ADDENDUM

Introductory Comments from Ann Tedards, University Senate President

The Senate Executive Committee has planned today's panel discussion in response to the solution teams' task to attempt to define the phrase "student-centered", and concerns articulated by faculty members recently about the role that research plays and will play in the future of this institution. We have eight panel members, including two students; the senate executive committee is extremely grateful to all of you for taking the time to share your thoughts today.

It is our hope that today's discussion will yield some clear ideas first about the importance of faculty research to our students, to the institution, the community, to the state, and I just added, the species. And, secondly, I hope that today's discussion might provide us with a good understanding of the link between faculty time spent on discipline-based research and the excellence of our teaching. As we go forward with possible changes for our university, it is imperative that this institution, the AAU comprehensive research university for the state of Oregon, support its faculty in their research endeavors and help the faculty, however possible, to articulate the vital link between our research and our teaching. So with that, I would like to ask our panelists, to introduce themselves and to give us two or three minutes of your thoughts about the topic today. Afterward, I'll moderate a discussion among the panelists if they have any questions for one another, and then, with the remaining time I would like to moderate a discussion with the members of the senate and others in attendance. We will begin with Alec Murphy.

Alec Murphy, geography. I am a professor in the Department of Geography and also head of the Geography department. I actually very much appreciate the fact that this discussion is taking place because I think it grows out of some concern, as Ann was articulating, that the process for change has been unfolding with lots of vocabulary about what we are, where we are as an institution, and where we're going. At times I think it is seen ˆ or seems to many of my colleagues -- as if the research mission of the university were a bit hidden in all that, or maybe something we're slightly embarrassed about, or that we really don't want to talk about as much as we should. In two or three minutes it is hard to address this issue in all its facets. But it seems to me that there are two fundamental issues we want to address and I'm going to devote most of my comments to one of these -- our mission in society in general.

I'm concerned in the broadest sense of why we are doing what we are doing, and what we as a society would lose if we no longer do that. That is what I'm going to devote most of my comments to. And the other, of course, is how we think about the relationship between teaching and research. I've lots to say about that to, but maybe in a couple of hours we can deal with that one. Figuring that some of my colleagues may deal with the latter, let's start off.

It's interesting to have Kirk Bailey attending this senate meeting because I actually raised some of these points two or three years ago in front of the State of Oregon Senate Ways and Means Committee when I was testifying on the faculty productivity issue at the UO. Questions were being asked about faculty productivity. I started and I will start today with the notion that if we don't make -- if we don't think -- research is a fundamental part of our mission and we don't have that as part of our way of thinking about the process for change, then of course, in some sense we are suggesting that our role as a research university perhaps is not the role we ought to be playing.

If that is the case, then we have some very hard questions we need to ask about the way our society functions, because our society has chosen to do something fairly curious in the US, in the global context. And that is, we in the US devote much of our independent research money and time to universities. This is different in other countries. In many countries this is put in privately funded institutes and think tanks of various sorts. But we in the United States put it into our universities. So if we want to move away from that notion, if we want to push the research to the side, to take it out of the universities, to not have places like the University of Oregon involved in that sort of endeavor, then I suggest there are a series of issues that society in general needs to address. One of them is very clearly related to teaching: Who will write the material that our students at this university and other universities will be reading and digesting and trying to understand as they're trying to confront the world around them? How will society ensure that research agendas are not dominated largely or solely by the private interests of those who actually have the funds to support that particular kind of private research initiative? How will graduate students learn the process of creating new ideas and understandings if they cannot work with people who are intimately involved in the creation of those new ideas and understandings? How will we as a university acquire the equipment that goes with advanced research, much of which is purchased through research initiatives by people on campus, that we can therefore expose our students to? How will we at a place like the University of Oregon attract some of the best and brightest Oregonians, or indeed, students from other states, to stay at our university when in fact it is well known now that Oregon universities have been less successful in the last few years in attracting the best and brightest Oregonians? Many of these students, if you look at where they are going, are headed to places that are among the strongest research universities. And I suppose finally and most generally, how will we continue to be a leader and not a follower as an institution and as a state?

