My written Faculty President’s Report for the Whitworth Board of Trustees meeting in Fall 2019.
As I write this report, the word “remix” is on my mind. To start with, I just put together a playlist called “Desert Songs” that pulls in a dozen or so “b-side” U2 songs, mostly songs that didn’t make it onto that band’s 1987 album The Joshua Tree. (My students reliably inform me their dad loves The Joshua Tree; I check my age and sigh a little.) If you share my affection for early U2, you’ll understand how great it is that “Desert Songs” feels to me like a whole, coherent album that could exist beautifully between The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree. For those of you whose inner college selves aren’t jumping up and down with excitement about that notion, I’ll get to my point, which is that encountering old good things in thoughtful new orders can bring to light qualities otherwise hidden or overlooked. This is remix as revelation—a sprawl of disconnected pieces becomes a new constellation, greater than the sum of its parts. And I think Whitworth, right now, has remix on its mind, as we finish work on our new Shared Curriculum, as we work to better serve our increasingly diverse student body, and as we anticipate the changes and challenges that may accompany the departure of Provost Carol Simon after seven years of steady leadership.
Faculty members are currently submitting proposals to convert existing General Education courses into “new” Shared Curriculum courses. By design, there is much in the new Shared Curriculum that will look familiar. We’ve reaffirmed our commitment to history, literature, the arts, philosophy, and the rest of the traditional liberal arts, and we’ve also woven in our well-established commitments to exploring human diversity, culture, and worldview. At the same time, we’ve articulated a new set of relationship between the pieces in a way that, we hope, will enrich ongoing discussions about interconnections between disciplines, about how we might reshape courses and groups of courses over time, and about the ways this Shared Curriculum feeds into the work students will do in their majors (and throughout their lives). I should note here that our fall faculty retreat was focused on the ways that students carry knowledge from one course into another, and on the interplay between different courses that students take. The seeking out and enhancing of that kind of interplay is very much in the spirit of this new curriculum.
One of the remarkable new elements in the curriculum will be a course category called “Faith, Reason, and Contemporary Issues” (FRCI). This is not a new “Core” course, but it joins with the well-established Biblical Literature course and the three Cores to make up a group we’ve called “Belief Inquiry.” The result is an intriguing remix that in my thinking is centered on Core 150, our long-standing Christian Worldview course. Seen alongside Cores 250 and 350, with their respective deep dives into ways of knowing and ways of acting in the world, Core 150 becomes an investigation of a particular worldview in action. Seen, instead, alongside Bib Lit and the new FRCI course, Core 150 is a study of Christian history and doctrine over time, joined on one hand to a course that explores reading scripture from a Christian perspective and on the other hand to a course that explores reasoning and the role of faith in reasoning. These five courses together give Whitworth a unique, dynamic approach to serving both our Christian students and our skeptics, preparing all of our students to assess their beliefs, develop their beliefs, and consider how they will live in light of their beliefs.
On campus, you’ll notice we’ve got the back of Cowles Auditorium “up on blocks.” This renovation project is a gift to the work of Aaron Dyszelski, Naphtali Fields, and Andy Christenson, the nimble, inventive faculty trio currently leading our theatre department. This is another remix; these three are new Whitworth faces, relatively speaking, stepping into roles long held by Whitworth classics. These artists are deeply invested in theatre as a form of intellectual and interpersonal engagement. I especially love the way, as a group, they explore theatre out in the world—in makeshift spaces, among communities, and as community building. They also share a keen sense of the importance of helping their students professionalize. Their students graduate with not only improved craft but also a strong grip on practical problem solving, group dynamics, planning and executing. And so, I think, their students are a dramatic rebuttal to the obnoxious idea that theatre is an impractical major. I would say the same about students from our other small, traditional liberal arts departments, such as History and Philosophy. In the hurly-burly of student recruitment and retention, it would be wonderful to see us bragging more about alums from these areas and investing in these departments in ways that will talk back to the culture and keep our whole university ecosystem on sure footing for the future. It would be wonderful if this renovation—which modernizes and repairs rather than expanding our theatre infrastructure—were only a first step.
I want to quickly mention five more things.
First, the incoming freshman cohort is again historical in its large number of first generation students and students from underrepresented demographics. Whitworth’s efforts to recruit and retain these students have transformed the campus in wonderful ways. They also present us with new challenges. How can we better serve this increasingly diverse student body? What kinds of curricular and infrastructural shifts might be needed to serve such a large cohort of first generation students? These questions are on the mind of the faculty, I think, and especially on the minds of faculty who teach courses geared toward incoming students.
Second, as we continue to develop and deploy new graduate programs, faculty are thinking hard about the need to cultivate excellent administrative and practical structures to support those programs. They are also thinking about the need to create strong connections between our graduate programs and our traditional undergraduate programs.
Third, Dr. Bert Emerson (English) has taken on the directorship of the honors program. Dr. Emerson keeps coffee and snacks flowing in the honors lounge near his office, and he is working to build up and clarify the purpose of the honors community on campus. I believe his careful leadership and organization (and that of his newly-named assistant director, Dr. Karen Petersen-Finch from Theology) will bear significant fruit in the coming years.
Fourth, I want to highlight the leadership of Dr. Erica Salkin (Communications), chair of the curriculum committee (COVAC), whose energetic grasp of curriculum nuances and processes has been and continues to be simply indispensable to the success of our general education revision efforts, from start to finish. Dr. Salkin (who is tireless) will also be leading the President’s Task Force on Free Expression and Civil Discourse, which has been tasked with developing a statement of principles for WU and is looking to our Christ-Centered Rationale for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion as a model. Dr. Salkin is an outstanding choice for the role, and her work with the task force will flow beautifully from her scholarship on student speech in schools.
And finally, the fifteen-member search committee that will be looking for a new provost has been formed, and its work has begun. Beck Taylor and Carol Simon have been a dynamic duo, steering Whitworth deftly into its strongest ever financial position, maintaining our status as a leading regional comprehensive university, and breaking record after record in recruitment and retention of diverse cohorts of students. Of all the changes coming to the big mixtape that is Whitworth university, the departure of Dr. Simon may be the most significant. And while much of the work of the search committee is still to come, I am pleased and excited that the group, drawn from many different areas and bringing many different kinds of experience to the room, is such an extraordinary set of scholars and administrators. I’ve been saying they’re a group that will be clear, confident, and kind, both in agreement and in disagreement, and that they’re a group that is passionate about Whitworth’s mission. And I mean it. These are DJs with great taste; the party is in very good hands.
Whitworth University
9/2019
Postscript: My “Desert Songs” Playlist
- Beautiful Ghost/Introduction to Songs of Experience
- Race Against Time
- Deep in the Heart
- Silver and Gold [feat. Keith Richards & Ron Wood & Steve Jordan]
- Heartland
- Luminous Times (Hold On To Love)
- Spanish Eyes
- Endless Deep
- Walk to the Water
- Sweetest Thing
- Love Comes Tumbling
- Bass Trap (Edit)
- Wave of Sorrow (Birdland)