UC Santa Barbara
Dean, Dr. Timothy Eatman, in conversation with UCSB Associate Dean of Social Sciences, Dr. Victor Rios and participating members, Aaron Santiago Jones, Director, Educational Opportunity Program and a PhD student.
“Given the forces that work against the kind of education we think our students should have…many who have the most to contribute to our classes won’t be here, because of the powerful mechanisms that will keep them away…we have to figure out a way to connect with those who aren’t here – those serious, thoughtful people in all realms of society, who are, in many ways, the ‘eyewitnesses’ to the worst degradations of our time and who are uniquely positioned to help us find solution.”
–George Lipchitz
Sponsored by University of California Placemaking Research Initiative with generous support from: UCSB Dean of Undergraduate Education, Dean of Social Sciences, Dean of the College of Creative Studies, Associate Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion, Center for Black Studies, Black Studies, OSL Academic Initiatives and the Multicultural Center, The Department of Art
Inclusive Ecologies is an ongoing series of public conversations to gather UCSB campus administrators, faculty, staff and students to share their work and engagement in campus diversity, equity and inclusion.
UC Placemaking Initiative in partnership with the UCSB Multicultural Center, hosted three roundtable conversations: Ecologies for Engagement: Impactful models for an honors college at UCSB, What Counts: Faculty and Graduate Student Research: Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and tenure policy in the engaged university and Inclusive Excellence: Academic access and retention: agency, equity and sustainability in undergraduate education and research with guest respondent, Dr. Timothy Eatman, Dean, Honors Living-Learning Community Associate Professor of Urban Education Rutgers University – Newark, New Jersey.
Dr. Timothy Eatman
Dr. Timothy Eatman is an educational sociologist, recognized for his work in the field of publicly engaged scholarship. He is currently the Inaugural Dean of the new Honors Living-Learning Community (HLLC) and Associate Professor of Urban Education at Rutgers University – Newark. Together with faculty colleagues and Rutgers President, Nancy Cantor, Tim is leading the launch of a unique undergraduate honors college that aligns the goals of academic excellence with inclusion and social justice. Dr. Eatman is the former faculty co-director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (IA), a national consortium of over 140 colleges, universities, and cultural organizations—including both Rutgers University and UC Santa Barbara – whose members strengthen the public roles of arts, humanities, and design fields through engaged research and action initiatives, coalition building, and leadership development through IA’s transition to its new California headquarters at UC Davis. As co-principal investigator of IA’s Tenure Team Initiative on Public Scholarship, Dr. Eatman has co-authored its widely cited report, Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University A Resource on Promotion and Tenure in the Arts, Humanities, and Design (2008) with IA’s founding director, Julie Ellison. This work on faculty rewards led to a second national study on the career aspirations and decisions of graduate students and early-career academic professionals who identify as publicly engaged scholars. He is co-editor of the forthcoming Handbook on Service Learning and Community Engagement under contract with Cambridge University Press.
Tim will build upon the work of Rutgers faculty on the HLLC Curriculum Team to design and implement the first phase of a university-wide interdisciplinary HLLC curriculum focused on “Local Citizenship in a Global World.” This innovative HLLC curriculum is being designed for an intergenerational and interdisciplinary learning community comprised of students, faculty, and community partners focused on tackling some of the nation’s most pressing social issues. The curriculum is committed to providing HLLC Scholars with the education, resources, and opportunities necessary to be the thought leaders within their fields, positive collaborators within their communities, and change agents in our world. To build organically on their own knowledge and lived experiences, HLLC Scholars learn to increase cross-cultural competence and approach local challenges that resonate globally from historical, philosophical, legal, scientific, and comparative perspectives. The HLLC curriculum provides the flexibility to focus on issues ranging from civil rights, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, religion, domestic and international violence, environmental justice, health inequities, and questions of democracy and citizenship. Tim is especially suited as a scholar and teacher to lead the development of the HLLC curriculum and the groundbreaking academic work that the HLLC will seed at Rutgers University–Newark and nationally across higher education. Dr. Eatman will lead this transformative work with an outstanding team of six new faculty mentors who will work in cohorts of ten students each, supporting the HLLC Scholars, 87 in all (61% from Newark and 47% first-generation college students)
Dr. Eatman and his Rutgers colleagues were recently featured on a PBS special on higher education. Living-Learning Community: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/at-this-college-academic-excellence-requires-passion-for-the-social-good
Inclusive Ecologies @ UCSB 3 Conversations
March 20, 2020
schedule
11-1140 pm: Ecologies for Engagement
Impactful models for an honors college at UCSB. Dr. Timothy Eatman will introduce the Rutgers Honors College model, followed by an open discussion, lead by UCSB Dr. Anne Charity Hudley, North Hall Endowed Chair in Linguistics of African America and Director of Undergraduate Research and Dr. George Lipchitz, Professor in Black Studies.
