January 5 LUNCH COLLOQUIUM   

EUEC member Selden Deemer spoke about the recent Pew Report on how our uses of the Internet may evolve in the next ten years.  As you can read below, there were both hopeful and not-so-hopeful theses. 

 Click here to read about the Colloquium 

Faculty Activities

There are more EUEC faculty activities to report.

Click here to read the latest

Jim Keller is the voting representative of EUEC to both the Faculty Council and University Senate.  You can read short summaries of the latest meetings of each by clicking  Council Concerns and Senate Summary.  Of particular note from the Senate:  "The University Senate has approved a motion to take an advisory role in making recommendations to Emory's President and Board of Trustees when it considers financial divestment from companies engaged in 'morally evil activities' or alternative actions with companies engaged in activities that cause social harm."  

"It gives me great pleasure to announce the 15th year of competition for the Heilbrun Distinguished Emeritus Fellowship.  Named in honor of our colleague Alfred B. Heilbrun, Jr., Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology, and funded through an extraordinarily generous gift from his family, this wonderful Fellowship offers an opportunity for heightened engagement in research and scholarship, and plays an important role in supporting a vibrant Emeritus community."

These fellowships are only for Arts and Sciences Emeritus Faculty, but for those of you who qualify, these fellowships of $10,000 each for a twelve-month term are a wonderful opportunity for research funding.  The full announcement and call for application can be found by clicking here.  

EUEC Awards for this year

It is with great pleasure that I can announce the awards for Distinguished Faculty and Distinguished Service for this year. Gretchen Schulz has been awarded the EUEC Distinguished Faculty Award and James Keller has been awarded the EUEC Distinguished Service Award. I want to think the Awards and Honors Committee, chaired by Helen O'Shea, for their great work in making these selections.

Gretchen Schulz was nominated by both Herb Benario and John Bugge!

Herb writes:

...But what has struck me over many years is the impact she has had off campus, in the towns of Oxford and Covington, on The New American Shakespeare Tavern in downtown Atlanta, opposite Emory Hospital Midtown, where she has been in charge of education and much else for some twenty-five years, and on the Emeritus College, with which she became heavily engaged even before she joined our ranks of emeriti.

She can be described as "a bundle of energy," without whom our organization would be quite different. I am continually astonished that she accomplishes so much while continuing to reside in Oxford, where the good will and friendships developed over these more than thirty years continue to have enormous impact on local activities and cultural offerings. She has recently been the leading figure in the establishment of the Oxford College Community Classroom (OCCC). For these reasons, and others only implied, Gretchen Schulz will be a worthy addition to the already lustrous roster of those recognized as Distinguished Emeriti.

John adds:

One has to say, too, that her work on behalf the Emeritus College since her retirement speaks for itself. Now a member of the Executive Committee, she has for the past two years been the dynamic leader of the subcommittee that has scheduled and administered the seminally important (and, because of her efforts, extremely successful), Luncheon Colloquium Series of presentations by speakers from across the University and from the community as well.

She recently received a Bianchi Excellence Fund Award, which permitted her to travel to Michigan State University in October of this year. MSU was hosting the annual meeting of the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies, where she delivered two papers, one of which touted our own Emeritus College as a prime example of an academic agency promoting interdisciplinary intellectual discourse among faculty. During the same visit, she was interviewed by Professor Roger Baldwin of the MSU Department of Education, who is doing research on emeritus colleges as an intriguing solution to issues that affect academic retirement. In effect, Gretchen was carrying the banner of our Emeritus College into a national arena and representing us well.

Certainly all of us have benefited from the work that Gretchen and her scheduling partners, Sidney Perkowitz and Al Padwa, have put into making our Lunch Colloquiums such a great success. I am personally extremely grateful for the help she has given in writing for, and helping to edit, this newsletter.

James Keller was nominated by Pat Douglass.

Pat writes:

Jim has served on many Emory University committees including the Winship Cancer Center Clinical Research committee, the Emory University Institutional Review Board which he chaired, and the Woodruff Heath Science Center Research Advisory Committee. However, as the EUEC representative to the University Faculty Council and the University Senate, he has been most influential in keeping EUEC members informed of the transition from University provided healthcare coverage to individual coverage.

At his own initiative, he researched Medicare regulations, clarified them to assist individuals in decision making and answered questions. He and Dr. Sid Stein facilitated two seminars for emeritus faculty to encourage further clarification on the transition. Over 50 attendees left the sessions with a better understanding of the decisions that must be made concerning healthcare. Jim contributed hours of his professional and personal time as the liaison between EUEC and The University Senate. His diligence kept EUEC members aware of the University's decisions on retiree healthcare and made sure their concerns were heard.

Many of you have seen Jim in action in various discussion of the healthcare transition. However, most of you are probably not aware of how much work behind the scenes Jim has put into helping write the documents that EUEC has provided members on making healthcare choices or the many hours he has spent one-on-one with individual EUEC members struggling with making various decisions on healthcare. He is now working on documents that we can use to help retiring staff, as well as faculty, make decisions on healthcare. As President of the University Senate and Chair of the Faculty Council, I got to see firsthand Jim's full participation in those bodies, and not just on healthcare issues.

We are fortunate to have both Gretchen and Jim as members!

--Gray Crouse

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The University in Crisis, Part I

SUMMARY REPORT

Emory University Emeritus College

Interdisciplinary Seminar:

The University in Crisis

Fall, 2014

January 8, 2015

Introduction

This document presents a summary of the findings of an Interdisciplinary Seminar on the general topic of "The University in Crisis," that took place in the Emory University Emeritus College during the fall semester of 2014 from September through early December. The topic was chosen as a way of allowing participants to focus on and deepen their understanding of various critical challenges facing American higher education in general, and Emory University in particular, in the twenty-first century.

This seminar was the third to have taken place in calendar 2014 and built on the success of the two previous seminars in the spring semester; these latter focused on the general subjects of "The Nature of Evidence" and "Individual v. Community." All three seminars have been based on the model of the so-called Luce Seminars directed by Professor James Gustafson of the Emory Graduate Department of Religion during the 1980s. Each of these saw faculty from every discipline represented at Emory involved in a rigorous and searching semester-long investigation of a single general topic. It is hoped that the EUEC interdisciplinary seminars, similarly comprising faculty and staff from every quarter of the University, will over time merit favorable comparison with those, for they have become an integral part of the mission of the Emeritus College - which is to provide opportunities for continued intellectual, creative, and collegial engagement of the emeritus faculty by facilitating opportunities for research and interdisciplinary education.

Twelve members of the EUEC agreed to enroll in "The University in Crisis" (though one found he could not attend our meetings because of persistent calendar conflicts). Because the EUEC is by nature interdisciplinary, there was no difficulty in acquiring a sufficient diversity of institutional and disciplinary points of view. Represented around the seminar table were the Schools of Medicine, Public Health, and Nursing, along with the Emory Libraries, the College of Arts and Sciences, Oxford College, and Agnes Scott College. Professional disciplines ran the gamut from pediatrics to English literature, the fine arts to dermatology, French language and literature to information technology, German studies to the fine arts, and nursing education to surgery.

The seminar met every Tuesday afternoon commencing on September 9, 2014, in the first-floor conference room at the Luce Center, headquarters of the EUEC. Each meeting began at 1:00 p.m. and lasted about two and a half hours.

Participants helped compile a preliminary bibliography of book-length works and scholarly articles on contemporary American higher education, and then were asked to choose a single topic under the generalized rubric "major challenges or crises facing the university," and to research it sufficiently to be able to assign from their own research about a hundred pages of pertinent reading material that defined, illustrated, and analyzed the particular challenge in question.   Members made their assigned readings available to the organizer of the seminar, who arranged to have them posted on a University Blackboard site created for the purpose. Members of the seminar were also able to find other course materials on the site - the course syllabus, announcements, and so on - and to post their own comments on the assigned readings, plus material from newspapers and magazines that they had found pertinent, in a sort of web log, or "blog."  Each participant took responsibility for making a short, formal presentation of his or her topic at the seminar meeting devoted to it, then invited discussion, which was always vigorous and occasionally contentious.

For a list of the participants in the seminar and an abbreviated syllabus of topics and readings, please click here.

_____________________________________________________________________

Purpose

Many of us began with a casual and perhaps somewhat less than well informed understanding of the crises higher education was facing in the present, in some cases more than a few years after some of us had retired from full-time employment in the University. We determined to learn as much as possible about the challenges facing the university and Emory especially, the institution to which we had given so many years of service. At the conclusion of the seminar the members found themselves in agreement that it would be appropriate to inform a number of different parties of our conclusions.

