Undergraduate Education at UT

Presentation at Honors Day Ceremony in Department of Chemistry

April 26, 2007

I am truly delighted to speak at the Honors Day Ceremony in the Department of Chemistry. Most of you know that before I became Provost on the Knoxville campus, I was a professor and administrator at Berkeley. Some of you also have heard that I my academic home there was the German Department, and that I specialized in nineteenth and twentieth-century German intellectual, cultural, and literary history. But I’m not sure how many of you know that as an undergraduate, I was a science major, graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Natural Sciences. Probably none of you know my true claim to fame as an undergraduate: in my freshman chemistry class, populated primarily by a few hundred pre-meds and science majors, I had the highest test score average. Some of that performance was luck, some was attributable to a good preparation in my high school class, but it is an achievement in science that marks the zenith of my activities outside the humanities. In any case, since that time I have harbored a special place in my heart for Chemistry, and that achievement of long ago accounts in part for my special feeling in addressing you today.

The topic of my presentation is undergraduate education. And my first order of business it to impart to you the good news: the undergraduate population on the Knoxville campus is good, and getting better every year. At the advent of the decade our average undergraduate had an ACT score of below 24; the incoming class this year had an average ACT of 25.8. Although we are not quite finished with admissions for next year, it appears that the average ACT for the class of 2011 will inch up slightly and cross the 26 barrier. Now many of you, like me, may come from states and universities that used the SAT, so I want to mention how our scores measure up against some other schools. An average ACT of 26 places us at or above such institutions as the University of Colorado and Colorado State, Arizona and Arizona State, Iowa and Iowa State, North Carolina State, Texas A&M, and Michigan State. It puts us on a par with such schools as the University of Minnesota, Ohio State University, Clemson University, Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute, and the University of Texas at Austin. Concomitant with this rise in standardized test scores over the past six or seven years has been the increase in the high school GPAs of incoming students. The bottom line is that the students sitting in your classrooms now and those arriving next year are different and markedly better than the students of only a few short years ago.

I am not certain that the increase in the quality of our students has led to appropriate consequences on the part of teaching and curriculum. I have been told, and I can understand, that only a decade ago the chief function of large introductory courses was to weed out students who were not suitable material for university education. This procedure was perhaps reasonable at the time. After all, in the 1990s Tennessee was accepting just about every student who applied for admission. But now that we are accepting less than three-quarters of the students who wish to enroll, we have a slightly different obligation toward undergraduates. It is my conviction that we should now be emphasizing how we can help every enrolled student succeed in his or her studies. We should no longer see courses, like the first two terms of Chemistry, as belated tests for admission to the university, and seek accordingly to expel those students who do not perform up to our levels of expectations. Rather we must develop methods and strategies to assist these talented, albeit sometimes ill-prepared, students to succeed in their studies, or, in cases where their talents lie in some other area, to persuade them that they should be pursuing a course of study outside of the natural sciences. In short we must change our focus from “weed” to “succeed,” rethinking how we teach, what we expect, and how we interact with the new student body on campus.

Each department must contribute to this rethinking, and I am confident that Chemistry has done so or will do so as well. My responsibilities and the responsibilities of the Office of the Provost are to ensure that those areas of education that escape departmental curriculum are rigorous, stimulating, and attractive for the undergraduate population. One area in which I have sought to work with departments, however, has been in the area of progression requirements. When I arrived on campus I noted that many programs have requirements for attaining admission to a major or persisting in a major that are above – sometimes significantly above – what the campus considers to be good standing. In some instances there is good justification for these restrictive entrance requirements to a major: some programs are besieged by a number of students that is much too large for their teaching capacity. In other cases, especially in programs affiliated with professional schools, external agencies set standards that reduce capacity or that stipulate restrictions on the student body. Many departments, however, restrict their majors for reasons that are not sound educational policy. I have sought this year through conversations with the deans and through their conversations with college committees to reduce the number of progressions requirements, and I have met with some success. There will be fewer programs with progression requirements next year. But we still have requirements that I consider unwarranted. Therefore, I will continue to work with colleges, departments, and programs over the next year, in cooperation with the faculty senate, to further reduce remaining, gratuitous restrictions on undergraduates seeking an education on the Knoxville campus.