It seems to me that all of these questions must come to the fore if we want to advance a notion of a university, even of a process for change university, that doesn't have this notion of research as part of that process for change. A student-centered approach, mind you, makes a lot of sense in a university and I would be the last to object to it. I am very much concerned with the student-centered approach to a university; but I think it is imperative that a vision be expressed with clear unapologetic reference to the research mission of the university. Unless we have some good responses to all of those questions that I have raised here, -- and I don't think we do -- in the process of advancing this clear unapologetic reference to the research mission of the university it is critical that we break down, as much as possible, the rather false dichotomy that is created in the public mind, and regrettably, even of some here in the university community, of the research and teaching mission.

Of course, there are different kinds of teaching that can take place; of course it is possible for research to take place in a way that marginalizes the teaching mission. And yet, what I would guess we will hear over and over again as we go down the table of the panelists here, are examples of people who see their research and teaching missions as inextricably intertwined. One is really reinforcing the other and they are not separable in the way they have often been separated in the public's imagination. I think that is the challenge we face and I think it is imperative that we meet that challenge directly, up-front, as part of our examination of this process for change if we're going to create a research university that can be a leader and not a follower in the 21^st century.

Ian Duncan, English. I am a professor in the English Department. The comments I'm going to give you are a digest of the comments I've received from a number of my colleagues over the department e-mail network over the last few days. I'm primarily addressing the questions of research and the humanities though I think much of what I say will apply to all fields and reinforce what has just been said, and, I hope will be reinforced by what will yet be said. A number of my colleagues feel dismayed and besieged by the notion that we have to justify what we are doing. I mean, this is a university. Do people in the university have to explain what a university is? Nevertheless, there are two rhetorical headings which are both connected; one is to take up the discourse we just heard.

Research is absolutely essential to teaching. It's not separable. In the humanities, we can see what we do -- we are developing a set of skills, skills to do with critical thinking, reading, interpretation. Research is itself the practice of those very skills we are teaching. Our own research brings vigor, new ideas to our teaching; it keeps our own standards high as teachers. And we're also imparting to our students those very skills that we are exercising when we are engaged in research. The paradigm that one hears going around a lot today about information seems to me to be somewhat misleading if we assume that information is a static body of data that is just out there, and we just dispense it, like candy machines. That's marketing jargon that tends to get used rather uncritically. What we teach students to do -- and there is considerable evidence this is what employers want from students in the community -- is how to gather, digest, evaluate, interpret and analyze information. Information is useless if you can't think with it or use it to think with. It seems to me that if we only see our teaching in terms as a body of knowledge that is "out there" and we're just here to "inform" students, that is fraudulent. We're defrauding the students. We're producing a kind of fraudulent model of what teaching is. Rather, we're concerned with developing skills in thinking and writing.

My second heading is that we are intellectuals. As intellectuals, we belong to a wider, national and international community as well as the various local communities and constituencies to which we have responsibilities. It is among our responsibilities that we give to the local community, including and especially students, access to that wider developing dynamic community of knowledge. That is part of the civic function of the university as a social institution about which we have also just been hearing. That is one of the main reasons, surely, that students go to a university. It is certainly one of the reasons I went to university as an undergraduate; you're going to take part in a wider horizon of knowledge, of discourse, of thinking and interpretation. All of these things are crucial, if I would bring in another kind of bottom line, in faculty recruitment and retention. If this university is to take seriously the notion of getting the best people they can, the best faculty to teach , then all of this needs to be taken into account.

Nathan Tublitz, biology. I am in the Institute of Neuroscience and a biology faculty member. I've been on the process of change for both sections here and my solution team is lead by Paula Burkhart, dealing with the issue of public perception. And when you start thinking about this issue of research versus teaching, to me the single most important issue is one of why does the public not see the relationship between the two? And so to address this issue, I want to tell you a personal story, perhaps an analogy; we'll see how far it goes. I grew up in south America. My first five years were spent with my grandfather in Bogata, Columbia. My grandfather was a cobbler. He moved from Europe to South America. He made shoes. His job, which I spent a lot of time sitting around watching as a kid, consisted of basically three parts: one part was dealing with customers who would come in the shop and want their shoes. The second part was making the shoes. Not just making any shoes, but making and refining new shoes, coming up with new techniques to make them better. The third part of this job was to develop an apprentice system and actually to teach people who wanted to go into this profession. So if you start thinking about what he did, it is not too dissimilar to what we do. He had a teaching component which was the apprentice program. He had a research program which was making new shoes. The teaching program benefitted from the research program because he could teach his students new things, new technologies that he had learned and passed down that learning. The research component benefitted from the teaching because he could hear from his students where he was screwing up.

