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Service
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In twenty-two years at Medaille, I have served under four presidents, two interim presidents, nine deans, three vice-presidents for academic affairs, and a dozen chairs in two departments, Humanities and Business. Of today's hundred-plus faculty members, fewer than ten were here when I went up for tenure. At the time, 1991, we had about forty-five faculty members and we had never had a full faculty meeting. Never. It's a new Medaille, and I have had an active role in its growth.
See CV for complete list of committees.
Rich Herdlein, the College's former VP for Student Affairs, wrote a recommendation letter for this portfolio. According to his letter, I was a "major contributor" to the College in the 1990's. Privately, he took me to task for my modesty because he doesn't feel as though my vita calls enough attention to those contributions.
Looking back, I can see that I was deeply involved in many if not most of the College's major initiatives. During my first years on Faculty Council, in the late 1980's when we had never had a faculty meeting, we went over the Faculty Handbook line by line with newly installed President Sullivan. Together, we proposed 56 substantive changes. We called a meeting on the fourth floor of the Main Building and worked hard to get out the vote. About a quarter of the faculty attended the first meeting. To pass an amendment, according to the Handbook, we would need two-thirds of the faculty voting in favor. Faculty Council, realizing that none of the amendments would pass, took the great liberty of interpreting the Handbook as saying that all the absent faculty were yes votes. Thus, we needed only half a dozen of those present to vote yes in order to get to our two-thirds. Regardless, only three of the 56 amendments passed. President Sullivan was not happy and I learned a lesson about the passive power of faculty to resist change.
In the early 1990's, I served on the Middle States accreditation steering
committee. Sr Savage and I did the final copyediting and proofreading.
I served on the General Education Committee from 1989 to 1992. We brought the faculty to consensus on a six-theme, 51-hour core curriculum that proved too credit-heavy to fit most programs and subsequently got scaled back.
One committee that I asked to be on -- the Technology Committee -- President Sullivan did not appoint me to because, he said, my views were not representative of the faculty. I knew too much about the subject and the IS&T staff was more comfortable working with faculty who knew less.
Recently, I wrote the Business Administration Department's self-study for Middle States re-accreditation. Last year, 2003, I wrote the Department's self-study for IACBE accreditation. In both cases, the chairs at the time were supportive, if not indulgent, for which I thank them. I have not included these self-studies in the appendices because of their bulk, but you can get them from the Business Department office.
After President Bascuas came, I was on the committee in 2003 that produced the current strategic plan with the consultant Tom Scheye.
In summer of 2005, I was on the committee that produced the new faculty handbook.
While not on a specific committee, I have been happy over the years to cooperate with Admissions, Student Affairs, and Institutional Advancement. Until recently, Admissions called upon me frequently. I am a fixture at on-campus open houses and other recruiting events, and I have several times accompanied Admissions staff to off-campus recruiting events.
In addition to extensive work on the sequence of basic writing courses (WRT 150, WRT 175, and WRT 200) where I worked with the rest of the Writing Committee, I wrote or substantially revised the outlines for more than a dozen courses that passed Curriculum Committee.
Throughout my career at Medaille, I have championed interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary courses. I don't feel as though I have a traditional discipline myself, and I have taught widely across Medaille's curriculum. I was on the two committees in the 1990's that designed Medaille's current general education curriculum, and I have been teaching in it since 2006.
My vita says B.A., History, with Honors and with Special Honors in English. The
Honors is cum laude. The Special Honors in English was the University of Texas'
honors program. They were the only seminar courses in my undergraduate years,
and I had to write a thesis with a faculty mentor. Mine was about D.H. Lawrence
and Victorian England.
When I got to Medaille, I saw a gap: the College had no honors program. Having
learned so much in mine, I proposed and started one in 1986. It was my first
independent step as a faculty member, so I worked with Eileen Brown, then a full
professor in Social Sciences. I created HON 100, Sex in History, an
interdisciplinary seminar that surveyed the last 40,000 years of the war
between the men and the women. It was a delightful course to teach, both for
opening students' eyes, and for the fascinating presentations and discussions.
