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[ The Elmhurst Scene ]
Q&A: Whatever It Takes
In 2006, we interviewed the new Dean of the Faculty, Alzada Tipton.
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Alzada Tipton joined Elmhurst over the summer as vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty. She arrived from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she was associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and an associate professor of English. Dean Tipton talked to us about her new job, about ways to promote great teaching, and about the role of cookies in higher education.
Coming to Elmhurst from Minnesota, you just went through one of the ordeals of academic life: the interstate move. Do any of the skills needed to move a family apply to being a dean?
We moved one dog, two cats, two rodents, and two kids. I’d say the dual goals of making progress and at the same time keeping everyone entertained and not entirely cranky might be some kind of metaphor for the teaching process.
Colleges love to talk about their faculty’s passion for teaching. But apart from talking about it, how can Elmhurst encourage great teaching?
One thing a dean can do specifically is to bring faculty together as a whole, as a college. Often when faculty come together, we identify ourselves as members of this department or that committee. It’s not often enough that a faculty member is a teacher along with other teachers. We already have a college retreat, and it would be nice in future years to have a section of the retreat focus on faculty and pedagogy. And you have to be aware of the desire that professors have to be great teachers. These are highly intelligent, committed people, and it’s been my experience that they’re always tinkering with their courses—bringing in a new book, thinking about a new lab—to make them more effective. Very few want to be teaching the same way in year thirty, when they’re ready to retire, as they did in year one.
Just for the sake of maintaining their own interest in teaching, if nothing else?
That’s right. It would be very boring otherwise. I taught Shakespeare nine times and did it differently each time. Now Shakespeare’s never boring, but it would have been less interesting to do it the same way each time. So when you talk about helping faculty to develop pedagogically, you mean giving the faculty the opportunity to do some of the things they want to do with their courses. Sometimes that means giving them time, sometimes it means fostering a healthy competition for resources. Sometimes it means giving them cookies. Whatever it takes.
Cookies go a long way?
Higher education is largely fueled by cookies and coffee.
How do you evaluate faculty members as teachers?
We have assessment mechanisms that offer one way of thinking about what constitutes success in the classroom. For example, in the general education curriculum, as I understand it, we have in place a program where a faculty member teaching a course can measure how students do with regard to the goals of the course at the beginning, and more importantly, at the end—to see whether students are making progress as they move through the course. That’s one way of doing it. I also think that the way you measure success and define good teaching is inevitably anecdotal. You have a student or alumnus rush up and tell you, “You changed my life!” And it usually happened in a class you don’t remember, or in a part of the class that you thought was peripheral. When an Elmhurst alumnus tells me, for example, about how Andy Prinz changed his life, I know good things happened in that classroom.
Do teachers have a role to play not just in the intellectual development of their students, but also in more affective development?
One of the things I enjoyed most about my previous job was the ability to work closely with student affairs professionals. I’m interested in having faculty members understand what student affairs professionals understand about student development. When we assess something like the ability of students to work cooperatively in diverse groups, we’re not doing a good job unless we assess the whole of students’ experience with that phenomenon. That means thinking not only about the work the students have done in the classroom but also the work they’ve done in their clubs, in committees, at internships, and so forth.
Even liberal arts colleges seem increasingly interested in professionalism and professional preparation. As an English professor, someone who teaches and studies Shakespeare and Spencer, what kind of case can you make for the relevance of the humanities?
If you ask employers what they’re looking for in their potential employees, the answer usually looks startlingly like the objectives of a general education program. They’re interested in people who can think critically, read carefully, write persuasively, communicate effectively, work together in groups, solve complicated problems. The education one gets in a small liberal arts college—the education you get, for example, in a course of study like English—addresses all those things very effectively. The liberal arts are professional preparation.
You’ve spent some of your first weeks on the job meeting with department heads and directors.
What are some of the issues they’ve been most eager to talk about?
Developments in the curriculum. People are interested in thinking about the general education requirements again. And there’s the sense that we ought to be hiring more faculty and building more buildings.
Will we be hiring more faculty?
I hope so. We’ll be working within the parameters of our budget.
Elmhurst is usually described as a small college, though we’ve had some relatively large fresh-man classes in recent years. Is the college about the right size?
It’s a small college if it has small classes. One of the things I like best about Elmhurst is that none of the classes get to be too big. Coming from an institution that had about the same number of students, but where the way to deal with large incoming classes was to increase the numbers in first-year classes, I’m very, very pleased that no class goes much beyond thirty-five here. I think that makes an incalculable difference to the students’ experience.
When I look at some of the popular college guides and at websites like ratemyprofessor.com, I get the feeling that students have become very savvy consumers of higher education. Is that empowering, or does it just reduce education to a commercial transaction?
Students are thinking, “What is my investment in this, and what return can I expect to get on my investment?” That’s a fine thing. But students need to be educated, by faculty and by administrators, about what it is they’re purchasing. They’re purchasing the opportunity to learn. They tend to think of it as purchasing a commodity—a transcript, a degree, a job opportunity. Have you heard the analogy that going to college is like buying a new car every year for four years and driving it off a cliff? That’s the worst possible commodity analogy. Instead, I’d say it’s more like purchasing services, like hiring a personal trainer. Faculty provide their expertise. But students have to take an active part in this endeavor. To get an education, you have to be the one committed to getting it.
Interview by Andrew Santella
Photograph by Mark Segal |
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