I'm not sure that it is really so different in academia. If you look at other professions and analyze them, many other people are actually doing the same thing, doing a little bit of research and a little bit of teaching. But they call it business. Our business is the business of education and I don't see how we can possible separate out research from teaching and do either one meaningfully. And so I think our responsibility is to try and convince the general populace of that particular fact.

Dennis Redmond, student. I am a Ph.D. student in the program of comparative literature. I should also mention that I'm an activist and I work for the graduate employees union GTFF which is somewhat relevant to this. I think one of the really important issues here essentially is what we mean by public. We are a public university. The question is, who is the public we are supposed to serve? I think one of the central points of the attack -- and we should be clear this is an attack, a war on public education in general, not just universities -- is who benefits from this? How do we define the public? Is the public a bunch of Bill Gates and some very large corporations or big business in general? This is a very small population. Or is it everyone? Is human knowledge the heritage of us all?

What we are seeing is the corporatization of the university. We're seeing the transformation of what used to be a respectable profession, and we're all becoming "microserfs" in various ways. This is very worrisome today. I think we have to be very clear that this does require action, not just a debate and say we have to do this that and the other. It's going to require a new kind of politics and also some rethinking of how we do our teaching. Comparative literature is an excellent example of this. It is one of the prototypical multinational disciplines. It emerged because we needed a way to talk about media culture, global culture, and so forth. It's a kind of multinational mixture. What has happened -- and this is something that professors in humanities know -- is an interesting interaction. Comparative literature dealt with a lot of new issues and then there is an interesting action where things get taught and get passed on and then it becomes the property of other departments, such as the English department. In other words, there's a mutual dialogue and space for new ideas and that's essential. That's the whole point of having a public university. It's not a business. You're not trying to sell your ideas. It is a place where you can debate and discuss them.

The flip side of that is, of course, is privatization. It takes on very crass forms. One good example is the Riverfront Research Park where the university is basically prostituting itself. We're supposed to attract business. We're supposed to do business' job for it. It really gets ridiculous in that sense. But that's not the fundamental mission, or should not be the fundamental mission if we're serious about the public being all Americans, or all the people on this planet.

Jeremy Grzybowski, student. I'm an undergraduate student enrolled in the pre-business department here at the UO. I'm actually a freshman, so I can't really talk too much about what I've seen, but I will talk about what I have seen so far. Definitely I am in agreement that research is good for the education of students and the overall betterment of the university through credibility and other such things. We've said that research will definitely help teaching, but I just want to make sure that the actual research will help the students' education. One thing that I see as a problem is that students feel out of touch with the research that some departments are doing. I would like to see increased access by students to research. All students should know about large research projects as well as small research projects. We should be more aware of what is going on in our university. Students should definitely become invested in this research and know about the current research that is happening in their department or throughout the university.

Steve Shankman, English. I am a professor in the English department and in the Classics department, and I'm the director of the Humanities Center. Because I want keep my remarks to two minutes or so, I'm going to read them. I want to make simply three points. I thought what we were supposed to address is the notion of research in a student-centered university. I want to express some qualms about the implications of this notion that somehow the University of Oregon suddenly is representing itself as student-centered. I think there are some dangerous implications that I want to point out. First, the sudden embracing of the concept of student-centeredness, I'm afraid, is going to create the impression that we are not already student-centered. We are. We have been student-centered. Humanists on this campus tend to be, and I will speak only for the humanists, almost compulsively responsible, dedicated teachers and very responsible teachers. I worry that with this new rhetoric of "student-centeredness," and I fear that it is more rhetoric than reality, the faculty may be seen as admitting culpability for the current crisis. I think that is simply unacceptable.

Second, the rhetoric of being student-centered obscures the undeniable reality that the real problem is that our classes are simply too big. That is, that our student-faculty ratio at the University of Oregon simply needs to be brought down to human proportions. That many be impossible, but we have to confront that reality. Third, this emphasis upon being "student-centered" may eclipse the reality of the absolutely necessary and intimate relation between teaching and research. The mission of the Oregon Humanities Center, which I currently direct, is to encourage and nurture innovative research and teaching, and to make the results of these two activities accessible to the larger community through public programs. Humanities Center teaching fellowships almost always lead to new research projects, and these research projects (which are often team-taught) change the nature of the fields our faculty teach. The Humanities Center is already promoting a student-centered model, in which small courses are taught by lively and adventurous faculty, who are actively involved in exciting research projects. We need to make more of these opportunities available to faculty so that they have the opportunity, in these times of the bottom line, to be creative scholars who both preserve and change their fields of research.

Geri Richmond, chemistry. I'm in the Department of Chemistry here at the University of Oregon and I would like to direct my comments specifically towards the intertwining of undergraduate teaching and the undergraduate experience and research as it pertains to the sciences, so I will take another side of campus. First of all, our fields of chemistry, computer science, physics, biology, biochemistry and other science-oriented fields are fields that move extremely fast. I took graduate biochemistry 20 years ago and I have had many intersections with biochemistry topics over the years. But the entire language has changed. The entire science has changed. I'm not a biochemist but I can't imagine keeping up in the field in any other way but to be actively pursuing research. So if I'm going to teach courses at the undergraduate level, I must maintain my knowledge of the literature and the best way, and in my belief, one of the only ways that that happens, is through research. I think computer science is another area that has exploded with such remarkable changes that there is no way that you could give a good undergraduate education unless you have kept up with the research fields. Again, the way you do that is to be actively involved in research.

The second point, which I feel almost religious about, has to do with the experience the students have in the laboratory. Last week we had very important congressional hearings in the US Senate in Washington having to do with the problems we have with education in the sciences. What was brought up several times included by my favorite guy, Bill Nye, the Science guy, was that one of our worst educational failures is the university model for teaching science. That is the large lecture room and the laboratory situation which is taught very much like a driver's education course. The point was that students get turned on by science and they excel in science when they've had an "ah-hah" experience as they put it. And that "ah-hah" experience generally comes from research, where you've had to create some kind of experiment, you had to execute the experiment, you had to fail, and you had to learn from that failure. You can't get that in the classroom! You can't tell your students "Fail a couple of times and then come back and talk to me and we'll talk about how your grade can be improved." So I think failure linked with laboratory research experience is just critical to how we educate our undergraduates.

Here at the University of Oregon, in the sciences, I can mostly reflect upon chemistry: about 90% of our majors do undergraduate research. Cathy Page is a university senator and my role model for how well you can do research with undergraduates. She has done a remarkable job with undergraduates. In fact, one of our stars in the chemistry department which we hired a couple of years ago started his science in Cathy's laboratory. So it's just that kind of experience that really motivates science students to go into science and then stay with it. We can't offer that unless we have a high powered research program. My laboratory is no different than a lot of others. I have over a million dollars worth of laser equipment in my laboratory and there is no way that students could get on fancy equipment like that and use these lasers unless there was research going on. And yet the students, undergraduates who leave my laboratory who have experienced in laser work, go to work for the best companies in the country and join the best graduate programs in the country. Again, they wouldn't have that experience if they hadn't been working in a research group where they could go fail and succeed. So I think it is just imperative that we keep research alive at this institution and that we value how much research helps and assists in the education of our undergraduates.

Jeff Hurwit, art history and standing in for Marian Smith, music. I am in the art history and classics departments, vice president of the senate, and also a member of the FAC. My main role here though, is as a stand-in because Marian had a very high fever. But she did send me a comment that she would like me to read to you on her behalf.

"I believe the goal of this panel discussion is to reaffirm the importance of faculty research at this university, and perhaps to widen discussion about it. If I were there I'd say something about my concern about the attrition rate among UO undergraduate students and my commitment to reducing it. I believe that more, small, lower-division classes constitute an important part of the solution to this problem as the UO undertakes its "process for change." At the same time, those who teach at the UO must maintain this institution's place as a highly regarded research university. We must continue to write, design, compose, paint, perform -- in short, to practice what we teach. Let us remind ourselves that we are the only AAU institution in Oregon, and that, as such, we provide a crucial link between this state (and its young people) and the larger community of scholars and artists at this nation's best research universities. Thus we offer our students something that many colleges and universities do not.

I was delighted to learn last week that two of our young faculty members at the School of Music have been given awards that recognize their research and creative work: a Rome Prize [for research in Roman archives and membership in a community of scholars from various disciplines in the humanities] and a Guggenheim fellowship [in composing]. These are hardworking and earnest young assistant professors who spend countless hours with their students and care deeply about them. Now, they will also be able to pass on to their students the experience and knowledge they will soon gain as they carry out intense their creative and intellectual endeavors during the fellowship year.

I'm not entirely convinced that our students and prospective students, or their parents, are aware of the importance of the UO being a research institution, or how this can directly benefit our students, or what makes the UO unique among colleges and universities in this state. In fact, it may be that our reputation is better outside Oregon than within it. If so, improved public relations should take an important place in our process for change.

I would also point out that I am not unaware of the fact that some research universities employ many faculty who care far more about their scholarship than their students. I earned a graduate degree at one such place, and my experience there taught me a great deal about how NOT to teach. But I have seen such excellence in teaching here, and have met so many faculty members so deeply committed to teaching, that I do not believe we are danger of losing our sense of balance. I believe we can meet the stiff challenges that lie ahead while maintaining our integrity both as teachers and scholars."

To Marian Smith's comments, Vice President Hurwit added these thoughts. Personally, my own perspective is to agree with everything that has been said by these panelists and to emphasize that student-centeredness, whatever that is and nobody really seems to know, should not and can not and probably is not, contradictory with or mutually exclusive with knowledge-centeredness. That's what we're really about.

Beginning of moderated discussion.

Ann Tedards: Thank you very much to all our panel members for your thoughts. It's great to sit in a room and listen to talk about what we love to do and what we do so well. It's a good feeling. One of the panelists, in response to saying yes to speaking today, suggested that we might be preaching to the choir. And I'm sure we are. So I want to ensure you that my intent is at the conclusion of our session to talk with the Senate Executive Committee and see if we might take a second step after this panel discussion to bring our concerns forward in more ways than just what we're doing today in this room. So with that, I'd like to first ask the panelists if anyone would like to make any further comments.

Steve Shankman: Talking about failure, I think we brought up a really important point. I think we need to fail in the humanities, too. That means you have to have more student writing. You have to get pages from the students and have them revise it. Actually, failing is a very, very important thing in the humanities as well. Unless our students fail, as Bob Dylan said, "There's no success like failure," or something like that.

Alec Murphy: I guess the one thing that a couple of people touched on a little bit and is just terribly important in thinking about all this, is how rapidly things change. I think Geri mentioned she took a course 20 years ago and how rapidly things change. How this puts the spotlight on good teaching, not simply teaching what facts are out there now, but teaching how to think about issues. You have to have some facts before you start thinking about them, but it creates, it really puts the emphasis on our ability to think and analyze critically. I really resonated with Geri Richmond's comments in this regard because I think you have such an incredible edge in doing that if you are actively involved and doing it yourself. I reflect upon a comment that one of my colleagues made who doesn't have a regular appointment with the University of Oregon. He has a small appointment with my department. For many years he has had most of his appointment at LCC. He had a broad range of experience at various community colleges and other kinds of institutions, and his comment to me the other day when I happened to mention to him that I was going to come and make this presentation before the senate, was "Well if it's of any help, in virtually every institution with which I've ever been associated, it's the people who are involved in the research who were the cut above almost everybody else in their teaching." And that was somebody whose primary career was in community college, not a research university.

Peter Gilkey: I'm on the Senate Executive Committee. What does the panel suggest that we do to get the information out to the rest of the university? If we are preaching to the choir, how do we get the song out?

Alec Murphy: I guess one possibility would be to convene all the chairs of all the process of change committees for a discussion and see how we could put research centrally into that discussion.

Nathan Tublitz: I actually don't think that it is the focus. The focus should not be within the university but outside the university. Again, I don't think we're preaching to the choir here, I think we're preaching to the entire university faculty. I think we need to go outside the university and preach to those people who are not quite convinced. I think there are a number of ways we can do that. We have a number of outreach programs that showcase the talent of our faculty. That in and of itself works very well to identify to the general public the quality of people that we have here. There are a number of ways of interacting with the public outside, like going and talking to classes, or by as Kirk Bailey suggested earlier in the meeting, going and talking to legislators who actually are making some of these decisions. I think those issues are the way that we're actually going to be able to do that.

John Mosely, provost: Thank you Nathan. You said what I had my hand up to say, more eloquently than I would have said it.

Steve Shankman: Kirk, you were talking about the governor. I wonder, are we wasting our time by going to the legislature? If you're saying he's the one who really appropriates the budget, shouldn't we just be going and talking to him if he's going to be the leader on this, rather than the legislators who come and go, and just have a session with him and tell him what we think?

Kirk Baily, legislative relations: Yes and no. The yes part is, certainly, he is the key player in state revenue picture, setting up the budget The problem with going to the governor exclusively is that he is so busy with other things that he can't do it. You're in as good as a position with this governor as you can possibly be. This governor "gets it" and by his actions and statements he, along with the task force, and in a somewhat careful way, has told us that funding is going to be coming our way, which is his way of saying, "I get it and I will be here for you." But on the other hand, the "no" part is that we can't ignore the legislature or the candidates. They represent the larger public opinion of the state. To overlook them would not be wise.

Dave Soper, physics. Just following up on this discussion, I recall about a month ago I got a letter or an e-mail that we sign up for the U of O Speaker's Bureau which has been recreated after seven years. Maybe Kirk could say something about that. That strikes me as one thing we could all do that gets us out to the Rotary Club or whatever around the state and help spread the word.

Ann Tedards: Does anyone know which office that letter was generated from?

Kirk Bailey: The Office of Communications. Ross West is another person in that office who is organizing that.

Jeff Hurwit: I think when most humanists think about involving their students or the students at the U of O in research, they don't think of themselves, they think of the sciences. They think of Geri Richmond, they think of Catherine Page. We in the humanities said "Oh, well, those scientists know how to do it. They know how to involve undergraduates in their own research by conducting labs and experiments." I did a brief look through the course catalog and I found most departments, including my own, have something on the books called undergraduate research. In my own department that is, in the 18-19 years that I've been teaching in this deparment, I can't remember when that course has ever really been used. Actually what we are talking about is a change in culture, a change in environment, where faculty are more willing to have undergraduates, even in the humanities, sign up for 401 research classes where those students for four credits actually become research assistants, and help professors, and have a face to face, one on one relationship, engaged in research problems. It could change the culture of the university a little in that direction, it might satisfy a lot fof the needs and demands of that we've heard here today.

Cathy Page, chemistry: But I think more than that, that the public has no idea what research is. I run into misperceptions all the time among the public -- they all think we have the summers off. When I tell them that's the time when we really get our research done, I just get these blank stares. They have no idea what research is. And that's important: 90% of the population has no idea what research is, much less what is a research university.

Ann Tedards: So to go the next step, it might be incumbent upon us to make those definitions and to do our public relations that would help to clarify for the general person.

Nathan Tublitz: I just wanted to address that it's not just the issue of public education. It's the clarification of public misconception. It goes in both ways. I'm a graduate of Reed College. I do a lot of work for them as well. Why do people go to a small liberal arts college? They go because of small classes, one on one interactions with faculty, and the fact that the faculty are actively engaged in their field. At the other end of the spectrum there are the large universities -- Ohio State, nine million students. Huge classes. No chance for interaction. It seems to me that this university is stuck in no-man's land, at least in respect to public conception. We're not considered to be a large public university that ignores the students, because we're certainly not that either. What I think we need to do is to get out there and show that we are the best of both worlds, for value as well. If you talk to parents and how they make these decisions of which schools to send their children to, you find out that they really don't understand this university. I address this concern to the administrators here: we need somehow to clear up these misperceptions.

John Mosley: I think Nathan has made some good points and we do say that we have the advantages of both worlds. We are a relatively small research university, and Jeff made some good points too, that getting the whole university involved in research with students is important. We're hoping that out of the process for change will come some good ideas that will permit us to build on the advantages of being a small research university of very high quality in a very livable place. We do try to covey to the public what we are all about, but we need to do this as a community, not just with us in the administration out there trying to do it alone. I think the single most important way that we can protect the research mission of this university is to explain to the general public why the research mission is critical to our educational mission, that it is not a research mission for its own sake. The core mission of the university is education ˆ we do research because of that core mission, because it makes us better at the core mission, because it provides better opportunities for students that are not provided if there is no research. And as a side result, it also provides information that is important to humankind. That's the strategy we need to employ and we need to do it at a more general level by actually involving more undergraduates in research and by explaining to the general public why our educational mission is made better by our research. We have done ourselves a diservice by categorizing our responsibilities into teaching, research, and service as though those were three separate categories that are not intimately interwoven. In some ways. and for some faculty, they are three separate entities. But we know for many of us they are not, and the more that we can integrate those activities, the better we can explain to the public and the better we can explain to the students why it is a real advantage to come to the University of Oregon.

