Phillip Wainwright, Vice Provost for International Affairs and Director of the Halle Institute for Global Learning at Emory, spoke about Emory’s Global Strategies. Central goals include:
Provost Claire Sterk urged further discussion about the role of Emory faculty in promotion and tenure. “What should Emory’s practice be, what should Emory’s culture be?” she said. “This is a very important conversation and one that I actually think is perfect for the Faculty Council as a governance body to explore.” Sterk added that she and President Wagner have been in conversation with Emory deans to “to really think about Emory’s values and how those translate into what Emory stands for.” She anticipates additional discussion with the Council about “faculty quality and student quality and the student experience.” She stated: “I personally feel that at times we separate the two too much. But the reality is if we really want to have an identity as an institution, we need to start putting those two together.”
At its February 18 meeting, the Faculty Council heard a report on the Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP), a required part of the university’s Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC) reaccreditation in 2014. A campuswide process in 2011-12 yielded a decision to select “The Nature of Evidence” (originally named “Primary Evidence”) as the theme of Emory’s QEP plan. Since that time, a steering committee representing divisions across the campus, under the leadership of Professor Pamela Scully, has more fully developed the plan. The goal of this five-year plan, dedicated to improving an aspect of student learning or the environment for student success, is to empower students as independent scholars capable of supporting arguments with different types of evidence. The plan has three components designed to engage first-year students at Emory’s main campus 1) before they arrive on campus, 2) within the classroom (in the required first-year seminars), and 3) beyond the classroom, through co-curricular experiences. “If we can help them think about the differences between original and secondary sources, how different disciplines encounter evidence, the way new evidence or a new look at existing evidence can present ideas in a new light—this kind of basic engagement with questions of evidence would be a very good thing for our students,” Scully said.
At its October 18 meeting, Provost Earl Lewis introduced the Council to a new university-wide structured inquiry about to launch: “Are we willing to spend some time looking ahead 25 years from now and asking what a liberal arts education at Emory should look like? What should be the interplay between the liberal arts curriculum at the undergradu- ate level and the professional and graduate schools? What should a liberal arts education contain? What changes do we want to begin to make?” Lewis said a committee would be formed in the coming weeks to spend a year in a systematic and far-reaching examination of these questions, toward “a framework for Emory University going forward, as we imag- ine the liberal arts.” To help begin to shape the discussion, the Council then spent some time in discussion of questions such as, “How large do you envision our student body becoming over the next quarter century?” and, “Are we structured properly to insure the quality we imagine for a first-rate liberal learning experience?”
At the March meeting, President James Wagner continued a discussion he had begun in January on Emory’s particular distinctions. He explained why it is important to be able to articulate Emory’s uniqueness among its institutional peers. “We can do a better job in student recruiting and retention,” he said, “and in making our case to faculty and helping our alumni understand what we are becoming.”
Following discussions with other governance groups, deans, the President’s Cabinet, the alumni, trustees, and students, Wagner noted, “it was something about the character, the nature of being in the commmunity,” that repeatedly emerged as a quality that makes Emory special. He identified courage, collaboration, ethical engagement, generosity, and hospitality toward spiritual belief and practice, among others, as expressions of that quality. “This report will be advising how we talk about ourselves and how we brand ourselves,” he said. “I think it will find its way into some of our fundraising and recruiting literature for students.”
Click here to read all Council Concerns reports on “Identifying Emory’s Distinctiveness.”
At the January 2011 meeting of the Faculty Council, University President James Wag- ner commented on the beginnings of a semester-long conversation taking place among several governance groups around the university on the question, “What makes Emory distinctive?”
“There are times when it’s important for us to stop and see who we are, for the purpose of being able to declare that, to explain who we are, to invest in what we find is good in that,” President Wagner said. He added that these questions had been taken up by the University Senate and the President’s Cabi- net, and they had been discussed at length at a recent Emory College faculty meeting.
Along with President Wagner, the Faculty Council plans to engage with the question of identifying Emory’s distinctiveness at its next meeting, on February 15.