ACADEMIC REMODELING AND RENEWAL by Steadman Upham, President Claremont Graduate University April 24, 2000 The ideas contained in this essay enlarge upon the public remarks I made at Claremont Graduate University’s recent retreat. The retreat was a marvelously enriching experience for our academic community, and it has produced substantial new dialogue on campus about key issues facing the university. As a result of this dialogue, I offer a few additional thoughts in these pages to help focus our collective thinking. I look forward to discussing these issues with you and your colleagues. Let me begin by saying the obvious—during the last two years, Claremont Graduate University has literally remade itself. Organizational remodeling has touched nearly every administrative aspect of the university. Collectively, faculty and staff have created a new administrative structure, one that is built around a decentralized budget and schools led by academic deans. The annual budget process has been utterly transformed so that CGU’s fiscal management is responsibility-centered. A division of executive and extended learning, also led by a dean, has been inaugurated to help CGU create an interface with the world beyond the walls of the university. Importantly, the university is nearly done with the initial implementation of PeopleSoft, an administrative software system that will streamline services to students. PeopleSoft will also allow CGU to be accessed via the Web for admission, registration, and portal services. Web access is the first step in making CGU ubiquitously available to all of its students. These and many other important achievements of the last two years have brought CGU into the twentyfirst century as a university, and have positioned it to begin to address its most difficult challenge. With the completion of Claremont Graduate University’s second all-community retreat, the university has entered a new and critical phase of its development. Following the retreat, I am more convinced than ever that we have a common understanding about operating the institution, and that we share the same values of commitment, focus, and dedication to our prime strategy—building strong and robust faculty-student relationships in the academic process. Commitment to our prime strategy continues CGU’s quiet revolution and distinguishes us from other graduate universities. With these shared aspirations and goals in mind, it is now time to think about Claremont Graduate University as a preeminent center of learning and knowledge. It is now time to focus on the structure and organization of our teaching and research, on the big ideas that will differentiate us from other graduate universities. During the next few years we must devote the same energy to academic remodeling and renewal that has been given to administrative restructuring at CGU. Academic Remodeling and Renewal I know from the lunch meetings I have had with you in my conference room during the last two years that many CGU faculty think about and research the same kinds of problems, albeit from very different perspectives and with markedly different classes of data. Despite such overlap and complementarity, I have been amazed how low our awareness is about what each of us does. In some cases, long-time members of CGU’s faculty were first introduced to each other over lunch in my conference room! During conversation, they realized they held similar scholarly interests and could benefit further from additional discussion and interaction. I truly hope some of these initial conversations have spawned longer-term scholarly collaborations. Members of CGU’s staff have had similar experiences, recognizing that their work influences and is affected by colleagues employed in many other areas of the university. This complementarity of interest, action, and pursuit is a vast reservoir of energy that can fuel our academic enterprise in the future. It is this complementarity that also provides a platform for academic remodeling and renewal. We have an unparalleled opportunity to focus all of our collective energies on our academic future—on the talented students, transformative ideas, academic programs, and community outreach that will build Claremont Graduate University’s strength and reputation. From this point forward, academic remodeling and renewal must occupy the lion’s share of our collective thought and action. What academic vision do we have for Claremont Graduate University? What domains of expertise shall we become known for in the future? Which areas of our current endeavor hold the greatest promise to grow to national prominence alongside other preeminent centers of learning and knowledge? How shall we recruit new faculty to Claremont Graduate University who complement and synergize existing expertise and enable CGU to transcend the academic disciplines? Quite understandably, CGU prides itself on interdisciplinary teaching and research. Over the years, interdisciplinarity has been a point of distinction for us and has contributed to our national standing, status, and reputation as an academic institution. Because of decentralization, however, we have struggled as an institution to keep faith with our commitment to interdisciplinary teaching. Worries about counting credit hours and the administrative complexities of dual and interfield degrees have created barriers