"Becoming What We Are"
Address to the Graduate Faculty, 9/12/97
Tony Filipovitch
Oh, my friends and relations--
Happy New Year! For almost my entire life, the change of the seasons has
begun and ended with the cycle of the academic year. September has been
the time of rebirth and renewal, the time for implementing new ideas, the
time of new faces and new challenges.
For me, the changes which are ushered in with this new academic year are
particularly striking. You would think that you would know a place when
you have been there twenty years. But I don't mind admitting that the learning
curve has been steep. Last year, I was sitting where you are; the view is
so very different from where I am standing now. So many things were transparent
to me as a faculty member, but now I am responsible for seeing that they
keep happening. It has been particularly humbling for an aging former hippie
to hear himself saying, "We have rules, and they have to be followed!"
Speaking of aging hippies, let me introduce myself. Many of you know me;
some of you have known me for 19 years. But I wasn't always a professor
of Urban Studies.
Except for one of my mother's younger sisters, I am the first person on
either side of my family to complete College. I am the first person
in my family to do any graduate work. My father's parents came to the US
in 1920. Although they spoke three languages (German, Hungarian, and Croat),
they were of peasant stock. My mother is a farm girl, and throughout grade
school I spent my summers helping on the farm--shoveling the barn, baling
hay, combining oats. During the school year, I grew up in Detroit (in
Detroit, not the suburbs).
My high school and first half of College were at Sacred Heart Seminary (in
the 1967 riot, the flames burned up Twelfth Street to within a block of
the Seminary). There I received an exceptionally thorough liberal arts education.
We not only studied the classics, we studied them in Latin and Greek
and French. I graduate from the University of Michigan, one of the premier
public Research universities in the country. My Master's degree, from Duquesne
University, was at a Private Comprehensive university and my PhD from Portland
State was at a Public Comprehensive university (PSU has grown to a Doctoral
University, but this was back when....).
In other words, I have grown up with a fairly wide range of experiences.
Before I came here, I was at a school where the administration had announced
that it was going to become the "Harvard of the Southwest." I
pointed out to my Dean at the time that we had no infrastructure to support
the level of demand for grants and publication, and we would chew up a whole
generation of junior faculty getting to that goal. He replied, "Don't
worry, you will be one of the survivors." I told him I would not, and
started looking for a new job. I came to Mankato State nineteen years ago
because the primary focus was on teaching. I could do research--I was encouraged
to do research--but the primary focus was teaching.
I came to Mankato, expecting to move on in 3 years, the way academic gypsies
do. In the end, I (and my family) chose to stay here. The students
here are my kind of people. They may not come with the best preparation
in the country, but they come to make the best of what they have. And they
turn out "pretty darn good," as Garrison Keillor would put it.
The approach here to learning is congenial to me. I love the classics. I
also really get excited when my research comes together and I've "got
something!" But what I really wanted a place which would nourish all
sides of my intelligence, and I found it here.
At the Council of Graduate Schools' Summer Institute for new deans (someone
there referred to it as "Dean's Finishing School"), one of the
speakers compared being a graduate dean to being the groundskeeper of a
cemetery--you have a lot of people under you, but no one is really listening.
So what ever possessed me to turn coat and leave teaching? The flippant
answer is the one I gave my family when they asked me how I could leave
teaching. I told them, "Oh, I'll still be teaching, just to a more
truculent bunch of students." A more considered answer is found in
a quotation that I picked up at that same Institute from Jules LaPidus,
the Council's president--"If we want things to stay the way they are,
things will have to change." If Mankato State is going to remain the
place where all sorts of people come to learn ideas and develop new ones
and work out their practical applications, then we're going to have to go
about it differently. I don't have the answers, but I do have a willingness
to take the lead, my friends and intellectual relations, in this quest.