We were prompted to this by 1) the realization that through the process of educating each other, we have all succeeded in learning a lot about the situation the contemporary university finds itself in, and by 2) the conviction that a summation of the informed opinions of a group of senior scholars - a sort of "council of elders," with over four centuries' collective experience in higher education - could prove useful to Emory as it faces many of the same challenges we debated. Buoyed by the knowledge that the Faculty Council has recently empowered a task force to study ways of enhancing faculty participation in university governance, we see our report and its tentative recommendations as exemplifying just this higher level of faculty input into the conversation about the directions of future academic policy.

In retrospect we see the collection of our eleven discrete seminar topics resolving themselves into four broad areas of thematic concern posing serious challenges to American higher education as we have known it. These areas of concern are the following; each is treated in some detail below:

  1) The university's instructional mission as potentially disrupted by the revolution in information technology.

   2) Traditional liberal arts education, seen to be under threat from a number of different quarters.

   3) The university's shift away from its traditional responsibilities to students.

   4) The diminished role of faculty within the dynamics of university policy-making and administration.

_______________________________________________________________________

PART 1:

THE UNIVERSITY'S INSTRUCTIONAL ROLE UNDER THREAT FROM THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION

Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs

MOOCs could prove to be, at best, a source of "creative disruption" of the university's traditional systems of delivering course content to students. Holly York, Senior Lecturer Emerita of French, led a fascinating seminar on such courses, which allowed participants to understand the far-reaching implications of any potential large-scale shift to online learning. As a veteran participant in a number of MOOCs herself since her retirement, she was able to speak authoritatively about their advantages and drawbacks, albeit, of course, from the unusual perspective of someone with decades of teaching experience in her own classroom. And she was well informed about Emory's own experiments with online courses under the aegis of Coursera.

The largest part of Professor York's contribution was the rich and varied assortment of essays and book chapters on this most exciting and controversial development which she assigned for the rest of us to read. The discussion that these sources provoked yielded a number of conclusions that were, each in its own way, double-sided, both positive and negative:

• On the one hand, it was obvious that MOOCs have the potential to make high-level learning democratically accessible to all, and essentially free. On the other hand, if they prove successful (widely subscribed to and widely accredited by agencies outside the academy), they threaten the university's monopoly on the dissemination of knowledge, and eventually the university's monopoly on credentialing that knowledge.

• While MOOCs seem to work well for students as "STEM" courses (in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), there is widespread skepticism about their value in the areas of the social sciences and humanities. In the latter, it was alleged, the human presence in a communal learning environment, the hallmark of a liberal arts education, could be compromised or even sacrificed to cost-saving.   Andrew Delbanco of Columbia University further believes that if widely adopted, MOOCs would make all faculty vulnerable, but especially those in humanities disciplines.

• Existing MOOCs all seem to have sprung from so-called Research I universities (Stanford, Harvard, MIT), whose principal function is the creation of knowledge and only secondarily, one might argue, the dissemination of it.   And while MOOCs on balance have seemed to pay less heed to the psychodynamics of learning, their very disruptiveness gives the academy a golden chance to probe deeply into fundamental questions of how people learn best and thus how the university should go about rethinking its pedagogical function. As Mitchell Waldrop writes: "Universities think of themselves as being in the university business, not the learning business." That is, they mostly take their existing structures and practices as given, and too often look to MOOCs and other online technologies only as a way to do things more cheaply.

• One fundamental question about learning is whether at some level it requires a human community of learners.   Emerson once wrote that, "Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul." The jury is out on whether MOOCs can provide this kind of stimulus if the model is the individual student sitting in front of a computer screen and only connected to a course electronically.

• One serious concern of seminar members was that MOOCs could foster inequality in the academy both by creating a class of "Superstar Profs" among faculty, undermining the ideal of the university as a community of scholars, and by similarly stratifying the student body, with MOOCs used for students without the means to attend a traditional residential college, and with face-to-face human instruction reserved for a wealthier elite.

York wrote in conclusion that, "Since universities no longer have a monopoly on content, their challenge is to make students more effective learners than they could be on their own. Massive Open Online Courses are among the potential tools for achieving this. Successful models are those that create a sense of place and presence for the development of a vibrant interactive intellectual community.  They require sufficient financial resources to support their innovative pedagogical techniques; a 'canned' course that is simply set in motion with no human instructional presence offers little in the way of learner community, but if properly conceived and maintained, a MOOC creates space for lifelong learning."

The seminar members agreed that Emory needs urgently to establish a policy for integrating the technology of the massive open online course into its existing curriculum, one that complements and enhances the in-class learning experience of students at all levels.

To be continued...

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