In most cases, however, my office deals with non-departmental programs that impact students outside of their major field of study. In this area the campus has historically not done well. If we take the traditional measures of excellence in undergraduate education – retention, persistence, graduation rate, time-to-degree – and we compare our numbers to those of other schools, we find that we grade out rather poorly. In retention of students from their first to their second year, for example, we are near the bottom of our THEC peer institutions: only Kentucky has a lower retention rate, and we do worse than schools such as LSU, Auburn, Virginia Tech, and North Carolina State, all of whom have students with test scores below ours. Indeed, our retention rate languished between 75% and 80% for over a decade before finally breaking the 80% barrier this past fall (81.7%). In the same year Maryland, Georgia, Texas A&M, and Florida had retention rates between 92% and 94%, while the University of North Carolina and the University of Virginia topped 95%. Indeed, although students entering with higher ACT scores and higher GPAs are retained at higher rates than students with lower numerical indicators, our best students are still retained at lower rates than the average retention rate at over half of our THEC peer institutions. Data for overall persistence, for graduation rates, and for time-to-degree follow this general trend. My conclusion is that even though we have succeeded in attracting a better quality of student, as a campus we are not doing our job to keep them here and to make sure they graduate.

To change this situation I have appointed a task force that is examining retention and that will make policy and programmatic recommendations to me by the start of the new term next fall. In the meantime, however, we are not sitting idly by. In the Student Success Center, we have introduced a number of programs to attend better to student difficulties in their initial encounter with higher education. We now have mandatory workshops for students who are under academic review and supplementary instruction in two key first-year mathematics courses; we will be extending this supplementary instruction to Chemistry 110 and 120 next fall, building learning communities for students in cooperation with student housing, and surveying students regularly to find out what they have found lacking in their education at Tennessee. In my office we are also undertaking a number of measures to deal with our retention issues. Under the leadership of the Vice Provost for Academic Operations, Todd Diacon, we are inaugurating a program called “Light the Torch of Excellence.” This program will introduce academic awareness in summer orientation and in the welcome week next fall. The focus will be success: faculty teaching typical freshman courses will give brief talks on how to succeed in their classes; the “passport to success” will introduce students to their classrooms; and college open houses will enable students to see what course of study lies before them.

In addition we are supplementing the First-Year Studies 101 courses, designed to introduce students to the resources and tools they need to succeed at the university, with a new program of Freshman Seminars. These courses are meant to provide a counterpoint to the large-enrollment, often alienating offerings first-year students typically encounter. The number of students in the Freshman Seminars will be limited to about 18; they will all be taught by tenured and tenure-track faculty; they will be given on a credit-non credit basis; and they will focus on a topic attractive to students and about which the faculty member is passionate. The object of these courses is to display the large array of interests of our faculty, to encourage contact between students and faculty, as well as students and their peers, and to socialize students into academic discourse in a learning situation without the pressure of grades. Thus far we have over 60 seminars, plus 15 additional seminars of this nature in the honors program. Let me give you a few sample titles to illustrate the creativity of the faculty who have signed up thus far: Melissa Kennedy, a microbiologist, will be teaching “Be a Virus, See the World!”; the medieval historian Michael Kulikowski will offer a seminar on “The Birth of Punk”; Robert Freeman from Biosystems Engineering and Soil Sciences will present “CSI Knoxville 1863”; and Joan Heminway from the Law School will give a seminar entitled “Martha Stuart Went to Jail. Why? So What?” I expect this program not only to help us in retaining students, but also to provide untold enjoyment and stimulation for all participants, students and faculty alike.