Where do we begin? Nietzsche wrote, "Become what you are." I think
the aphorism is apt for us. We are the largest public graduate school in
Minnesota, aside from the University of Minnesota. Graduate studies is one
of the distinctive competencies of Mankato State University. We have been
involved in graduate education for almost 45 years and many of our current
graduate programs have been here for 30 years. It is graduate education
which helps create our distinctive campus environment, different from the
four-year colleges (which focus primarily on the transmission of knowledge
and skills) and the Research Universities (which focus primarily on the
development and testing of theory). At Mankato State, our teaching is tied
to the application and generation of new knowledge; our research is an extension
of our teaching.
As I mentally wander around our campus, I am struck by the number of outstanding
programs we have nourished, my former department among them (I take no special
credit for that--the program was nationally ranked when I came here 20 years
ago). You heard President Rush describe some of them yesterday. Dick Wintersteen
in Social Work lead a cross-disciplinary team in what promises to be nationally
significant research on assessing changes in the delivery of medical assistance.
I have met a number of graduate students who have come here from all over
the country to study in the Experiential Education program. The Water Resources
Center has a strong reputation Statewide for its work on wetlands conservation.
Students from the Theater department win regional and national awards every
year. Judy Kuster's and Don Descy's WebPages are internationally recognized.
We host the Good Thunder Writer's series. The Education College has partnered
with the Districts in setting up the Lab School project and with US West
and the NEA for training teachers in electronic technology. The Engineering
program is a lead player in the wireless communications consortium and MSU
is the annual host for the Regional Science Fair. The list goes on and on.
By and large, we are a marvelous place!
And I think it is because of our track record, because of the ties we have
built to our communities (both local and national), because of our success
in training our students and their success in the careers they have pursued,
that the Minnesota Legislature was willing to set up a Center for Rural
Policy and Development here.
There are, of course, a number of challenges which I see for the next few
years ahead. As a graduate institution, we are just coming of age. I think
we are facing the crises of adolescence as we try to determine just exactly
what we want to be. We need to focus on the quality of our efforts in research
and graduate studieswe have shown we can do it; now we have to show how
well we can do it. And we will have to help MnSCU define the role that
graduate education plays in the system. Given the fiscal conservatism of
our times, we need to develop our fund raising and development capacity
to generate our own sources to fund the activities we want to pursue.
The graduate college plays a central role in recruiting students into our
programs. About 80% of grad students make their first MSU contact with the
Graduate School. While overall the number of prospects, applications, and
admissions has declined, that decline is primarily in nondegree-seeking
students. That is both an opportunity and a challenge. Our student body
is changing. For generations, we have focused on the two-to-four years we
have in which to teach our students. In the Information Age, learners will
come to us throughout their lives--no longer will we teach them for four
years, but for forty! But how we do it, and when, and where will be different.
Technology will also change how we approach the process of teaching
and learning.
These are some of the issues, as I see them. But the role of the graduate
dean is to lead the College in enunciating its own Vision of itself.
First of all, this means leading the graduate faculty in an assessment
of the present curriculum, focusing and redirecting resources as needed.
This process would be guided by four principles:
a) Graduate programs at Mankato State are a common good; no
individual program can hope to achieve its promise in an environment which
does not nourish graduate education in general. As Ben Franklin said, "We
must all hang together, or we shall assuredly each hang separately."
b) Resources (human and physical) may be redirected, retrained, or reused,
but we cannot afford to waste or throw away any of them. Sustainability
depends on the principles of reuse and recycling.
c) Global competition (and with the advent of distance learning, we are
in a global market) requires a clear vision of distinctive competency, and
continual assessment to match our efforts with a changing environment.
d) Graduate work in a comprehensive university has its own role and character,
distinct from that which occurs at a research and a doctoral university.
Ernest Boyer has written that, "The comprehensive ...university, perhaps
more than any other, can benefit most from a redefinition of scholarship."
(Scholarship Reconsidered, p. 61). We must become what we
are!
Second, it is the role of the Dean to lead the entire campus community in
a common effort to serve our various partners. Boyer (Scholarship
Reconsidered, 1990) calls for a recognition of four types of
"scholarship"--that of discovery, integration, application, and
teaching. In addition to the traditional pure research, we must be of service
to the communities which support us through mentoring, applied research,
continuing education and community service.