Lunch
12-1240 pm: What Counts: Faculty and Graduate Student Research Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University – The 2008 Tenure Team Report.
The conversation will continue with UCSB Dr. Charles Hale, Dean of Social Sciences and Dr. Victor Rios, Assistant Dean and Professor of Sociology.
1-1:40pm: Inclusive Excellence: Academic Access and Retention
Agency, equity and sustainability in undergraduate and graduate research among administration, faculty, students and staff An open conversation.
Inclusive Ecologies
Conversation Notes + Reflections
Conversation 1:
Ecologies for Engagement:
Impactful models for an honors college at UCSB
Dr. Timothy Eatman will introduce the Rutgers Honors College model, followed by an open discussion, lead by UCSB Dr. Anne Charity Hudley, North Hall Endowed Chair in Linguistics of African America and Director of Undergraduate Research and Dr. George Lipchitz, Professor in Black Studies. Dr. Eatman introduced the key features and guiding principles of the Rutgers HLLC undergraduate residential model and its engagement with Newark’s civic life. Anne Charity Hudley, North Hall Endowed Chair offered her past successes in forming the scholars program at William and Mary College – departing from her own hometown to engage with UCSB campus as an exciting public incubator for academic research.
While Rutgers University hosts more than 80% local resident students who come from surrounding Newark/NJ neighborhoods, UCSB and many of the suburban UC’s import their large and diverse populations from across the state, with increasing numbers of transfer and out-of-state/international students. Regional displacement and the absence of intergenerational familial/social ties that link Rutgers students to their communities remain a primary challenge for UCSB. Unless campus-community relationships have been well established and maintained by the continuing campus sectors to facilitate deep ties, UCSB will require a network model that fosters long-term trust for effective publicly engaged research. “What is the force and infrastructure for this sort of work here that allows a student to hit the ground running”, asked Jamal, an undergraduate Junior in Black Studies. How would UCSB leverage its current stakeholders and resources?
In response, George Lipchitz suggests an emergent strategy for our current campus organizing: “I think there is an opportunity here, but not because of the massive resources that this university provides for this kind of work, but because of the absence, leaving those creative and critically-minded people to take up the charge – no one will do it for us”. The role of art was identified as an integral vehicle for relationship-building across sectors and the creation of new forms of knowledge production. References were made to texts, including Harvard scholar, Doris Sommer: “The Work of Art in the World” and Adrienne Maree Brown’s, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds.
When called upon to share the distinctive features of UCSB’s unique College of Creative Studies (CCS), Dr. Bruce Tiffney, interim dean, articulated the primary qualities of CCS as an intimate college with self-motivated faculty and students, small classes, historically serving the “round pegs” that don’t easily fit into square holes – at the core of both the college’s unique success and challenge. However, diversity was absent from the current CCS faculty and student cohort.
Conversation 2:
What Counts: Faculty and Graduate Student Research
Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation + Tenure in the Engaged University
The conversation will continue with UCSB Dr. Charles Hale, Dean of Social Sciences and Dr. Victor Rios, Assistant Dean and Professor of Sociology.
Dr. Eatman’s conversation continued with UCSB Charles Hale and Victor Rios, who brought their their critical perspectives as both administrators and researchers of UCSB campus promotion culture in relationship to the Tenure Team Report, co-authored by Tim Eatman and Julie Ellison (see above link to report). Dr. Eatman asked all participants to write their own example of 1) knowledge-making that they are most proud of and 2) knowledge-making that they consider most impactful (note –no explicitly I dentified request of a deliverable, such as a book – thus, opening up to other potential forms).
Dr. Rios discussed the separation of his own research and service profile in his bio-bib for the first 10 years of his academic career – advice was given to “steer clear of community work”…upon tenure and full, he was “done hiding…” In the recent cycle, the award-winning film he did with his students felt more aligned with what he considered his core “purpose”, yet, promotion letter ambivalently commented that he “made a movie about his life story”, rather than viewing it as a valuable component of his research profile. “They questioned my purpose”. Victor discussed his academic ‘survivors’ guilt’, always trying to find Oakland in the academy. “How do we open and reimagine the university for these various kinds of engagements? In my new role in the dean’s office, I am questioning how we might intervene in bringing dimension to future profiles in promotion”. Victor quotes from the tenure team report, “Scholarship in public is especially attractive and equally risky for scholars of color”. Dr. Eatman pointed to Earl Lewis, former president of the Mellon Foundation, who “hid his public scholarship” and Deborah Lieberman’s hypothetical “Publishing without Passion for Promotion”, describing her challenging journey through the tenure process.
