Sept. 17, 2002
New Columbian College Dean Assesses GW, Higher Education
“…[T]he issue
is how to equip individuals with competencies and experiences that are
going to be portable, given that there is a more porous connection between
academia and the world. That is one of the main challenges of a liberal
education.”
ByGeorge!:
What are some of your first impressions of GW and the Columbian College
of Arts and Sciences?
William Frawley: It’s a terrific place
and people have been very helpful and patient with me as a “freshman.”
I’m impressed by the breadth of activity and the strengths.
ByG!:
What are some of the strengths?
WF: It has traditionally visible strengths
in the social sciences, but it also has many strong programs in the
sciences and humanities that I think deserve showcasing and are part
of the overall “package” of the college.
ByG!:
What are some areas of the Columbian College that you think can be more
fully developed?
WF: We’ve been trying to set out a
plan for this by articulating our goals and prioritizing them toward
an action plan. We’ve been doing that in the dean’s office
all summer through various sorts of information gathering (reading strategic
documents and visiting with departments, faculty, students, and others).
We will then go to the department chairs and faculty with a schematic
of how to proceed and work with them on setting out steps for progress.
One area is excellence in undergraduate education. We want students
engaged and focused, involved in discovery and inquiry-based education.
We want to promote core competencies, including multicultural competency,
which is an unusual advantage of the GW experience. We’re looking
at a variety of opportunities to link students and the full intellectual
experience of GW. So that’s one broad conversation we’ve been
engaged in about development for the future.
ByG!:
That’s centered around the Hewlett Foundation grant (which focuses
on reshaping the undergraduate experience through Washington-area resources
and inquiry-based education)?
WF: Well, if the whole world could be like
the Hewlett grant, we’d all be better off. I had significant involvement
in Delaware’s Hewlett grant when I was there. The Hewlett grant
delivers the kind of experience that can be fostered in lots of other
ways (dean’s seminars, capstones, laboratory research, different
kinds of tutorials, learning communities, research “expeditions”
with mentored fieldwork, and so on). These are activities that I’ve
worked on for a long time.
Another area that we’ve been talking about in great detail is graduate
education, focusing intensively on programs that have or could have
national prominence. To this extent, we’re looking at new ways
of funding graduate students, ways to support graduate students to present
their work at conferences, ways to have them have fellowship-like experiences,
in addition to teaching. We’re also looking at how to aggressively
recruit students and place them into their professions.
ByG!:
Is that becoming more common in higher education?
WF: Yes. If you want to compete, not only
with your “cohort group” of schools (those that you’re
like), but also with your aspirant group (the schools you’d like
to be like), you have to do these kinds of things to outthink them.
What we’re looking at is ways of having GW enter the higher competition
full-speed ahead.
Another area we’re studying is investing in faculty, especially
in the research-teaching environment. We’re talking about how to
recruit the very best people at the junior and senior level, including
attractive start-up packages. The way an institution makes its very
first approach to a faculty member is a significant move toward retaining
that faculty member.
ByG!:
And that holds true for students, too?
WF: Yes, and for staff. You retain people
by starting before they come. Further on the faculty initiatives —
we’re thinking hard about ensuring faculty participation in professional
conferences through research and travel support and we’re planning
a systematic approach to increasing external funding, not only in the
sciences, but also in humanities and social sciences. There is enormous
potential at GW for successful grant-getting. We’re also studying
ways to offer research release time so that faculty can bring important
projects either to completion or just get them off the ground. And we’re
trying to promote innovative things in linking research to teaching.
In my previous life at the University of Delaware, as department chair
for many years, I always found my best researchers to be my best teachers.
It was very hard to see the distinction between research and teaching.
The same would be true here, I’d guess.
ByG!:
Can you talk about the interdisciplinary nature of Columbian College
and how it relates to other schools?
WF: Well, interdisciplinary is a funny
word. First, let’s not forget there are disciplinary things, too,
and calling something interdisciplinary does not mean that it is intrinsically
better than something disciplinary (and I say this as someone who has
worked in interdisciplinary studies his whole career). Interdisciplinary
can either mean different perspectives on a problem retaining a disciplinary
view or the construction of a new discipline in pursuit of problems.
Those are two different approaches, so it’s really a difference
between multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary. Here is the great caution
in interdisciplinary work: it’s so darned hard to know one thing
with true confidence that to ask someone to know two, across different
disciplines, seems an enormous task, especially to know these two things
in a legitimate and detailed way: all the more reason for collaborative,
team-like interdisciplinary work. I say this all as a long preface to
noting that one of the exciting things about GW is the inclination toward
genuine and interdisciplinary work. But we must be honest about how
hard that kind of work is. CCAS has productive connections with all
the other schools that could foster interdisciplinary work — the
Elliott School, engineering, business, law, public health, and medical
schools. But don’t forget our productive connections within the
college, either. I just think we need to think really hard about what
we can be good at, and in this self-examination, keep substance and
depth of inquiry as the yardsticks.
