Letter from the Dean

Dear Friends:

This summer I have had the pleasure and the challenge of working with a small group of faculty and administrators as we attempt to articulate the school’s goals for the next academic year. One of the great privileges of academic life is the opportunity to work with bright, dedicated colleagues as we try to improve the school and College. Sometimes these improvements are serendipitous, but most often I have come to see that intentionality—deciding which goals are worth pursuing and then dedicating time, energy, and fiscal resources—is more likely to yield positive results. At the risk of drawing parallels to the business world, I have been reading Jim Collins’s book Good to Great in which Collins teases out the strategies that distinguish the merely good companies from the few great ones. One of his insights includes an analogy to the hedgehog: Collins says that great companies are extremely focused and work relentlessly toward central goals, however difficult they may be to achieve.

The academic world is not as neat as the business world, and indeed one of the challenges of the academic world is assessing accomplishment and success. The business world has the advantage, as success is usually defined in dollar terms. It’s no surprise that Collins uses earnings and stock value to differentiate the great companies from the merely good. Though occasionally I wish for such straightforward yardsticks, I revel in the College’s complications and the school’s achievements—difficult to measure precisely but highly satisfying.

This newsletter is a wonderful collection of snapshots reflecting the school’s important advances. This summer, after years of development, the School of Humanities and Sciences welcomed its first graduate class of the master of arts in teaching, offered by the newly established Department of Education. Our plan is to introduce carefully other master’s programs in education, most probably in elementary education and educational administration. From the beginning, our goal has been to offer distinctive programs distinguished by their high quality and rigorous, imaginative curricula. Like our undergraduate education programs, we wish to build upon our reputation in teacher education so that our graduates are recognized and sought after as H&S builds a reputation for excellent teachers.

As chair-elect of the American Conference of Academic Deans, I am responsible for our January 2007 conference program (to be held in New Orleans), and I have invited a number of our science faculty to develop a preconference workshop, three hours in duration, illustrating Ithaca College’s notable success in incorporating sustainability into the school’s curriculum. (See the story titled “Did You Say Sustainability?”) Ithaca College is doing important, innovative work on sustainability, from sponsoring the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival to examining the feasibility of erecting a wind turbine—generating electricity as well as educational opportunity for our students—on the College campus.  These are fine examples of blending interdisciplinary academic efforts with the “real world.”

Our school offers numerous opportunities for student-faculty collaborative research, and one of my very specific goals for this academic year is bringing coherence to these many opportunities by establishing a formal program that will allow the school to publicize and clarify these many opportunities. Most obviously, for example, students and faculty in the sciences and many of the social sciences engage in collaborative research—a hallmark of the school. In addition there is an Emerson Foundation endowment that is helping to support financially a number of students in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences whose research requires significant support. Recently we have helped to finance art history students who have collaborated with faculty in their fieldwork. Two years ago the fund supported a history student who returned to his native Bulgaria to study a 50th anniversary commemoration of Holocaust-related events.

Finally, I want to emphasize the H&S Annual Fund through which each year we offer modest amounts of money to enrich our students’ education. The opportunities to which you can contribute through the H&S Annual Fund range from supporting an individual student’s presentation at an academic conference to providing the funds for a class trip to a museum or similar venue. Your generosity is important to us, and I assure you that your contributions are carefully stewarded as we seek to offer ever better educational opportunities to our students—a goal that we can achieve with careful planning and your support.

I appreciate the opportunity to share these thoughts with you. I am proud of our school and always look forward to hearing from you. My e-mail address is herlich@ithaca.edu.

Howard S. Erlich, Dean
School of Humanities and Sciences