Third, the graduate dean will provide significant assistance to MnSCU
as it works to define the role of graduate education in the System. MSU
is the largest provider of graduate education in the System, and has an
interest in helping our new partners in the merged system understand the
role that graduate education and research plays in the System. It was hard
enough to keep up on what six people were doing in my former department;
now I am responsible for representing 71 degrees and 45 programs. I need
you to feed me. I would like to visit with each of your programs to be briefed
on your particular competencies and successes (and, yes, to discuss the
particular "challenges" each of you faces). Although I am not
native-born Minnesotan, I am by nature shy and I have a rotten memory for
names (my wife is amazed that I can remember what Henri IV said in 1589
yet can't remember whom I met or what I did yesterday). In my new job, I
am working to overcome these failings; but if I fail to seek you out and
hear the latest news on your students or your ideas, pull on my coat and
tell me anyhow. I may be a slow learner, but I'm trainable.
Through it all, the mode of action should be one of partnerships.
In its 1996 report, Science and Engineering at the Crossroads, the
National Science Foundation stressed the importance of interagency coordination
and cross-cutting initiatives. The business and education communities are
coming together in School-to-Work and Business/Education Partnerships. A
dean with no faculty has to operate through consultation, cooperation, and
collaboration. Each player (whether from the community, the faculty, the
student body, or the administration) brings a different mix of resources,
and money is not the most important of these. The new dean's first task
must be to pull together the common vision which the various partners share
(keeping in mind that the dean is one of those partners). Guided by that
vision, priorities must be set--because not everything can be done first--and
the first priority must be the learner.
While "Vision" is logically prior, in practice Action Strategies are developed along with vision building.
I would anticipate several major foci of action:
1) Focus (and assess) graduate academic programs & research
and service.
2) Foster collaborative leadership.
3) Coordinate faculty and graduate student development with efforts
in the disciplinary Colleges:
In this last regard, I am pleased to take this occasion to announce that
the Graduate College will embark on a fundraising campaign to establish
the Winston Benson Fund for graduate student scholarships. For those of
you who did not have the pleasure of working with him, Win Benson was the
second graduate dean at Mankato State University. He held that position
from 1967 until his retirement in 1989. While he was a man of many talents,
I remember him most for his devotion to the students. He personally interviewed
every graduate student at the completion of her or his program of study.
I can think of no more suitable way to honor his memory than to continue
his tradition of caring for the students.
Through all this runs the issue of Assessment . We don't do
"efficiency"--efficiency is how we do it, and assessment
is how we demonstrate our efficiency. The Graduate College Report, "Quality
Graduate Education: Defining a New Direction," is a good base on which
to build, but some of its terms are not readily measurable, different classes
of measurement are lumped together, and often assessment measures are treated
as hurdles to be cleared rather than information for a process of continuous
quality improvement. I want to work with the Graduate Committee to develop
and annually review a set of assessment measures which provide feedback
for the programs. The emphasis is on providing information to inform our
efforts to do what we do better, rather than a tool for separating "sheep"
from "goats."
I am finding that being the graduate dean requires that I juggle a lot of
balls in the air. And I am still learning how to do it. But one of those
balls is special, and all of us must be careful not to drop it. That ball
is the students. I am still a novice juggler; please be patient with me.
And, no matter what our skill level, let us all renew our commitment to
become what we are, or as the Athenian Oath would have it, to "transmit
this place not only not less, but greater, better, and more beautiful than
it was given tous."
In closing, while I have emphasized here a number of elements and steps,
I wish to emphasize that I have a bias for action. We have been planning
and strategizing and visioning and assessing for the last 7 years. We do
not need another occasion to put everything on hold while we debate the
crystalline expression of our will. We have been thinking about it and talking
about it long enough that we should have at least some idea of what
we want, and we have been gathering some information which demonstrates
it (at least to our individual satisfactions). As John Kennedy put it, "All
this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be
finished in the first one thousand days.... But let us begin."