ByG!:
How has the liberal arts education changed and do you feel that more
careers need multidisciplinary skills, combining economics and environmental
studies, for example?
WF: I don’t think making something
multidisciplinary necessarily makes it more informative — and again,
I’m a committed interdisciplinary person. Certainly things need
to be more informative, but how can we promote informativeness and depth
at the same time? We need to model for students the way to work through
a problem in detail, with rigor and systematic argument. That experience
will prepare you for a career better than handfuls of facts.
What has changed in liberal education? Certainly the world has changed
and it’s a lot smarter now than when I was an undergraduate. I
think we need to capitalize on productive things in the world outside
the classroom, all the while maintaining balance between GW’s centrifugal
forces and centripetal forces. The boundaries between the class and
the world have become porous, which is a good thing. Now we have opportunities
to use theoretical knowledge to make sense of the world in a way that
was not available to me when I was 20 years old. To come back to part
of your question — whether that means liberal education is career-oriented
is an independent question. I prefer to say that the issue is how to
equip individuals with competencies and experiences that are going to
be portable, given that there is a more porous connection between academia
and the world. That is one of the main challenges of a liberal education.
ByG!:
What can the community expect from you as dean of GW’s oldest school?
WF: They can expect to have access to me.
The open flow of information is absolutely vital. I think people need
to have access to individuals who are making decisions about their lives,
and those who are entrusted with decision-making need to exercise that
responsibility in mindful ways. The community can expect from me high
academic standards, access, and authenticity. I’m a visible person
in the sense that I’m always around. I go out and sit and have
coffee, talk with people; I enjoy meetings where there is a lot of brainstorming
and then we come away with a half-dozen ideas to take forward.
ByG!: You’ve met with faculty
members since your arrival in July. What kind of feedback, concerns,
and ideas have you received?
WF: Part of my becoming a GW citizen is
reading briefing books we’ve developed on every department. I’ve
met with more than three-quarters of the departments for at least an
hour-and-a-half, sometimes two hours, going over issues, their strategic
plans, their sense of the future, and seeing their living space. They
show me the labs, offices. I’ve been spending long hours trying
to get to know what people think they’re doing. I’m trying
to appreciate their lived experience because I’ve come from some
other place. Faculty members are concerned about the research environment.
They want to make sure the inquiry they’re doing is well supported.
They want to know how to engage students and each other better. And
I think what they really want is confidence that the Columbian College
is a driving force at GW, and they would like to help “steer the
vehicle,” if you’ll allow the extended metaphor.
ByG!:
CCAS consists of 40 departments and many specialties. How will you help
frame the school’s mission in a way that makes the Columbian College
appear as a more cohesive unit compared with the somewhat more direct
missions of a law, engineering, or business school?
WF: I would bet that if you ask that question
of Tim Tong, the dean of engineering, he would say that engineering
is a very diverse field. So while a school is called such and such,
it’s not clear that it’s somehow intrinsically that or has
some obvious unity. With that said, it is true that arts and sciences
can be quite wide-ranging. I think that’s exciting. There are possibilities
of putting together quite different groups and I think one of my personal
strengths is to bring intellectual communities together. The advantage
of being the dean is that I’m in a position to know what everyone
is doing.
ByG!:
So how do you do that?
WF: We need to build an identity out of
the activities of individual units by looking at the themes that sweep
across CCAS: the American experience, health and medicine, evolution,
materials, nuclear studies, policy, the urban experience, environment,
literary inquiry, the plastic and expressive arts, ethical responsibility,
spirituality, and a number of others. These are themes that cut beneath
the disciplines, as it were. Still, to create identity, you have to
go back to three things I’ve said already — authenticity in
action and speech, access to information, and high academic standards.
ByG!:
Libraries are the academic heart of universities. What are your thoughts
about Gelman Library and its collection and services?
WF: I’ve been through Gelman a bit,
but mostly I’m a tech guy, so I like to get to Gelman through my
computer. I like to sit at my desk and have the library come to me.
I think people need to “go to” the library in different ways
now. The whole way of conducting research and concentrated thought about
a problem has changed for many disciplines (not all) — from going
over and pulling a book off of the shelf to tailored information-search
and collaboration. And the whole notion of information access and what
an information storehouse is, what a library is, has changed even in
the past five years. I work right across the street from Gelman, and
I can look at the library from the outside, but I can access its contents
from the inside while at my desk. Technology’s a wonderful thing.
Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu
