By Jude Nixon
Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences

This is my first opportunity as Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences (SOAS) to address you in ASpect. I wish first to express my deepest gratitude to Chris Fauske, who served tirelessly and diligently as Interim Dean, holding the office together in order to maintain the smooth running of the 20 departments and their faculty that compose the SOAS. My sense is that we have not skipped a beat in the interim and that nothing was left unattended or allowed to drop. Chris clearly tended the shop. I wish also to thank him for his continued support: bringing me up to date on the many processes of the office, and sharing the reasons behind certain decisions and actions–including how things might be done best and more efficiently. And so my heartfelt thanks to Chris, who has returned to the faculty to do what he loves best—teaching students.

My goal is to use ASpect as a forum for news, information, and the sharing of initiatives I will undertake as Dean. We are currently embarking on a search for an Associate Dean (AD) to fill the void created when Chris Fauske left that position to become Interim Dean after Dean Shea retired. We hope to have this person in place for the beginning of the spring semester. Most duties of the AD will be internal, working closely with chairs and departments on important personnel and resource issues. This will free me to begin working on larger goals and initiatives of the SOAS, chief among them development activities, fiscal decision, strategic planning, and how best to position the SOAS in line with the mission, goals, and programs of Salem State. Essentially, Salem State cannot be all it should be without a focused, nimble, and vibrant SOAS. I ask for your patience and support as we work together on this all-important goal of making the SOAS visible, consequential, creative, and cutting-edge. But this also means working closely and deliberately in joint partnership with the other Schools, whose viability is tied closely and inextricably to ours. For even as we argue for our own importance and centrality, we cannot do so based on any false premise, diminution or imagined demise of the other Schools. I will not support or pursue policies or programs that compromise the vitality and sustainability of the other Schools, not only because of ethical reasons but as well for our own viability. Our relationship will be a partnership built on cooperation and not competition.  I aim to pursue initiatives that create a healthy marriage between all the Schools in which each speaks meaningfully to the other, as they should and must.

I want us to begin to focus seriously on creative teaching, team-teaching, and the best of interdisciplinarity. Students must be queuing to take our courses not because they are required but because they are creative, thoughtful, and relevant. Part of our challenge, of course, is that the Ph.D. programs from which our faculty come are still primarily discipline-specific, but current economic realities and societal forces require more candidates with multiple specialties and sub-specialties. Our scholarly identity, while seemingly stable, is far more fluid and shifting than we think, and our specialties far more porous than we are often willing to admit. But while we can and should hold on to a particular identity, lest we become schizophrenic, we must at the same time recognize our multiple selves, for in truth we are never just one thing. While we have different specialties,  what brings us together is the “Ph.” in the Ph. D., the φιλοσοφία, love of knowledge, the sophist in us, and our ability, as such, to be sophisticated, adulterated (mixed), nuanced. We have to begin removing the academic barriers to successful teaching and learning in our efforts to prepare our students for the 21st century. Only in Robert Frost’s fascinatingly ironic “Mending Wall” are barriers seemingly venerated, where the speaker reminds himself/herself of a profound truth:

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.

Good fences, the speaker obviously presumes, do not in fact make good neighbors. Of course, one of the ways to remove discipline-specific barriers is through well-placed centers, which can bring together from numerous departments. important synergies. Perhaps one of the most fascinating because  counterintuitive evolutionary principles in the Darwinian understanding of the relations amongst species is that things that appear most dissimilar may be most closely related. There is really no legitimate ownership of particular knowledge, and true knowledge resists all attempts to fit it neatly into little groups. The best information is never housed in one place.

Finally, while teaching will remain fundamental to our Salem State identity, there are far too many unsupported and unheralded research talents and activities in place in the SOAS. One of my goals will be to harness these research initiatives and energies and work to provide support for them. So do join me in working together to prepare our students for a life of learning along with great career options, even as we, the faculty, continue to enjoy our profession marked by intellectual growth, enormous personal pleasure, and great professional accomplishments. As Dean, I want to help realize three things in the SOAS: a committed faculty, great research productivity, and personal growth. If I achieve these goals, Salem State will become what it should be.

This article is part of ASpect’s December 2009 issue on interdisciplinarity.