The new Dean of Students believes that colleges have a responsibility to produce "better people." Making Thanksgiving dinner conversations more interesting is just gravy.
Posted on: September 12, 2007
Shortly after the start of the fall term, the College welcomed Dr. Eileen Sullivan as the Dean of Students. In her half-unpacked office in the Frick Center, the public relations office asked Dean Sullivan about her professional background, her work with values-based education, and her interest in Elmhurst College.
First off, what was right about Elmhurst College and this position? Why Elmhurst College and why now?
Why Elmhurst College? Well, I remember when I saw the ad in the Chronicle of Higher Education, I had this mixed sense of emotions. While I thought that professionally the opportunity seemed to be a great fit to my background and experience, I also had this sinking feeling that, there would be a thousand applicants, simply because of the caliber of the institution and the exciting opportunity the position presented. Given the work I’ve done at Bowling Green State University, I’ve developed a good sense of institutions that are committed to things like values and ethics, and respecting diversity of ideas and beliefs. And I sensed right away that Elmhurst College was an institution that lives that at its core. Believers, non-believers and questioners alike—there is a place for everyone here.
And, ‘Why now?’ I suppose the opportunity to return to the President’s cabinet was a draw, as that’s been a place where I’ve spent a third of my career, serving two different presidents at two different institutions in two very different senior level capacities. It’s a comfortable place for me, for while I can serve as a student advocate and leader for the student affairs area, serving on the President’s cabinet provides the opportunity to work across divisional lines for the betterment of the student experience and the quality of campus life. Essentially, I’ve had some cool experiences that have afforded me the opportunity to contribute to broader institutional goals….focusing on “the forest, not simply the trees.”
Could you name a couple of those experiences?
First, I would say working with the President of Bowling Green State University, serving as his Executive Assistant and Policy Analyst was one such experience. Here was a leader who focused on things like building community, student success and critical thinking about values. The President had a vision of the university as "the premier learning institution in Ohio and one of the best in the nation." I was able to work directly with him as he charted a course to transform an institution of 20,000 students, 3,000 faculty and staff and 120,000 alumni. My role of President Ribeau’s cabinet was sort of the “other”. The one person at the senior level who didn’t have a division and an agenda for that division. My focus was helping the President advance his priorities, his vision-- through communications, through development of collaborative partnerships, through my leadership of the Legions, which was the President’s cross divisional leadership team of faculty, staff and students. That group met monthly and served as a think tank to advise the president on issues of institutional significance. Issues that could only be addressed and problems that could only be solved through the collaboration of folks working across all divisions of the University.
Another cool experience for me occurred in April of 2000, as that’s when the President of BGSU, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and I really began our work together on what eventually became the Bowling Green Experience (BGX), the University’s curricular and co-curricular values initiative. The next two years were spent working with a faculty, staff and student committee to lend their best thinking to how we as a university could use critical thinking about values as the theme to prepare principled citizens. Our first committee spent a year developing recommendations on how this could be accomplished. The result was a plan for a five-component curricular and co-curricular initiative that the President released, and we spent the next several months seeking input from the college community. We began planning pilots of the first two components (for first-year students) of the initiative: a first-year general education course on values taught in-discipline, paired with an intensive orientation experience with a service, values and common reading component. As the initiative began to evolve, it took more and more of my time, and so the President appointed me to serve as Assistant Vice President for Academic and Student Affairs and Director of the Values Initiative. I see a number of similarities between the first two components of the values initiative at BGSU and the First Year Seminar Pilots being introduced this fall at Elmhurst.