Conversation 3:
Inclusive Excellence: Academic Access and Retention
Agency, equity and sustainability in undergraduate and graduate research among administration, faculty, students and staff: an open conversation.
Dr. Eatman addressed the history of Imagining America as a White House Millennium Initiative, to address some of the key issues and impediments to publicly engaged scholarship in the Humanities and Arts. Dr. Eatman referenced the late-1990’s centers that surfaced across the country, assuming that our campus had a center for community engagement, which, as of yet, we do not. MCC and some research centers offer vehicles for community engagement through student/faculty programs and outreach grants. It should be noted here that in his former role as HFA Dean and currently as EVC, David Marshall has supported UCSB membership to imagining America since 2005, which provides resources to our faculty and graduate students to participate in the national network and conference.
Dean Charlie Hale began with a statement by his predecessor and current President of Pitzer College, Melvin Oliver: “Colleges mission is to educate our students, but social justice cannot be the mission of the college, or the mission becomes political and not educational”. “How we can look at these institutional guidelines and make sure that UC is among the leaders in working this out, rather than falling behind. He poses his view of how social justice on this campus is being defined “as a political position, rather than based in the deeper values we express within community engagement”. He focused on the one paragraph excerpt on diversity from the Red Binder (PM210) and how we understand and value criteria for tenure and promotion on this campus. As a relative newcomer from University of Texas (2017), he remarked with some marvel at how little this had been formalized into language for tenure and promotion in campus guidelines and more critically, that it was not integrated throughout all facets of academic culture. Audience comments, including a newly-appointed tenured-professor, spoke of the challenges that they have and will continue to face as the “instruments of labor” in addressing campus diversity challenges and questioned how they will protect themselves from “an exhaustive responsibility to represent, mentor and advocate for students and colleagues of color”.
Ricardo Alcaino, Director, Office of Equal Opportunity & Discrimination Prevention (Title IX Officer) spoke of universities and their publics – and tax dollars. “Diversity is not an add-on. Social justice should be a key part of any research”. General society – “what does it mean for scholarly research to integrate social justice values?” He poses a model of social justice at the center of knowledge-making that has a responsibility for public impact. Report followed up with community organizing.”What does it mean to have a definition for public scholarship”. What does the arc of that career look like? What does a hiring letter look like? What do the artifacts of research look like?” He suggests that this campus gather examples of how this document has served in rethinking advancement at other universities (These documents and resources should already be in an accessible archive at UCSB, but critical comments were made that this is not the case).
Gratitude to the colleagues who served as respondents: Anne Charity Hudley, George Lipchitz, Charlie Hale and Victor Rios, as well as the staff of the Multicultural Center for their extraordinary hosting of our event in their beautiful student lounge/gallery. Thanks to MCC Director, Zaveeni Marcus-Khan and Manager, Jesse Avila, as well as technical support from Chawn Lemon and student staff, Dominick Ojeda and Sury Garcia.
Documentation and links to continue this campus dialogue in the future.
UCSB Sponsors:
Jeffrey Stopple Dean, Undergraduate Education
Linda Adler-Kassner, Associate Dean, Undergraduate Education
Maria Herrera Sobek, Associate Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion
Zaveeni Khan Marcus, Director of the Multicultural Center
Sharon Tettegah, Director of the Center for Black Studies
Bruce Tiffney, Interim Dean, College of Creative Studies
Mark Shishim, Associate Dean, Student Academic Support Services and Director of Academic Initiatives, Office of Student Affairs
Vilna Bashi Treitler, Chair/Professor, Department of Black Studies
Organizational partner:
University of California Placemaking Initiative, UC Santa Barbara
Links:
Imagining America (IA): Artists and Scholars in Public Life
IA Tenure Team Report
http://imaginingamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/TTI_FINAL.pdf
IA Full Participation
http://imaginingamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/fullparticipation.pdf
IA Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE)
https://imaginingamerica.org/about/leadership/
IA National Conference: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, October 18-20, 2019. https://imaginingamerica.org/national-gathering/schedule/
References:
Timothy Eatman, “The Arc of the Academic Career Bends Toward. Publicly Engaged Scholarship. https://graduateschool.syr.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/CFuturesChap1.pdf
Adrienne Maree Brown, “Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds”, 2017
Doris Sommer, “The Work of Art in the World”, 2013
Barbara Tomlinson + George Lipchitz, “Insubordinate Spaces: Improvisation and Accompaniment for Social Justice”, 2019
Nick Sousanis, “This Dissertation will be Comic”, The Chronicles of Higher Education, April 1, 2012. https://www.chronicle.com/article/A-Comic-Dissertation/131393
UCSB Academic Personnel Policies and Procedures:
https://ap.ucsb.edu/policies.and.procedures/red.binder/table.of.contents/
Dr. Anne Charity Hudley has kindly offered to gather us again in the coming quarter.