Dean's Initiatives

Under the leadership of Dean Debra Satz, the School of Humanities and Sciences has launched several initiatives and pilot projects.

Assessing Our Departments 

Beginning in 2019-20, we will begin piloting external reviews with one department from each of our three academic clusters. The focus of these reviews will be to address the following questions: 

  1. Where might we invest/disinvest programmatically and/or intellectually? 
  2. What is the current state of teaching in the department and how might that improve? 
  3. What opportunities exist to further diversify our faculty and graduate student populations? 

Improving Undergraduate Teaching 

We recently rolled out an H&S teaching initiative that requires all incoming assistant professors to attend the three-day Course Design Institute offered through VPTL. To further support junior faculty teaching, departments will assign a senior faculty mentor to provide expert guidance and observe classroom instruction. In addition to hopefully improving the quality of teaching throughout the school, this model also informs the assessment of the candidate’s teaching at reappointment and tenure. 

Building Community Among H&S Faculty

One clear theme that emerged from the dean search process is a desire among many of our faculty to engage more with colleagues in other departments and disciplines. To help strengthen the H&S intellectual community, we have launched a series of small forums that convene groups of faculty to discuss specific issues; a short list of topics includes freedom of speech, conflict of interest, open science, and reproducibility/replication of research. The H&S deans also host informal happy hours to facilitate unstructured community building.