. The success of the most spectacular medical interventions or new pharmaceuticals is similarly limited by compliance with medical instructions and changes in behavior that promote recovery. Psychology is now well positioned to extend the frontiers of knowledge by joining with allied sciences to solve problems that no one discipline can solve alone. Rising rates of obesity and diabetes will not be arrested without involving psychologists. For example, what psychologists have discovered about learning and memory can help design new educational strategies. In addition to the medical sciences, nursing, public health, and education, psychologists can now work effectively with linguistics, communication sciences and disorders, human development and family sciences, integrative biology and anthropology, molecular 3 biology and neuroscience, pharmacology, computer science, and biomedical engineering. Such interdisciplinary collaborations promise to advance knowledge and solve intractable societal problems. Interdisciplinary activities are only successful if they are strongly rooted in the excellence of each of the contributing disciplines. Thus, a focus on interdisciplinary research requires nurturing each of the participating fields of inquiry. This becomes a balancing act. Core disciplines cannot be ignored in the pursuit of interdisciplinary work, but attention to each core should not stifle the interdisciplinary activity. Learning how to nurture each core while simultaneosly facilitating links between cores is a new challenge for faculty, departments, and universities. The Psychology Department at Ohio State University has begun the tackle these challenges. The faculty recognize and embrace the proposition that interdisciplinary research and teaching is important for the future success of psychology, and they have taken a number of major steps in that direction. However, it is our opinion that they have not yet achieved a comfortable balance between nurturing the core and reaching out to allied disciplines. In the following sections of this report, we will offer suggestions to achieve these long-term objectives in a manner that will result in a more comfortable and productive balance. II. Current Interdisciplinary Activities The review committee applauds the Department’s priority on interdisciplinary research. Throughout our visit we heard about the many examples of collaborative research between faculty across different areas of psychology, and heard about research projects involving units outside of psychology. The interdisciplinary emphasis was infused throughout the self-study report in both an organizing and generative manner. For example, interdisciplinarity provided an organizing framework for the new hiring initiatives in Neuroscience, Health, and Judgment and Decision Making discussed in the self-study report. Each of these initiatives builds on strengths within the department as well as across campus, providing an opportunity to take the department into new research areas. Given the department’s strength in these areas and the relevance to the national funding agenda, the interdisciplinary framework positions OSU’s Psychology Department to continue being a top department and to move to “eminence.” We encourage additional investment of resources in these areas. In the next section, we suggest several points that will help the department implement these interdisciplinary, cross-cutting links, to maximize chances for success. III. Strengthening Cross-Cutting Links within Psychology In recent years a consensus has emerged within the Department that it needs to move from being a collection of area silos (or even independent labs) to being a group of faculty and students who identify with the Department as a whole. Some 4 progress toward strengthening the cross-cutting links of the Department in this way has already been made: “…a major new development is the increasing number of faculty in the department who are working with fellow faculty in the department across area boundaries.” But more progress is needed. Our impression from our meetings with faculty and students is that the potential impediment to a faster rate of progress does not derive from active resistance from members of the Department but, rather, from long-term habits of working independently rather than as members of the Department as a whole. We have some suggestions for strengthening the Department as an integrated whole—a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts—that will not only lay a solid foundation for the emerging interdisciplinary Departmental initiatives (e.g., Neuroscience,