Dear Members of the Search Committee:
I write to apply for the position of Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Portland State
University. Currently, I am Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Graduate School at the
University of Texas at Arlington. A metropolitan institution very similar to PSU, UT Arlington is a
Carnegie Research University-High Activity institution with 80 bachelor’s programs, 74 master’s
programs, 31 doctoral programs, 25,106 undergraduate students, 7869 graduate students, and $64 million
in external research and sponsored program expenditures. The Office of Graduate Studies, which I
oversee, has a staff of 47 and a budget of over $4,000,000. As Vice Provost and Graduate Dean, I help
advance our strategic goals in graduate, especially doctoral, education; manage graduate programs and
enrollments; oversee our graduate tuition fellowship and assistantship programs; and review all tenure
and promotion decisions. In addition, I have led efforts to improve program quality, increase and diversify
enrollments, raise funds for graduate student support, and revamp all aspects of graduate education.
Previously, I served as an Associate Dean in our Graduate School and as the Chair of our English
Department. I also have a strong record of publication, invited lectures, and conference papers on textual
scholarship, William Faulkner’s fiction, and higher education and serve on various professional
association and state committees. Given my leadership skills and experience, I believe I can help advance
learning, discovery, and engagement in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
As a Vice Provost and Graduate Dean, I have improved our undergraduate and graduate programs. For
example, I oversee the academic review of all academic programs on campus and work closely with our
deans and programs to create effective specific plans for prioritizing and implementing review
recommendations. I also helped create our university initiative on active learning and aggressively
developed our campus-wide undergraduate and graduate student research day. An advocate for
undergraduate research experiences, I have expanded our NSF-funded LSAMP program and created a
campus-wide summer research program that pairs undergraduates with doctoral student mentors. To
improve dramatically doctoral education on campus, I am rolling out competitive funding for doctoral
students; introducing completion and time-to-degree reporting; improving doctoral program recruiting
and performance; and expanding our mentoring, writing, teaching, responsible research, and intellectual
engagement, programming for graduate students. Some of this work builds on my efforts as a Chair to
improve the transition of our students from school to work. We added technology to our curriculum in
pedagogically effective ways and created career forums, service learning, and an internship program to
help students become intellectual entrepreneurs with the ability, experiences, and confidence to embark
on professionally rewarding career paths once they leave the classroom. Underlying these efforts is my
passionate conviction that enabling students to apply the intellectual capital gained from their organized
courses to issues and problems outside the university helps them make connections between university
study, the world of work, and their own future. These experiences suggest that I can help CLAS forge a
unique identity and improve its academic programs while realizing PSU’s motto “Let knowledge serve
the city.”
I also understand the role of faculty and am committed to providing the support and infrastructure that
enables them to fulfill their role. As Chair of our English Department, I was involved in all aspects of
hiring, mentoring, reviewing, tenuring, and promoting faculty. As Vice Provost, I have assisted our
Provost in building our annual faculty hiring plan. For many years, I have served on our three member
University Tenure and Promotion Committee and reviewed all faculty dossiers and made
recommendations to the President in consultation with each academic dean. My pursuit of NSF
ADVANCE funding to transform our recruitment and retention of female STEM faculty and my creation
of a pre-faculty internship program with Howard University demonstrates my commitment as well to
building a diverse faculty.
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As many states, including Texas, have deregulated tuition and reduced funding to universities, academic
administrators at public universities have increasingly sought funding to maintain quality. To help fund
graduate students and innovative practices in graduate education, I created and lead a proposal
development team in the Office of Graduate Studies that has generated a range of interdisciplinary,
campus-wide efforts to seek external funding for doctoral students and innovative graduate education
practices. In the past three years, our team has generated $3.1 million in graduate student support from the
Department Education’s GAANN program and the National Science Foundation’s LSAMP Bridge to
Doctorate and S-STEM programs. We are aggressively pursuing additional GAANN grants as well as SSTEM, IGERT, and AGEP grants from NSF. This experience can help me advance the College’s research
agenda across all disciplines.
I have also raised funds for graduate education through other avenues. For example, I helped create our
first campus-wide graduate fellowship programs and expanded their funding, negotiated doctoral student
support agreements with foreign government agencies, and increased our institutional need-based aid for
graduate students from $1 million to $3 million annually. Over the past few years, my development
officer and I have built a fundraising effort from scratch by engaging alumni in our graduate
programming and events. This effort is now bearing fruit with modest annual donations and several
endowments, including one valued at $300,000. Because of these efforts, graduate education is now part
of the University’s development agenda and our upcoming comprehensive campaign. My development of
new revenue streams for graduate education suggests that I can help increase and diversify the College’s
funding.
The increasingly interdisciplinary nature of knowledge creation, research, and workforce development
suggests that CLAS should continue to nourish a variety of joint degree programs and research
collaborations within the college, across the campus, and with other general academic institutions and
health science centers, both in the United States and abroad. I have some expertise in this area. For
example, I regularly identify promising areas for new graduate and certificate programs and create new
partnerships with local, regional, and international institutions in an environment of scarce resources. I
help develop, obtain approval for, and launch graduate programs across the disciplines and coordinate our
graduate offerings at our Fort Worth campus. Currently, I am pursuing interdisciplinary programming in
sustainability and in the intersection of the arts, humanities, and engineering. I am also an advocate for
our joint Ph.D. program in Biomedical Engineering with the UT Southwestern Medical Center. In the area
of international collaborations, I helped create or implement our executive MBA program in China, our
joint Ph.D. program in Social Work with the Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon, our joint Physics
Ph.D. program with Changwon National University, and our joint Computer Science Ph.D. program with
the Demokritos Research Institute. In many of these efforts, I have taken an entrepreneurial approach
towards revenue-sharing that incentivizes programs to explore new and innovative programming. Given
this background, I believe I can advocate for new academic programs, increase the College’s revenue, and
collaborate productively with the Oregon Health Science University and with universities along the
Pacific Rim.
A conviction that higher education has a responsibility to prepare an increasingly diverse group of
students for success in a multicultural democratic society has informed my approach to graduate
recruiting and admissions. At UT Arlington, we increased our overall graduate enrollments by 102.7%
from Fall 1999 to Fall 2010 and our new graduate enrollments by 58.2%. At the same time, we increased
the diversity of our graduate student population, including a 229.6% increase in AfricanAmerican graduate students, a 286.8% increase in Hispanic graduate students, and a 116.4% increase in
Asian American graduate students. From Fall 2001 to 2010, moreover doctoral enrollments grew from
589 to 1300. The Office of Graduate Studies helped build these increases by working with graduate
programs to create an effective recruiting infrastructure that includes an improved website; better
communication with and tracking of prospects, applicants, admits, and matriculants; relationships with
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feeder schools, campus recruiting events, and a campus-wide admissions standards review. My work in
building a diverse student body may help CLAS build and diversify its enrollments.
As an academic administrator, I have relied on collaborative planning and decision-making. Working
with Deans, Chairs, the Graduate Assembly, and faculty, for example, we improved the culture and
performance of our Graduate School. We first determined what particular internal and external policies
governed our practices. When the reason for a particularly complicated practice was institutional
tradition, we worked diplomatically to rationalize it. We improved our policies on admissions,
standardized testing, English proficiency, fellowships, certificate programs, theses and dissertations, and
other areas. Improved use of technology helped us rationalize many of our processes and improve service.
This record demonstrates that I can work effectively with a wide range of academic and non-academic
units at PSU to develop the various infrastructures needed to support the College’s goals.
As a scholar, I have published widely on William Faulkner's fiction and on the interpretative implications
of the linguistic and bibliographical instability of a literary work’s various texts. My two edited
collections explore the relationship between textual scholarship and literary theory. As a teacher, I seek to
foster an ideologically and historically oriented discussion of American literature in all my classes.
“Canon Formation and American Literature,” one course I developed, investigates different theories about
the canonization and teaching of American literature. Another such course, “Textual Scholarship and the
Humanities,” focuses on the relationships between theories of textuality and the realities of textual
instability. In all my classes, I try, in Gerald Graff’s terms, to “teach the conflicts” characterizing the
liberal arts today.
In closing, my best assets are that I am committed to helping students succeed academically, that I work
well with a wide variety of academic cultures, and that I understand the role of faculty and am committed
to providing the support and infrastructure that enables them to fulfill that role. My efforts at a large
research university with a diverse student population may benefit the College of Liberal Arts and
Sciences. Enclosed is a copy of my curriculum vitae. Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Philip Cohen
Dean, Graduate School and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs