Dean of the Faculty
Speeches & Articles
A Letter to Parents of Reed Students
February 2006
I’d like to share with you the following passage, excerpted from a recently completed self-evaluation of Reed’s physics department:
“The Department has a friendly, welcoming, and supportive culture, something we regard as particularly important in a discipline that can seem cold and forbidding. Faculty members are respectful and supportive of one another’s efforts, and we are all intensely concerned with helping our students become successful and confident scholars. We encourage physics majors to treat one another – and the faculty – as colleagues, and to assume a stewardship role within the department. They serve as readers, tutors and lab assistants, they congregate in the Physics Lounge to work together on problem sets, and they join the weekly Wednesday seminars. As seniors they are given offices in the Physics building. Every spring, on a night known only to them, the juniors paint a new physics-related mural on a blank wall in the stairwell; all of these are clever, and a few are beautiful. In general, there is a palpable sense of community in the Physics Department that we are anxious to nourish and sustain.”
While all of this is quite true of the physics department, it also nicely summarizes what Reed itself is all about: a unique combination of analytical rigor and collaborative endeavor, leavened by a touch of wit. We call this “intellectual community,” and it’s something to which the College has been powerfully committed for nearly a century.
The trick at an institution like Reed – one of those rare institutions that has both a powerful sense of itself and also great confidence in its defining mission – is to build on existing strengths without underming them, to grow in new ways without veering from the basic direction, to adapt time-tested principles and practices to emerging realities.
It’s precisely in this context that the faculty regularly examines and evaluates the academic program, restlessly seeking ways of doing things better. At the moment, for example, the faculty is pursuing a variety of projects or initiatives, all with a view toward ensuring that the academic program continues to operate at or near the cutting edge:
1. Environmental Studies: Given the culture of the College and the student body, it’s perhaps surprising that we have never offered a formal, self-standing program in environmental science or environmental studies. A committee of the faculty is currently investigating this issue. The problem is more difficult than one might think: to formulate a program that maintains the college’s high intellectual standards, that is consistent with our tradition of disciplined-based interdisciplinarity, and that is financially and organizationally feasible. The committee is pursuing these questions carefully and critically, relying in part on outside experts from sister institutions. I expect to receive a report with recommendations sometime in the late Spring or early Fall.
2. Diversity: The faculty is on record as strongly urging the College to increase the number of professors from underrepresented minorities. We are pursuing this initiative with vigor. Again, though, the problem is to accomplish the goal in a way that best sustains the College’s academic traditions. This means ensuring that we are able to identify and recruit minority faculty who will embrace our distinctive mission – great undergraduate teaching in a traditional liberal arts context – with enthusiasm and delight. At a time when outstanding minority candidates are often highly sought by a host of prestigious institutions, we face real challenges; but we are also fairly confident that the obvious if distinctive attractions of Reed will allow us to be successful in the long run.
3. Performing Arts: We have long been proud of our excellent programs in dance, music and theater. But faculty in those departments have now shared with us an exciting new vision: to create contexts – intellectual, organizational, physical – that will allow for greater interconnection and cross-fertilization among the three programs. At Reed, the approach to performance has always been critical, theoretical, intellectual; the arts are both studied and pursued in the context of thoughtful self-reflection and analysis. A more robust inter-departmental approach can only enrich this process, and we have begun to think seriously and concretely about how to implement such a vision.
4. Linguistics: Reed has a well-deserved national reputation for producing unusually large numbers of students who go on to perform with distinction at the very top graduate programs in linguistics. But this has occurred despite the fact that we have never had a formal linguistics department. Instead, linguistics at Reed has been a “program,” and an understaffed one at that. The faculty has now addressed this situation, creating a new Department of Linguistics and strengthing our linguistics staffing. Linguistics is a rich, theoretically and conceptually powerful discipline that also has deep natural connections with a variety of other fields including anthropology, literature, philosophy and psychology. The creation of this new department is a prototypical case of building on a traditional strength in ways that will maintain the vigor and currency of the academic program.
5. Digital Asset Management: The opportunity to observe and manipulate pictures – in art, science, history and other disciplines – is an important part of any serious liberal arts curriculum. We have long been working on the transition from slides to computerized images – so-called “digital assets” – but the technical, organizational and financial challenges have been immense. It is thus with the greatest pleasure that we have just received a $450,000 grant from the Keck Foundation that will enable us not only to solve our problems but to become a leader among liberal arts colleges in the world of digital asset management. The immediate impact on the classroom will be enormous, as it will allow our students to engage in previously unimagined ways with an infinitely expanded array of computerized images.
6. New Faculty: We have just completed two national tenure-track faculty searches in political science. From a combined applicant pool of nearly 400 candidates, we were able to appoint two young academics – one in political theory, the other in international politics – with absolutely superb credentials from the very top graduate programs (Harvard and Stanford, respectively). We are extremely excited about these individuals, and are hopeful that they will become the kinds of outstanding teacher/scholars that have been long been the backbone of Reed’s academic program. At the same time, we are also searching for new tenure-track faculty in Classics and Russian, and have I high hopes for both searches. We take great pride in the care with which we recruit and hire new faculty, and I know that the results pay great dividends for what actually happens in the classroom.
This list is by no means complete; and it’s also true, of course, that we have our warts and disappointments. Among other things, we continue to operate in a fiscal environment that often requires painful trade-offs. The point of this letter, however, has not been inclusiveness, but simply to share with you a few of the more important ways in which the academic program – under the careful stewardship of the faculty – continues to develop, even as we reaffirm our traditional commitments. Of course, the foundation of all this is, as always, the extraordinary Reed student body. For faculty, the opportunity to teach Reedies – with their talent and, even more importantly, their genuine passion for ideas – is a gift, and something that we don’t take for granted. Our students inspire us, and this means that working hard to maintain and enhance the quality of the academic program is something that brings us both pride and delight.
If you have questions, concerns, suggestions or other comments about the academic program – or anything else! – please don’t hesitate to contact me (tel: 503-777-7257 or peter.steinberger@reed.edu). I love talking to the parents who have been, in substantial measure, responsible for the wonderful students that continue to make teaching at Reed so enormously rewarding.
Peter Steinberger
Dean of the Faculty