Summer 2003
From the dean: A time for reflection and rededication
Photo by Terry Faust
It’s so easy to veer off course.
But in a year of unprecedented budget cuts—when CLA’s budget was cut $5 million and state support was slashed a whopping 26 percent—we pledged to keep moving forward and keep the college strong.
Faculty and staff from across the college rose to the occasion and made many, many tough choices to ensure CLA’s vitality. We worked together to protect the college’s top priorities and core values—the excellence of our faculty; the excellence of their teaching, scholarship, and creative work; and the excellence of the academic programs that we provide our students.
And it’s a good thing we did. As word has gotten out about the excellence of a CLA education, the number and quality of student applications has skyrocketed, and most of this increase has come from Minnesota’s very best and brightest. This fall, we will welcome to CLA one of the strongest freshman classes on record.
Discussions will continue this coming academic year about innovative ways to enhance the excellence of our faculty and the work that they do. We will be looking for new ways to create even more powerful educational experiences for our students—to educate creative, innovative, and imaginative future leaders who can put ideas together in fundamentally new ways.
There is nothing so very new, of course, in this drive to excellence; but in these challenging times, it’s more important than ever that we stay focused on the road ahead.
Sure, steady progress
As CLA dean, I need to remind myself constantly to heed
one of the cardinal lessons of a liberal education: The way to the
future is sometimes a bumpy and circuitous path through unfamiliar
terrain, with unexpected detours and hairpin turns. And as we negotiate
those paths, it doesn’t hurt to stop once and a while just
to take in the sights, even to smell the lilacs.
As any great artist, scholar, or scientist knows, breakthroughs—those so-called “eureka moments”—may come in a flash of inspiration, but that inspiration doesn’t sprout full-blown out of untended ground. It is fed by months, even years of focused exploration, reflection, and knowledge accumulation. It takes time. It takes patience. It takes perseverance.
If ever a world demanded careful, informed reflection, it’s the one we wake up to each day, the one whose morning headlines trumpet a steady onslaught of unsettling stories—war and terrorism, deadly epidemics, ecological disasters, bankruptcies, layoffs, road rage… Under the ceaseless assault of bad news, we are too often in a reactive, not reflective, mode.
As the challenges of living in this century multiply exponentially, the work that we do each and every day in CLA is a powerful reminder that creative, thoughtful people sharing insights and knowledge across disciplinary, cultural, and geographic boundaries can make progress toward solving complex and seemingly intractable problems. Indeed, the creation and sharing of knowledge—not rumor, not sound bytes, not scattered bits of data, but real knowledge and understanding—is fundamental to improving the lives of people the world over.
Urgent questions
What seems to work in our democracy? What doesn’t?
And where do we go from here?
How do we weigh individual liberties or self-interest and the common good?
How do we preserve a free and independent press in an age of media consolidation?
How do we work toward religious, political, and racial tolerance in a world whose national borders, power relationships, immigration patterns, and political and economic alliances are constantly shifting?
To whom do the world’s resources “belong”? What do sovereign nations in a global community have a right to claim as their own?
How do we ethically and responsibly compete for, preserve, and share the world’s natural resources? How do we balance economic and environmental interests?
How do we shape and reshape our cities? How do we think about and form policy regarding such public goods as transportation, housing, our schools, libraries, and parks?
How do we revitalize a sagging economy? How do we manage economic risk and uncertainty at home, at work, and in the marketplace?
How do we make both ethical and economically feasible decisions about access to quality health care and social services for all ages and communities?
How do we sort through the barrage of words and images that comes our way? How do we separate commercial messages and advocacy from the “facts”?
These are the kinds of questions that underlie the research projects of CLA faculty and inspire the discussions that unfold in their classrooms. Such questions are at the very heart of a liberal education, not to mention our survival as a society.
A new high-tech weapon, vaccine, or genetically engineered food will surely grab headlines. But behind the scenes, CLA’s professors—including those featured in this issue—are broadly engaged in the research needed to address the long-term cultural, social, and economic issues that will determine the vitality of our communities, our nation, and our world. Through their teaching and research, they are inventing spaces where new knowledge can be freely created and shared, and where competing views can be weighed and measured, orthodoxies challenged, and values tested.
They are helping to preserve the kind of reflective, thoughtful public discourse that is essential to the survival of a democratic society. Their work is a constant reminder of why the University of Minnesota is such a vital institution.
I know that many of you believe in liberal education as much as I do—and you have demonstrated that belief time and time again with your participation in the life of the college, with your many cards and letters to legislators, and with your philanthropic gifts. I am grateful for your support—and I hope that you will stay with us as we navigate the rocky but always scenic and invigorating path that lies ahead.