College of Arts & Sciences
Fall 2006 Faculty Meeting

Remarks from Interim Dean Höft

The Two Cultures

famously coined by C. (Charles) P. (Percy) Snow as title of an article published in the New Statesman in 1956 and as the title of a lecture at Cambridge University in 1959. There are several layers and interpretations to that phrase in the academic setting in general and that apply to our condition at the university as well as in the college.

Three examples come to mind immediately:

(1) The culture of the Arts and the culture of the Sciences [Snow's original concern].

(2) The culture of collective bargaining and the culture of academic discourse,

(3) The culture of emotive responses of individuals and groups and the culture of rational argument,

Our task this year will be to construct bridges that overcome the apparent differences, to close the rifts that have opened up, and to engage our collective intellects to unify the college in these three areas. Some of you may believe that the differences are irreconcilable; I beg to differ with that view. I am an optimist, possibly because my training is in Mathematics and Physics, where the search for the next experimental result or the next true statement is ever hopeful, and is pursued with single-minded determination. Should one find proof to the contrary, it just means going back to the drawing board and searching for another way to solve the problem at hand.

Today we are caught up in the experience of our most recent past on campus, we are caught up in our emotions, and we are caught up in the positions that are staked out in the landscape of the university and the college. I want to offer a counterpoint of reflection; it has helped me in my attempts to analyze our situation and I hope that it might provide some guidance to you. A novel by a contemporary German writer starts with this sentence:

Gestern wird sein, was morgen gewesen ist.

My humble and literal translation is:

Yesterday will be, what has been tomorrow.

The story then goes on to describe the events that lead to the peace treaty ending one of the more gruesome and protracted events in central Europe and Germany, in particular, the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648.

This sentence appeals to me as a mathematician and logician since it projects a sense of circularity between yesterday's future and tomorrow's past without ever mentioning the present; and it reminds me of self-referential statements such as the sentence:

I am lying

[[if the sentence is true, then I am lying, and therefore, the sentence must be false]]

[[if the sentence is false, then I am not lying, and therefore, the sentence is true]]

The sentence leads into obvious logical paradox, but its structure is the foundation for such important and far-reaching theorems as Kurt Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem and Alan Turing's Theorem on the Undecidability of the Halting Problem for Turing Machines.

This sentence also fascinates me in its literary brevity - in either language; it is a stark declaration, in seven words, that yesterday and tomorrow are just two aspects of the same reality, one determining the other in a mutually inextricable manner while begging the question of the role of the present.

Let me return to the present and this gathering: why we are here today and where we are going to go. We are getting acquainted with our new faculty colleagues, we are proud to welcome the outstanding students who are part of our first cohort of Undergraduate Symposium Research Fellows together with their faculty mentors, we will recognize the diverse accomplishments of the faculty in our college, and we will look ahead to the end of the academic year when our students and faculty demonstrate their work during the week of excellence in March 2007.

In that spirit, it is my pleasure to have Provost Don Loppnow add his perspective and vision for this academic year; and I want to remind you that he has had a long and outstanding career here at Eastern, joining the Social Work program as an Assistant Professor when that program was still housed in the College of Arts & Sciences and he was assigned an office in Pray-Harrold.

I now would like to welcome our faculty colleagues who are joining our college this fall semester. There are 21 new faculty members; I am proud to greet them and introduce them to you today. I have had conversations with most of them during the search process last academic year and got re-acquainted during the New Faculty Luncheon earlier today. I will call on the department heads to briefly comment on the special expertise each of our new colleagues brings to the college.

I expect that each one of you will have a successful career at EMU and I hope to work with you and to support you in your endeavors in years to come. You represent the future of the college and of the university. With the efforts of my faculty colleagues and your decision to select EMU for your academic career you are now one of 371 faculty members in the college, more than we have had in five years, and growing from 344 faculty just two years ago to our current strength.

I now would like to turn to Dennis Beagan, Department Head of Communications and Theatre Arts and Assistant to the Provost for Development. Last year he and I conceived a five-year fundraising project to establish a sustained student fellow / faculty mentor scholarship program for the Undergraduate Symposium. Each student is supported yearly for four years through a gift of a donor and each faculty mentor is supported yearly for mentoring by funds from the Provost's office. At the end of four years - and even earlier if appropriate - the Symposium Fellows will present their work at the Symposium. The 2006-07 academic year is our first year of the Undergraduate Symposium Research Fellowships and we were successful in raising funds to support 13 student fellows and mentors. Dennis will tell you about one of them.

After introducing our new faculty colleagues and our Undergraduate Symposium research project I now would like to mention the organizational changes that have occurred in the Dean's office since last winter semester.

Laura George, former Associate Dean, whom you have met already, is the new Department Head of English Language and Literature succeeding Russ Larson who is returning to the faculty.

Linda Schott, former director of the Women's and Gender Studies program, whom you also have met already, is the new Associate Dean replacing Laura George and, for this academic year, the Interim Department Head of the History and Philosophy department.

Carol Haddad from the School of Technology Studies in the College of Technology will serve as the new Interim Director of the Women's and Gender Studies program during this academic year.