Cynthia Vakareliyska, Russian: I want to address involvement of students in research. Actually, this is something that we've done for our regular classes. We have them do research projects in their regular classes but the research is the student's research. The practicum classes are mostly for research assistantships for credit. They are quite popular with the students because they get to work on real research projects and faculty even get some articles published with some of the students. So there are ways to do research with students in the humanities. It's something that we have been doing, so it is surprising to hear that this is something we should be doing.

Alec Murphy: I just want to address briefly the whole general discussion about educating the people outside the university. I couldn't agree more with Provost Moseley's comments about trying to break down the misperceptions. But I do think part of the reason we're here is because there is an internal at least perception issue that we've got to deal with and that we can't ignore. It came out in one of the faculty-administrator lunches with Stead Upham a couple weeks ago. The refrain was, "Gee, process for change seems to be happening in ways that seem to leave out the research side." The perception exist among the campus faculty. I would be very happy to see that what was just said by the provost was one of the stated thrusts of the process for change. What I think we really need to do is show how these things all link together and get that message out. But unfortunately I think there are a lot of people on campus who feel that somehow that's not part of the discussion. Whether this is right or not, that feeling is there and it needs to be addressed.

John Moseley: The president, at the process for change convocation last week, basically made that statement. I understand the perception is there, but the president made it clear that research is a major part of what we do here.

Michael Olson, ASUO: Large classes preclude discussions of the research experience. I'm personally enrolled in a 400 level political science class where there are over 100 students. Although the professor has done outstanding research, it is nearly impossible to interact with the professor on a more personal level. The only students who really get a change to engage in some discussion are the graduate students. This seems to be common in the social sciences where the only access to research seems to come on widescale class proportions. We know from reading through the catalogue and literature that the faculty is very talented, but students need to have more access to them and their research. In some departments this seems to be handled much better than others. Maybe some of the good situations can be transferred to the other departments somehow.

Geri Richmond: That raises a very important point. At a large university, undergraduates are not handled like they are at Reed or where I used to be at Bryn Mawr College. And the point that I keep making as to why good students succeed at a large place like this where they could easily get lost, is that the students that succeed are the ones that go banging on faculty members doors and say "take me on," "teach me on my own". I think if undergraduates could see from examples of departments where undergraduates are intimately involved in research, and how productive it is to their welfare, and understand that this is an acceptable thing to do, other undergraduates may not be so hesitant to approach a faculty member and say "can I help you." There are gems in the rough out there that faculty can work with and get publications with and further their research. Students can be very hesitant to go to a faculty member and ask to be part of the team. But if we could increase this awareness on the part of both the students and faculty member, this would be very helpful.

Clare Lees, English: What I've been particularly impressed by all the contributions on the panel is the ways in which all of you have demonstrated how dynamic and constantly changing is both research and teaching as a process all the time. If we could capitalize on that energy and work that into the process for change we'd get a more rhetorical and actual position statement on what we actually do at the university. We change all the time, our knowledge changes all the time, and our interactions with our students change all the time. But our institutional funding structure may not change and may have hardened in some cases; that is an important message that we could make in the process for change.

Jane DeGidio, academic affairs: In response to what Geri was saying, I think is it hard for students to go to faculty. We have students graduating in double majors who have never had a faculty member ever talk to them or congratulate them or talk about their achievements. So I think we also need to look at what departments can do to encourage students to come to the faculty and get connected.

Geri Redmond: One simple thing we do is have a pizza party with undergraduate majors and the faculty to explain to them what their opportunities are if they hook up with a faculty member to do research. That at least opens the door and welcomes them.

Ann Tedards: I've heard several times here that we had students graduating with a baccalaureate degree without one faculty member who can write a recommendation for them. I think one of the things we need to look at is the discrepancy across the university. In some areas the university is doing very well, and in other areas we are not doing very well. Somehow, we have to try to bring everyone up to par with respect to access of undergraduate students to what we are doing here. I'm not sure how we can address that because we are a big place, but we need to somehow.

With no further discussion, President Tedards informed everyone that the senate executive committee along with the council of deans, the Faculty Advisory Council, and the president's small administrative group, will meet separately to review all the solution team reports. They each will write a summary and bring forth some recommendations. Thus, there are two groups that are primarily faculty representatives who will be looking at the solution teams reports.