Oh, if we had had the Web back then!
The program also had a research and thesis course as well as a thesis defense.
Several of them were very tense because we did not grant honors to everyone who
defended. A new dean in 1990 stopped the program to develop his own, which never
came to fruition. The current honors program was developed by the dean after
that one, and I was not in his favor, so I was not involved in it.
I have made it a point during my career to offer assistance to
new faculty, especially those in my department or on whose search committee I
served. For those new faculty whose search committee I chaired, I felt a special
obligation. The offer to help was always appreciated, I believe, and several new
faculty accepted in a sustained manner.
In 2006-07, I served on the mentoring subcommittee of the Faculty Development Committee that has led to the current (2007-08) pilot program. Because I will be away so much of the next two years, I have stepped off that committee.
Starting in 1998, I worked with many faculty to develop course webs, that is, to put their course-specific material on the web, often RicciStreet.net: Stephanie Argentine, Bruce Bailey, Jim Brace, Tom Callahan, John Donovan (on right), Rich Jacob, Walt Kolt, Mark Lavatelli, Mike Lillis, Ken Radig, Lonni Wilson, and Uhuru Watson. Some of them are no longer with the College. Some acquired their own domain names and have gone on to develop their own web presence. Some tried it for a while and then went back to paper. A couple used Ricci Street for a time before they lost interest. Walt was the last of the faculty who kept his course webs on Ricci Street and used it consistently.
Upgrading to E-Class
by Brian Kantz
Medaille College Horizon, Spring 2000
In the late 1990's and early 2000's, as the faculty and College community became more conscious of the Internet, I led several lecture-demonstrations about the Internet and webmaking.
In my fifth year at Medaille, I began talking to President Sullivan about
my
pedagogy. Its hallmarks: constructivist, learning-centered,
process-oriented, project driven.
While many managers have trouble, at first glance, distinguishing innovation
from deviance, President Sullivan encouraged me to write up mine as a Title III
grant proposal. He wanted outside validation of my ideas. I spent much of the
1991-93 school years doing so. First, I wrote and we were awarded a Title III
planning grant, which gave me some release time and funds to attend a seminar in
Chicago on how to write successful Title III applications.
The easy part was writing the full grant. The College's Institutional
Advancement director wanted to help, but I insisted on doing it my way. I needed
two crucial buy-ins. First, I needed the Academic Dean to sign off on it.
Second, as I had learned in Chicago, I needed to document a faculty-wide planning effort that resulted in
consensus on the grant's goals. Having Institutional Advancement write the grant
in their offices was a sure way to get turned down because the evaluators would
assume it had a lower chance of success without prior faculty buy-in.
The dean's approval was easy to get, and he helped greatly, especially at the
end when we were working out the GANTT charts. He agreed with the overall goals
and he was able to see logistical problems that I wouldn't have. I appreciated
his assistance. To increase fundability, I used the ideas of Total Quality
Management that were so popular in American industry at the time. In addition, I
added ideas about curricular integration and constructivist pedagogy from Jean
MacGregor and Barbara Leigh Smith of Evergreen's
Washington Center for
Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education.
The faculty's buy-in was harder won and the process was difficult. At the time,
the faculty had not in the history of the College had any general faculty
meetings other than what the president led at start-up. Those meetings convened for the purposes of Title III were the only times other
than start-up that the faculty had ever convened as a whole and talked about
anything. Attendance was not good.
While I led them through a planning process and I produced the documentation
that I needed, I realize in retrospect that I should have cut my losses at that
point by telling President Sullivan that I could write a fundable proposal but
that the faculty didn't have the consensus to follow through. However, having
just received tenure myself, I felt the need to write a successful grant. The
dean at the time believed that he had the leadership skills to pull it off.
So I wrote the grant (available upon request) and the College received $1.2 million
over five years (1993-98) for:
Curricular integration through organizing principles
Learning communities
Use of faculty advisors to increase retention
Technology in the curriculum
Data-based problem-solving and decision-making
Portfolio-based outcomes assessment
Several other problems helped doom this effort. First, President Sullivan never
understood the ideas listed above. While he spoke appropriately about the fact
that we had a Title III grant, I never in public or private heard him address
let alone elaborate on any of the above ideas or initiatives. Second, the dean
who signed off on the proposal was ineffective a year later and gone from the
College a year after that. Third, the dean who replaced him compared the Title
III initiatives to "starting World War III" and in any event wanted nothing to
do with something so closely associated with his predecessor. Fourth, the
administrator who President Sullivan appointed to lead the Title III grant had
been the one most in opposition while I was writing it. He thought that the
ideas were deviant, not innovative. And he didn't keep his job long after the
new dean took office.
Added to the lack of faculty interest in the first place, this leadership crisis
caused the Title III initiatives to falter. By the third year, it was re-written
with the help of the state Department of Education. We ended up getting the first
round of faculty laptops and the ideas and initiatives listed above were forgotten.
It is of interest to me now, more than ten years later, to see the new VPAA and undergraduate dean
attempt to re-introduce some of these Title III ideas. Of the forty-odd faculty
when I got tenure, fewer than ten of us remain, so perhaps the initiatives will take
hold this time.
In summary, as a long-time Red Sox fan, I clearly have an affinity for losing
causes. While a lot of good came out of the Title III funds, the ideas that so
excited me died. Leading that planning process was my one foray into
administrative work. I didn't like it and I'm not good at it. I also learned
that most faculty are not trailblazers. Higher education has strong,
institutionalized restraining forces that fight hard against certain kinds of
changes yet are powerless against others. The sage on the stage ruling by fear
through grades is too comfortable a system for too many faculty. I will tend my
own garden from now on.
Community ServiceSee CV for complete list of memberships.
Officer Positions
Membership Chair (1994-1997), American Crime Writers League
Webmaster (2002 - 2007), NY State Chapter, American Association
of University Professors
(Note: the current website is not mine.)
My brother Ken, the Texas politician and judge, has published half-a-dozen books. I was the copy editor for three of them.
Texas Crime Victims Handbook, Georgetown Press, 1994
Crime In Texas, University Of Texas Press, 1997
You Can't Do That, Dan Moody: The Klan-Fighting Governor of Texas, Eakin
Press, 1998
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I have consulted with local small business owners about their web presence and actively assisted half a dozen of them, some of whom were former students.
See CV for complete list of
domain names have been hosted on my sever, where I maintained them.
Over the years, I have given dozens of lectures and presentations to community organizations, especially when I was flogging First and Ten. Topics: Internet, Web, multimedia, mystery fiction, forensics, publishing industry, local sports.
For many years, I served on the Church Council at Parkside Lutheran Church, and I recently led a strategic planning effort at Holy Trinity Lutheran.
Through my wife, I have been active -- especially in the late
1980's -- in the local arts community, serving on boards of several
not-for-profit galleries and other arts organizations.
I was an active participant in establishing and I am a steady contributor to the Allen Downing Scholarship. Allen was sitting in my classroom and I was videotaping him on stage two weeks before he died.
Net Neutrality and
Civil Liberties: What's at stake for libraries? (photo above left)
Blur and Blend: Connecting Our Communities
Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), Western New York /
Ontario Chapter, May 4, 2007
This web, offered in fulfillment
of
the requirement in the handbooks of
Medaille College, Buffalo, NY,
Volume IV: Faculty Handbook,
section 4.5.4.3 Faculty Portfolio,
is © 2007 and licensed under a
Creative Commons License.
web established: February 2007
page last modified: October 2007
by Douglas Anderson
http://toLearn.net/portfolio/service/index.html