Diane Winder from the Department of Music and Dance provided advising support for departments on a half-time release last year. This year she will serve full-time as the Assistant to the Dean for Student and Faculty Services expanding her role considerably.

In addition to these changes in the academic administration of the college we are in the process of making additional changes in the support staff of the Dean's office; they include hiring a replacement for one secretary who left over the summer and, most importantly, two new professional/technical positions. The latter two were funded by the university as part of a multi-year budget commitment to support the work faculty do towards accreditation of the university's education programs by NCATE, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. I anticipate that with these staff changes the Dean's office can provide support for you and your departments in three major areas where such support had been missing sorely: (1) database administration, (2) website support for activities related to accreditation and advertising your departmental programs, and (3) training sessions for faculty in the accreditation software systems and enabling cross-communications with the College of Education.

Faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences have already taken long strides to meld the two cultures of which C. P. Snow spoke. Faculty in the Arts and Humanities and faculty in the Sciences can and do work well together and engage in collaborations that are fostered in the departments and the college. Here are a few examples:

Mathematics, Communications & Theatre Arts and UG Studies & Curriculum cooperate to develop an Integrated Science Curriculum;

Linguistics in English Language & Literature and GIS in Geography & Geology (GIS) cooperate in creating a Language Map Annotation Project;

Mathematics and Special Education Cooperate in assisting students with disabilities to achieve in mathematics;

African American Studies, the College of Education and Halle Library cooperate in helping people to become readers by establishing an African-American history and literature collection and lecture series

History & Philosophy, the College of Education and the Institute for the Study of Children, Families & Communities cooperate in partnership with local school districts to promote college readiness and success.

Chemistry, Physics & Astronomy, the Coatings Research Institute and the School of Engineering Technology cooperate on coatings research and analysis.

These are just a few of funded projects awarded to faculty in the college.

The College of Arts and Sciences is so large and its faculty is so diverse that it is extremely difficult to effectively demonstrate faculty success and exhibit the impact that the scholarly and creative activities of the faculty have on the teaching environment at EMU, in the professional world and in our local community. I will cite just the numbers of faculty from the college receiving university awards in a couple of major categories during the 2005-06 academic year:

3 Ron W. Collins Distinguished Faculty Awards, 13 Graduate School Research Support Awards,

13 New Faculty Research Awards,

15 Faculty Research Fellowships, and

18 Sabbatical Leaves during the current academic year.

These numbers speak eloquently to the stature of the faculty in the college. In closing I would like to share with you a very personal view of the Arts and the Sciences. The label that sometimes is attached to the German people is

Das Volk der Dichter und Denker

which translates as

The People of Poets and Thinkers

where Thinker could mean philosopher or scientist. At any rate the phrase describes a society that embraces artists and scientists in equal measure and embodies the values and contributions of both in its educational system. I grew up in Osnabrück, a city in the northern German State of Lower-Saxony. The oldest high school in the State, the Karolinum, is in my home town; as the name of the school indicates it was founded by Charlemagne (Carolus Magnus) around 800, the year he was crowned Emperor, over three hundred years before the first European university was founded in Bologna in 1119. Just a stone's throw away from the high school in Osnabrück across the market place is the historic city hall, finished in 1575, where the peace treaty of the Thirty Years War was signed in 1648.

This historic environment forms the backdrop for one of the most important values that my parents instilled in me: the importance of an inclusive education. My father belongs to the camp of the poets. His dissertation was a study of the aphorisms of the romantic poet Novalis (1772 - 1801). My paternal grandfather belongs to the camp of the scientists. His dissertation (I spare you the lengthy German title; for the record it is: Zusammensetzung und Eigenschaften des dem Alluviallehm Angehörenden Bodens des Landwirtschaftlichen Versuchsfeldes der Universität Leipzig) was a study of the composition of alluvial clays of the agricultural fields of the University of Leipzig, the second oldest German university, founded in 1409. As you know, I am a mathematician and computer scientist, and I again belong to the camp of the scientists.

In my way of thinking, the arts and the sciences form a whole, each one expressing reality and the human condition in their own, different way, and allowing fluidity and integration as we wish. This symbolism is central to our college and I wanted to have that symbolism expressed at the signature event hosted by the college, the Undergraduate Symposium. The Luncheon Speaker for Symposium XXVII next March is a person that personifies the integration of the arts and the sciences. He is Brent Collins, a sculptor whose artistic vision expresses forms that turn out to have significance in the sciences and mathematics. The sculptures represent naturally occurring shapes such as the twisting coils of DNA or bands that define what mathematicians refer to as minimal surfaces. He grew up in the Midwest and actually has connections to Ypsilanti. Right now Dennis Beagan, Tom Venner and I are in the process of organizing an exhibition of Brent Collins' work in the New Student Union during the Week of Excellence and the Undergraduate Symposium. We are also exploring ways to solicit donations to purchase the Genesis Sculpture for permanent exhibit at EMU. I look forward to next March and to see a dream that I have had for about a year actually being realized: A lasting symbol for the college and its faculty.

Thank you for coming.

September 22, 2006

Hartmut F. W. Höft

Interim Dean