Creating the Future of Graduate Education and Research
Deborah A. Freund, President
Claremont Graduate University
March 8, 2013
As you all know, one of my primary jobs as president is to brag about how wonderful
CGU is. In fact, nothing gives me more joy than being captain of the CGU cheering
squad.
I love spreading the word far-and-wide about our amazing students and faculty, and
their history of important research on issues such as combating poverty, fostering
community, increasing international trust, improving understanding across religions and
cultures, enhancing diversity and inclusion, and so many more.
Obviously, solving important problems is what most universities do. If I’ve learned
anything since becoming president, it’s that CGU is definitely NOT most universities.
We are different, special.
In a speech I gave on February 4th, 2011, I challenged CGU to do the hard work of selfexamination by asking four key questions, and everyone responded with great force and
enthusiasm.
1. Are we engaged in research and teaching for which we can claim true
distinction?
2. Can we realign our structure equipping us to make the maximum contribution
to society and prepare us for the challenges of the future?
3. Are we committed to becoming and maintaining ourselves as a studentcentered institution?
4. Are we providing opportunities for our students to succeed and engage the
real world?
Of course, everyone knows that we’re not done yet. We have months of fine tuning and
mid-course adjustments ahead. The work of building CGU into a stronger and more
impactful university will never, and should never be done. But we’re moving forward,
and already seeing tangible results in answering these questions. Look at the progress
we’ve made in the past year alone.
In the area of student-centeredness, we hired Vice Provost Fred Siegel, who is
reorganizing our Office of Student Services and bringing our graduate students to
realize they truly are at the center of CGU. Under his leadership, we had our largest and
most successful student orientation ever, and this year’s entering class is the largest in
our history.
In the advancement area, we hired Vice President Bedford McIntosh who is focusing
and strengthening our Advancement Office. Meanwhile, our trustees have responded to
the call for student funding. Among the several new fellowships we’ve attracted the past
year, the Michael J. and Mary C. Johnston fellowship and the Roy and Carol
Christensen endowment, will provide critical support for some of CGU’s brightest
students for many years to come.
In our realignment work—where there certainly have been transformational
challenges—we have begun forging CGU into a more efficient university that it will
foster more synergy between students and faculty, and will be more competitive in
bringing in funding—both governmental and private.
In fact, we have already made huge progress in realignment, and are seeing
tremendous early benefits. For instance, reorganizing the schools and changing our
budget model enabled us to set aside $500 thousand dollars a year in investment funds
to support our strategic endeavors. We created similar reserve accounts for schools and
departments, backed with real dollars that support their own initiatives. Also, new
collaborations between schools are allowing us to offer new opportunities for students,
such as our recent partnership with Esri, a global company dedicated to creating
sustainable solutions using GIS technology. Bringing the real world into the classroom,
they will engage our Institute for Mathematical Sciences, the Center for Information
Systems and Technology, and Drucker School students in experiential learning through
an information systems track in our MBA program.
Beyond realignment we continue to grow and evolve our program offerings to better
serve students for life after graduate school. For instance, our new Sotheby’s Institute of
Art partnership will offer students a master’s degree in Art Business, an emerging,
multidisciplinary field that complements a growing collection of arts initiatives we’re now
organizing into a new Center for Creative Practice.
Those are just a few of many accomplishments we’ve made lately. We are definitely on
the move!
Back when we began the realignment process in 2011, we discovered that there was a
strong desire among faculty, staff, and students for removing infrastructure issues so
that we could put our mission front and center.
We are ready to move beyond that realignment conversation and talk about our core
work in research, teaching, and public engagement. In other words, it is time to present
a vision for Claremont Graduate University that will guide us through the next decade
and beyond. This is the time for us to talk about who we are, who we want to be, and
what sets us apart from the rest of the pack.
There are already several obvious things that distinguish CGU: our university is
exclusively graduate-level; we are a deliberately small and intimate academic
community; we are part of a prestigious consortium that collaborates and shares worldclass resources; we live next door to the great socio-cultural laboratory that is Los
Angeles County and the Inland Empire; and we encourage collaborative,
transdisciplinary, and experiential research and education that, though grounded in
traditional disciplinary theories, is unbound by departmental constraints. We know how
these distinctions add value to our students’ experiences.
We also know that we are a research university in a changing academic world: one that
is more competitive, more international, more diverse, more interactive, and based more
online. How do we continue to be a vibrant institution in this changing world?
We need to affirm goals that both reflect CGU’s DNA and that help us create a futuristic
niche in the higher-education marketplace; one that students view as valuable and that
will draw them here.
Our university’s mission—to prepare a diverse group of outstanding individuals to
assume leadership roles in the worldwide community through research, teaching, and
practice in selected fields—will always be valuable to students, and to all of us. But how
do we more effectively realize our mission in the twenty-first century?
I think there are the four major goals that will make our mission more viable in the next
five to ten years, perhaps even the next five to ten decades.
1. We need to expand our focus and become a more practice-based research
university
2. We need to continue our dedication to being a more transdisciplinary
university.
3. Everyone at CGU needs to help transform us into a more student-centered
university.
4. Our academic work needs to be more centrally organized through the
implementation of a university-wide research center.
These are goals we have been working on—and in most cases the goals in which we
are already exceling. These are the kinds of issues that are going to become much
more valuable to both today’s and tomorrow’s students, so we need to continue to
improve in them.
The first goal is strengthening practice-based education and research at CGU. By
practice-based, I mean education and research that help our students learn from people
working in embassies, nonprofits, and start-ups as much as from books, theories, and
empirics; that explore collaborative options to make greater impacts on people’s lives;
and that introduce our graduates to career paths they hadn’t yet imagined.
Like all good scholarly work, practice-based research and education is always grounded
in disciplinary theory, evidence, rigorous evaluation, and sound science. However, it
must be informed by the problems and challenges that exist beyond the laboratory and
lecture hall. There are multiple avenues that we are taking and can take to improve this
work at CGU, such as clinics, student internships, doctoral placements in for- and nonprofit institutions, and through engagement programs with neighbor agencies like those
in the Inland Empire who would benefit enormously from our expertise.
When I say practice-based education and research, I’m talking about the work of a
student in our School of Politics and Economics who recently interned as a program
analyst for the State Department’s Information Management System.
Or I’m talking about our eight Community and Global Health students, who, through
their Randall Lewis Health fellowships, are working to improve the effectiveness of the
California Healthy Cities Program throughout San Bernardino, Riverside, and Los
Angeles Counties.
Similarly, the Community Fellows Program in our School of Behavioral and
Organizational Sciences has placed more than 50 PhD students in practice-learning
settings in public and private institutions such as the Riverside County Department of
Mental Health, the YMCA Leadership Program, Direct TV, the Music Center, and the
Walt Disney Company, where they are both learning and contributing.
Or I am talking about an Information Systems and Technology PhD in our Tech Clinic
program, who is teaming up with Loma Linda Hospital to use GIS and spatial
information technology to improve health outcomes in local communities.
Now, I realize that graduate education is a not a one-size-fits-all enterprise, and what’s
good for a PhD student isn’t always the same thing for a master’s student. They share
several commonalities, but, depending on the situation, their needs might be vastly
different.
It’s so important for our master’s students to be drilled in the fundamental theories and
on what’s cutting edge in their field. Therefore, I want to stress that the foundation of
practice-based learning rests critically on a mastery of the traditional principles of a
given discipline. We must ensure that our students are exhaustively versed in the basic
methodologies their departments were founded on—it is upon this very education which
practice-based experiences will build.
Moreover, many of our students come here because they want to join the ranks of
tomorrow’s top professors and teachers, and we should never lose sight of the fact that
teaching in the academy is a practice. Rest assured we will continue and strengthen our
great legacy of training future leaders in academia.
We also realize that many of our PhD students might prefer careers outside of
academia, if they understood what the opportunities might be. It is our responsibility to
help them envision such alternate careers, and prepare them to succeed in those
ventures. Here again is where practice-based learning can be an enormous help to our
students through collaborating with their peers, and working across disciplinary
boundaries.
This is why our second major goal must be to strengthen transdisciplinary research and
education at CGU. For many years now, transdisciplinarity has been an integral part of
our university’s mission.
I want us to build on our tremendous progress, and the good advice we just received
from our external reviews. There are several areas where we can improve our efforts.
First, we will come together on a clear and operational understanding of the term, one
that we can articulate cogently to anyone who wants to know about us, and one that
resonates with transdisciplinary scholars worldwide. Second, we will do more to
advance the discourse on transdisciplinarity in the larger academic world, sharing our
experiences as well as learning from others who are working in it at conferences and
other collaborative gatherings. Additionally, we plan to set up a transdisciplinary core at
CGU that oversees engagement with, and support for faculty and students, key faculty
appointments, and a core curriculum—all in transdisciplinarity.
When we succeed in transdisciplinary work at CGU, we do amazing things and succeed
in creating incredible opportunities for students.