Our efforts in retention are only one step on a longer journey we must undertake to improve undergraduate education on the Knoxville campus. Another area in which we must accomplish much more is general education. We have done a good job thus far in extending general education as a requirement for students in all colleges, and in arranging for the availability of courses when students need to take them. But our current general education curriculum is a strange mélange of basic skills courses, distribution requirements, and general education offerings. I am convinced we must rethink this series of required courses and ask some of the following questions: Are students excited about general education courses? Do they consider them requirements they must fulfill or educational opportunities? Do faculty members regard them as a chance to experiment with the curriculum and to pursue exciting new classroom initiatives? Are the courses currently offered designed for general education, or as the first step in a departmental and disciplinary curriculum? Are the faculty members who teach general education our finest classroom lecturers and teachers, or are they the faculty members assigned to a particular course at a particular moment?

From these questions you can probably guess that I would like to see general education courses (excluding perhaps the skills courses in general education) as an educational and innovative program, taught by the most distinguished classroom educators and designed to reach a general student audience. I would also like to see them adapted to the needs of our students and our campus. Doesn’t it make sense for the University of Tennessee, which is only a generation or two removed from segregation, to offer a general education course on racism, diversity, multiculturalism, and cultural differences? In an age in which technological change is rapid and often confusing, shouldn’t we be looking at courses that explain and physical universe, the fundamentals of the technology, and the implications of science for everyday life? In a society where cultural values are fleeting and vacillating, shouldn’t we be offering courses that reflect on our vital cultural traditions and their transient qualities? A redesign of the general education curriculum in line with intercultural, international, and technological perspectives is something I would like to see over the next few years. I think the renewed focus on the content of our general education curriculum has the potential to enhance educational horizons on campus, improve faculty satisfaction with their jobs, and make students better informed citizens of their communities, the state, and the nation.

A final area in which we should focus our efforts in the coming years is undergraduate research. Sometime I have the feeling that we suffer considerably from our disadvantages, such as our size, but that we frequently do not do enough to exploit our advantages. The chief advantage of this campus in comparison to UT Martin and Chattanooga or to East Tennessee State is that we are a research one university. Yet most undergraduates never have the opportunity to experience the very feature that makes this campus different from other options they may have had. Although involvement with research will normally eventuate only toward the end of an undergraduate’s career, the atmosphere created by promoting undergraduate research will invariably reach down into the first couple of years of undergraduate experience and produce excitement and a positive outlook on the campus. We should make it our goal to provide a research experience for every undergraduate who desires one. This experience may be in the form of a senior thesis with a research course and research activities; or it may be as simple as working in a laboratory one summer or one semester; or it may involve working closely with faculty in doing archival and library work. Research programs can be funded rather inexpensively if students can sign up for credit for their research activities. Faculty as well as students benefit from such programs: Faculty members have incentives in receiving research assistance, and satisfaction from working closely with young people who may be future colleagues. Students receive credit toward their degree and the immense satisfaction of learning by doing. The institution wins because we have provided better education and an enhanced student experience.

Let me conclude here and simply reiterate the main themes of my mission for undergraduate education. We now have a population of students that is better than we have ever had, and as good as many of the top public research institutions in the country. Yet we have failed thus far to deal adequately with that changed situation. We must provide more challenge and rigor in our classrooms, but also more care and better counseling. We must open our majors to as many students as possible, adopting an attitude of accommodation and orientation on student success. And we must provide programs inside and outside departments that will make this large university small, that will encourage intellectual interaction and learning, and that will take advantage of the first-class faculty on the campus and their role in creating new knowledge. I see a bright future for undergraduate education at the University of Tennessee: we have all the pieces we need to inaugurate a new era of teaching and learning; now it is my job, working together with my staff and with the talented faculty and staff of this institution, to make certain that those pieces are put in the appropriate places. I welcome your participation in the challenges that face us, and I thank you for your attention this afternoon.

Posted: April 27, 2007