Another exciting professional experience I’ve been able to have involved serving as Vice President for Student Development at Loras College. As this was my first experience working at a small private liberal arts institution, I learned so much. But I also was able to see how portable something like a values initiative can be….from large public to small private, the values initiative was adaptable. Bowling Green has around 20,000 students, and Loras had 1,700. So at Loras the intensive orientation component of the BGSU values initiative was adopted. With a common reading experience, academic dishonesty and conduct discussions, a service project and community building activities, “Launch into Loras” served as a way for first year students to get to know a faculty leader, a student affairs leader, and an upper class peer leader, three days prior to the start of the fall semester. Assessment results for the pilot year of the program indicated that there was a 10 percent increase in the first to second semester continuation rates among first year students participating in Launch into Loras vs. first year students who weren’t involved in the program. There was a quantifiable positive impact on student success and persistence.
I’ve really been blessed to work with two very strong college and university presidents [Dr. Sidney Ribeau, President of Bowling Green State University and Dr. John Kerrigan, former President of Loras College]. Now that I’m at Elmhurst, I’m approaching this as a great opportunity to work with another great leader in higher education. President Cureton has a distinguished list of achievements as a higher education executive and I’m very excited about working with him.
Particularly at a large, public institution like Bowling Green State University, but even here, how do you present values education without presenting a creed to students? That is, how do you teach values without preaching values?
I think you do it by focus on critical reflection or critical thinking about values, not values indoctrination. Our goal in the academic community should always be to equip students with the skills and dispositions to make informed decisions professional and personally, about things that matter to them. Our goal should essentially be to teach students “how” to think, not “what” to think. And I guess, by the time they graduate, they should be able to negotiate values that will come into conflict, and make a value preference, and be able to support that through their thinking, and their actions. We, as educators, as an educational institution, have a responsibility to give people a means to identify, weigh and defend positions on values issues.
Do you worry that maybe all you’re teaching students is how to defend a position, whether it’s value-based or not?
Perhaps, but I generally think that the cognitive and affective skill development of students, kind of takes care of that. Traditional-aged students, for example, come to us with their suitcase of values that someone else has packed for them. The first semester they are with us, they start to look through the suitcase and based on their new experiences, they start to decide certain things no longer fit and there are also new values they want to add to their suitcase. That’s why Thanksgiving dinner conversations are so interesting when first year students return home after being exposed to lots of different people, ideas, beliefs, etc. They essentially begin to evolve from a critical thinking and values standpoint. We want to encourage the students to look at values, to explore, identify, make some value preferences and defend those preferences.
Now, you’ve written about applying this large, public university program [at Bowling Green] to a small college setting [at Loras College]. It seems like the type of program that, in a lot of ways, would be better suited to a small college.
Actually, our intention at Bowling Green was to take the values focus which has historically been the domain of small private liberal arts colleges which educates smaller numbers of students and apply them to a larger public setting that in essence educates more of the masses. At Bowling Green, President Ribeau and I felt a real responsibility to fulfill the public trust, as a state institution, by investing resources in something that could help us turn out better people.
A professor at Elmhurst College recently said to me that one of the advantages Elmhurst College has is that, as a small-religiously affiliated college, we attract some students who have already have a predilection towards ethics and values in education. They are interested in these questions before they get here. Did you notice that same student at Loras, which is a small, Catholic college?
Moving to Loras was a significant change for me. It was the first small college that I had been at, as a student or an administrator. I loved the intimacy of the setting, and certainly as both a religiously affiliated institution and as a liberal arts college, I sensed that the institution definitely attracted a certain kind of student. But I do think that whether they’re attending public or private institution, there’s something about this generation of students that is more in tune with altruism, values and issues pertaining to social justice. They are generally a group of individuals who are more concerned with others and doing something to make the world a bit better. I guess I go back to my mentor Sidney Ribeau who, when referring to the impact of the institution on the student and how their experience could impact others, said: "Bowling Green State University is an institution that changes lives, and its graduates go on to change the lives of others.” I think Elmhurst College has a huge impact on the lives of its students, and their ability to go into the world and make a difference in the lives of others is huge. I hope to be a part of that, even in some small way.
(To read Dean Sullivan's writing about establishing values-based orientation programs, click here.)
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