For instance, last year’s Manifold Greatness project brought together students and
faculty from the arts and humanities and religion to study and celebrate the King James
Bible and its 400-year influence on the United States. Their efforts required a
combination of expertise in English literature, history, cultural studies, religious studies,
archival studies, and museum studies. Our students scoured the Honnold and Dennison
Libraries’ special collections seeking out relevant texts for the exhibit. They had to
research them, examine them, and put them together to tell a story about the role of
religion in America. This project asked students to curate a major exhibit and opened
them up to entirely new possibilities for employment—both academically and
professionally. This was practice-based research and practice-based education in
action.
I strongly believe that these kinds of collaborative projects are what graduate education
will look like in the twenty-second century. We are already doing some of this at CGU
today, but we will need to do more taking a leadership position in advancing the practice
of transdisciplinary research and teaching, and telling the world what we’re doing, to
make it a more prominent part of the value that draws students to us.
Practice-based and transdisciplinary education and research are so important because
they give our students a fuller academic experience with far greater professional
opportunities. And they are also what students are beginning to demand.
They will demand opportunities like the practice of management curriculum that a
handful of our Drucker MBA students are enrolling in this spring, where they will work
with the Amgen corporation on its strategic priorities, making recommendations identical
to those done by a professional service firm—and getting paid for their work!
Students of the millennial generation are growing up in a very different world. They learn
differently. Thus, they are going to require a different graduate-school experience.
They don’t relate as well to a lecturer at the front of the room raining wisdom down on
them. They devour knowledge not just from books and in classrooms, but from multiple
sources: social networks, the blogosphere, YouTube, news websites, iTunes
University—and this is all available to them anytime, anywhere, and in seconds from
smart phones that fit in their pockets.
As such, millennial students are more connected to people who live continents away
and to what’s happening in the world in real time—and so they want to be a part of it.
The Arab Spring in Egypt, student protests in Iceland, the imprisonment of the Chinese
artist Ai Weiwei—our students are more connected, concerned, and want a graduate
education that allows them the freedom to do work that can make an impact next door
or a continent away. In fact, they live on-line and we have to be there with them, offering
new courses and a new style of teaching. We are responding with a team of people
setting up our first on-line pilots, and we will have to do even more.
Because of this, CGU is the kind of graduate school millennial students will want to go
to. Our size, resources, and transdisciplinary and practice-based opportunities provide
them more freedom to pursue scholarship that both engages in conversations that
matter, and conversations that matter to them.
Today, we educate superb mathematicians and managers, economists, historians, and
artists who have expertise in their fields, but who appreciate diverse perspectives, who
can reframe problems, and who thrive working in teams—all in service of fostering a
better world.
Still, there is so much more we can do to accommodate CGU to the needs of today’s
and tomorrow’s students. For this reason, increasing our efforts in student-centeredness
must be our third major goal.
But what is being student-centered all about? As our beloved Peter Drucker often
asked, who are your customers? And what do they value? And what he meant by that
was how are we going to change their lives?
Students ARE our customers and we must put them at the center of our practices. We
know who they are as individuals, the family circumstances they come from, and how
we can proactively meet their needs in the classroom, in advisement, and in student
services. By joining our academic enterprise with the work in student affairs, we can
create a more meaningful community of scholars—thereby improving student
satisfaction and time-to-degree.
And there is one other element of student-centeredness that is paramount, working
harder on transitions to careers.
We need to provide more opportunities that add value to students such as one of our
math PhD students, who with funding support from the Air Force Office of Scientific
Research, is taking her expertise with mathematical methods and using them to develop
Google-like search engines that can aid the Los Angeles Police Department.
In addition to opening up our students’ potential research applications, we need to make
ourselves far more welcoming to students, which is why another key dimension of
student centeredness is diversity.
The demographics that make up Southern California are changing dramatically,
becoming more and more multi-cultural. This means that every year, more and more of
our students may be the first in their families to make it to graduate school, and they will
have little frame of reference when they get here. Graduate students from
underrepresented groups already feel isolated. We must help them feel at home at
CGU. Why? This is what it means to be student-centered. As multiple studies have
shown, being comfortable in school is the key to scholastic success.
We need to build a support system staffed with people who will nurture our students at
every stage of their programs. There are many undergraduate models that do this so
well, and that we can adopt at CGU. We will find ways to enable these students to get
together, both with students like themselves and those who are completely different—
academically and socially. And we need to reach out to their families to make sure they
are a party to our students’ success, too.
There is an enormous amount of good research and academic literature on the
implementation and benefits of student support. Our own School of Educational Studies
is a leader in the area, and we are fortunate to have some of the world’s leading experts
in higher education at CGU. For example our SES Dean is editor-and-chief of the
Journal of Higher Education.
We need to broker a meaningful partnership between student affairs and academic
affairs so that our amazing faculty and students can advise us and help us grow in
student-centeredness and diversity, based on the research evidence.
And this work should also extend to our international students, who accounted for more
than 30 percent of our enrolled students last fall. According to data compiled by our
Office of Institutional Effectiveness—which we set up as a result of realignment and
which has been doing incredible work for us—international students are taking
significantly longer to get their degrees than others on campus. They deserve the same
attention and level of services as anyone else on campus.
I know, from multiple examples I’ve seen throughout my career, that if our students feel
at home in graduate school—no matter where they come from or from what
circumstances—every time we challenge them, they will show us they can do more.
And because many of our students come from situations of great need, they will bring
so much valuable and dynamic insight into our classrooms.
While diversity is a part of student-centeredness, it also is a major societal condition. As
such, we must build our capacity to accommodate diversity, but we must also see
diversity as a power that helps us accomplish our mission. In the 21st century, the most
viable and vital institutions will be the ones that recognize and embrace the changing
demographics of their student body.
In addition to improving our diversity infrastructure, we must enhance our opportunities
for meaningful research and funding. Accordingly, we will begin planning to launch an
all-university research center and to affirm it as our fourth major goal.
The research center, a key recommendation from our realignment plan, will increase
CGU’s reputation and performance as a research-intensive university by encouraging,
pursuing, and establishing more major research endeavors—both single- and transdisciplinary—on important societal and intellectual issues. Expanding the number of
large-scale research projects will inspire investment in CGU as a source of
transformational, even game-changing ideas that offer a substantial return to our local
communities, our country, and our world.
We need a center like this now more than ever, as we’ve seen government, corporate,
and private foundation budgets slashed over the last four years—so we are going to
have to work even harder to make this happen. The center will enlarge CGU’s
resources for faculty and student support, helping to write many more research grants
to government agencies at all levels—federal, state, and local—and to private
foundations, corporations, and individuals. And of course, students working to develop
and conduct the research for such funded projects, and getting paid on grants to do so,
is another very important form of practice-based learning.
The research center’s commitment to attracting more support and sponsored funding
will enable us to better recognize our cross cutting themes. And it is an excellent
educational opportunity for our students. Whether they’re getting a PhD to go into the
academy or an MBA to enter the non-profit world, any student who knows how to write a
grant will have a huge leg up on the competition. This is practice-based learning and it’s
a source of stipends, income, and student support.
Also built into the center will be a “What Works” department—another key
recommendation from the strategic plan—that is engaged with philanthropists, NGOs,
businesses, and academics from many disciplines to consider best practices, and how
those efforts can be duplicated in a variety of contexts. Together with real world
practitioners we can generate, analyze, and combine evidence and examples, drawing
important practical lessons.
Lessons about what works like those being explored by students in our School of
Educational Studies who are trying to help K-12 schools that are really hurting because
their funding has been repeatedly cut. These schools don’t know how to fundraise like
institutions of higher education. Our students are providing feedback and strategies to
help them fundraise—all the while we are teaching our own students about education,
fundraising, and the kinds of real-world problems they are going to face after they
graduate.
Another central component of the research center will be an Inland Empire engagement
effort to help us coordinate the many requests we get from local agencies to help them.
Our region has so many needs: for jobs and economic growth, in healthcare, education,
and that’s just to name a few. We have the intellectual resources to make a difference,
and it’s our responsibility to help our neighbors. And—you guessed it—it will give our
students even more practice-based experience. This is what our local public universities
are doing so well, and it is time for us to inject their dedication to community service into
our DNA. Through the engagement center, we will interact directly with institutions,
programs, and local governments in the Inland Empire and surrounding communities to
put transdisciplinary and practice-based learning and research to work in our own
backyard.
Today, in the context of seeing our future, I affirm the central place of this research
center in the life of this university, and I am incredibly excited to make this center a top
priority in my fundraising activities.
As Peter Drucker famously said, “The best way to predict the future, is to create it.” By
strengthening CGU’s practice-based and transdisciplinary research and education, by
becoming better at student-centeredness and diversity, and by creating a research
center to help us organize our efforts, we will help create the future of graduate
education right here at Claremont Graduate University.
We at CGU—because of our brilliant students, our intimate size, our cutting-edge
resources, our proximity to Los Angeles, and our commitment to multidisciplinary
research—are uniquely designed to cultivate and support this special brand of graduate
education and research. It is what has secured our legacy for impactful work in the
world, and it is what will continue to make us a leader among research universities for
years to come.
These ideas are just the start; they are a reflection of our work, our DNA, and our place
in higher education. But they aren’t self-executing. They need all of our good ideas and
creativity to become a force in shaping CGU’s future.
Of one thing I am certain, there is an abundance of heart and mind at CGU that will
carry us to that future.