to interdisciplinary collaborations. We need to do better, and I am confident that we can. We need new ideas to move forward. Let me offer a few for you to ponder: First, we need to distinguish between our administrative structures (schools, decentralized budgets, etc.) and the way we pursue scholarly ideas in the university. Ideally, our teaching and research at CGU should be conducted independently of the administrative structures we use to manage the university and balance its budgets. Naturally, there are effects produced by these latter structures, but they should not impede faculty and students from working and learning together even if the individuals reside in different schools or academic programs. To advance, we must follow the ideas, not the administrative structures. Second, trustee Dr. George Kozmetsky presciently observed at the March Board of Fellow’s meeting that the term “interdisciplinary” was outmoded. He suggested that the growing interconnections among academic disciplines and the explosion of knowledge emanating from the integration of information technology have transcended specific academic fields. Dr. Kozmetsky suggested that we discard the term interdisciplinary and instead use the term transdisciplinary to organize and pursue our scholarly interests within the university. What this means in my view is that we begin to think about the university as a place of ideas, not as an organization of academic disciplines. This should not be difficult to accomplish since most of our teaching and research already revolves around big ideas and broad domains of learning and knowledge that transcend traditional academic fields. Transdisciplinary thinking forces us to think across, beyond, and through the academic disciplines represented at Claremont Graduate University to encompass all types of learning and knowledge about an idea, issue, or subject. A transdisciplinary perspective forces us to rise above and go beyond the limits imposed by related or cognate academic fields found in “mere” interdisciplinary thinking. Third, although each of us shall need to make adjustments in the way we engage faculty colleagues, teach students, and pursue our scholarly interests, the important work is not entirely for us alone to accomplish. One of our best means of advancing on our institutional goals will be through the hiring of new faculty. In my remarks at CGU’s second all-community retreat in March 2000, I described a plan for the recruitment of new faculty based on a model of cluster hiring. This strategy holds enormous promise for Claremont Graduate University because it allows us to create rapidly a scholarly community of interests and critical mass around ideas and knowledge domains. I know that the FEC will be discussing the merits of this proposal, and I look forward to their deliberations. The real challenge for Claremont Graduate University is to build a scholarly community of interests and critical mass around ideas that matter, around ideas that will help to explain the past, interpret the present, and define the future. In this respect, Dr. Kozmetsky’s suggestions about transdisciplinarity need to be taken seriously. Defining a few broad knowledge domains that encompass teaching and research across, beyond, and through the academic disciplines can make CGU unique as a learning environment. Every time we hire a new faculty member, regardless of the specialization, we need to ask if the specialization we seek is related to any other intellectual pursuit at the university. If the answer to this question is no, then a very serious public discussion needs to occur about whether CGU should proceed to fill the position. On the other hand, if the answer to this question is yes, then we should seek to define clearly all of the points of intellectual connection. We should then make certain that every search committee is appropriately constituted to maximize transdisciplinary understanding. This model demands that faculty hiring becomes a public and collective process of our academic community. Let me hasten to point out that I do not know what exact process we should follow, nor would I proscriptively impose one. I ask, however, that the FEC enter this issue onto its agenda for discussion early in the next academic year. Provost Hart and I will be consulting closely with new FEC Chair, Professor Richard Ellsworth, about this matter. We want each new faculty to augment the scholarly community of interests and critical mass around the ideas for which we are known, and for which we seek to become known. As I said at the retreat, we need to recruit academic “rate busters” to help us with this task. With a relatively small core faculty, we do not have a single position to waste on a disciplinary “silo” or an isolated, unconnected academic interest. What is proposed here will not be easy, but it can be accomplished by Claremont Graduate University. We can identify a process to recruit new faculty to CGU that is publicly discussed, collectively motivated, self-consciously designed, and explicitly intended to improve the academic quality and impact of our already outstanding learning environment. We have truly remarkable opportunities ahead. We can improve rapidly if we are thoughtful, creative, and bold. I know we are capable of greatness as an academic community. Together we can accomplish our goals.