Past Activities: 2002-2003
Mellon Lifecycle activities continued at Carleton and Macalester for the 2002-2003 school year. Below are a few examples of this year's activities. Also look at the activities from 2001-2002.
Faculty Exchange Program
In the fall of 2002, two Macalester faculty members, Terry Boychuk (Sociology) and Karen Saxe (Mathematics and Computer Science) participated in the faculty exchange with Carleton College. Specificaly, Terry Boychuk proposed to teach a course entitled "American Social Policy" and advance his research on the U. S. welfare state during his time with the Carleton SOAN Department. As planned, Karen Saxe taught one course and investigated the restructuring of lower-level mathematics curriculum and the creation of a mathematics/computer science capstone program in the MATH/CS Department. In preparation for her appointment as the chair of the Faculty Personnel Committee at Macalester in Spring 2003, Karen also immersed herself in campus discussions of faculty governance and the student culture of academic excellence at Carleton.
Co-Mentoring and Cohorts
In addition to forming along demographic lines, the cohort definition is being expanded to include disciplinary commonality (inter-departmental). Because of the small size of Carleton and Macalester, it is likely that professors have sub-disciplinary interests that are unique in their department. Forming cohorts of faculty whose interests lie in similar or related areas can help to diminish this disciplinary isolation.
This year featured one co-mentoring project: Joan Hutchinson (Mathematics and Computer Science, Macalester) and Robert Dobrow (Mathematics, Carleton) organized a two-talk series for students at the two colleges. Dr. Dobrow spoke to Macalester about his research in probability, with connections to card shuffling and data structures. He also consulted with colleagues on probabilistic methods in DNA sequencing. Hutchinson gave a faculty/student talk at Carleton on "Three (or Four) types of Graph Coloring," emphasizing her research in graph theory.
Faculty Reflections
Carleton faculty put together a collection of twenty one essays in the collection Reflections on Learning as Teachers. The volume is currently being reviewed, and Carleton is hopeful about being able to share the work in print with a broad academic aucience.
Mid-Career Faculty Workshop
The Second annual Mid-Career Faculty Workshop was held last December. It focused on how principles of Stephen Covey's First Things First could be applied to faculty life. The group was composed of full professors a number of years past tenure, many of whom expressed concerns about sustaining a balanced professional career. Participants were able to articulate tasks that seem to drive their schedules and push back higher priority tasks, and brainstormed ways to find time to address the more important tasks.