Home: About the College: Dean's Office and Administration: Plans, Reports, and Policy Documents: Arts and Humanities Strategic Plan

The College of Arts and Humanities pursues excellence in the acquisition, interpretation, preservation, synthesis, and transmission of knowledge related to the development of peoples and cultures as well as their artistic and creative forms of expression. The academic and artistic disciplines within the College enrich our understanding of the past, contribute to the creation and appreciation of all forms of artistic expression, expand our ability to understand and interpret our own culture as well as cultures separated from ours by language or geography, and examine issues centered in language, logic, ethics, and value. Through its diverse departments and programs, the College provides undergraduate students with the essentials of a genuinely liberal education, preparing them for life in society and introducing them to the life of the mind; it does so by teaching them to think creatively, to communicate clearly and effectively, and to reason accurately and critically. These skills are crucial to success in a world in which new ideas rapidly replace older assumptions. The graduate degree programs of the College prepare the scholars, artists and performers of tomorrow with the knowledge and professional tools that enable them to take their place in the academy and with the integrity, values, and vision to become tomorrow's leaders.

The College of Arts and Humanities is home to three large clusters of academic departments: the creative and performing arts -- Music, Theatre, Dance and Art; the departments which study languages, literatures, and cultures -- Asian and East European Languages and Cultures, Comparative Literature, French and Italian Languages and Literatures, Germanic Studies, Linguistics, and Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures; and departments broadly classed as the humanities -- American Studies, Art History, Classics, Communication, English, History, Jewish Studies, Philosophy, and Women's Studies. The College is committed to understanding the past on its own terms, but we also believe that the study of the past is essential to understanding the present and the future. Our comprehensive scholarly quest is to relate and integrate past, present, and future as they express the human condition. We are committed to creating and employing the best contemporary methods of study and examination in our scholarly investigations and our teaching, so that our students understand where we have been and where we can be tomorrow.

In December, 1994, the College of Arts and Humanities set forth its first strategic plan as the culmination of a lengthy and broadly based process of examining the College's goals and missions and of evaluating its strengths, challenges, and opportunities as they existed at that time. The 1994 Plan, like the Campus' plan, "Charting a Path to Excellence," which appeared a few months later, reflected very clearly the depressed economic environment of the early 1990's that had already led to the closing of departments and programs.

Much has happened in the ensuing six years. The University has enjoyed an unprecedented period of substantially increased financial support and a reaffirmation by the state of its commitment to the University as the Flagship Institution of the Maryland system of higher education. The College has significantly advanced the five objectives set out as goals in the 1994 plan: we have consolidated our role as a premier liberal arts college and strengthened our best graduate programs through judicious recruitment and retention of faculty. We have added to our intellectual life by creating entirely new degree programs (e.g. an M.A. in Second Language Acquisition and Application; a Ph.D. in Women's Studies; a revised Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance Studies) as well as a new form of degree, the Citation. The completion of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center represents the single greatest enhancement to the entire campus to take place in the 1990s. We have furthered our commitment to the diverse, multi-cultural, international nature of our global society through such initiatives as the Driskell Center for the Study of the African Diaspora, the Latin American Studies Center, and the acquisition of the National Foreign Language Center. With the creation of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) we are becoming national leaders in pioneering the application of information technology within the humanities.

Over the course of the past year, the Campus has undertaken a second strategic step. The plan set out below responds to Building on Excellence: The Next Steps, the strategic plan adopted by the Campus earlier this year. We applaud the goals that animate that plan. We are building a culture of excellence, offering an enriched educational experience to all students that takes full advantage of the special strengths of a research university, that strengthens our Maryland family of alumni and friends, and that engages in an ever-growing range of partnerships with private companies and governmental agencies, and other research universities in the state and region. What follows states our goals for the College of Arts and Humanities.

Strengths

Any assessment of the strengths of the College of Arts and Humanities begins with our excellent faculty. The College of Arts and Humanities boasts numerous faculty who are recognized by their peers as leaders within their various disciplines. Many of our senior faculty hold prestigious national offices, serve as editors of major professional journals, and are routinely consulted on issues within their disciplines. Many of our faculty are major voices, quoted and cited in the ongoing discourses of their disciplines and are regarded as jewels among the nation's humanities faculty. Many of our creative and performing artists are nationally recognized for their artistic contributions. Many of our newest junior faculty have also begun to take their place in the spotlight. As a result, some of our programs already stand high in national rankings and others are gaining national acclaim.

The location of the University has enabled us to attract excellent faculty and provides fertile ground for teaching and research. The Baltimore-Washington corridor offers internationally renowned research facilities for Arts and Humanities faculty. The Smithsonian Institution, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Pratt, Dumbarton Oaks, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives, among others, offer excellent facilities and research collections and are intellectual centers that serve as magnets to draw to the area serious researchers from around the globe. The awakening of the greater Washington area as a center of professional theatre has raised the region in to a level of eminence which it has long enjoyed in the visual arts, to the great advantage of our creative and performing faculty. This advantage will grow with the opening of the Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts. Businesses and governmental agencies in the Baltimore-Washington region offer opportunities for partnerships, which many departments and faculty have exploited, to the mutual educational and intellectual advantage of our faculty and students. The extensive international presence within Washington, D. C. enriches the international focus of departments committed to the study of other cultures, languages, and literatures.

The structure and intellectual climate of the College Park Campus offers numerous advantages to the faculty of the College. Because we have appointed faculty who combine distinguished teaching with their research, and because the disciplines of Arts and Humanities are central to the core of undergraduate education, our departments and our curricula influence the educational lives of the entire undergraduate student body. At 9 to 1, the Arts and Humanities student-teacher ratio is a strong attraction to excellent students seeking a liberal arts experience. We have also become pioneers -- as reflected in MITH -- in harnessing the resources offered by technology to enrich both our pedagogy and our research. Professors in the College regularly receive well over half of all teaching awards given on campus, although they constitute less than 25% of the campus faculty. The content and focus of many of our disciplines renders us leaders, not only in the internationalization of the campus, but also in the area of diversity, both as it relates to curriculum and as it is reflected in the composition of our faculty and student body. On campus we continue to set the educational and cultural agendas for issues concerning race, gender and ethnicity, and we are recognized nationally for our achievements.

Our student body, both graduate and undergraduate, has improved dramatically in recent years. This past fall the freshmen entering the College of Arts and Humanities had SAT scores averaging 1170 and 1340 at the 25th and 75th percentiles, up 90 and 110 points respectively in the past six years. A similar dramatic improvement is true of Arts and Humanities graduate students, as may be attested by the recent placements of our strongest PhD recipients in tenure-track jobs at such major universities as Michigan and Cornell.

Challenges

The most fundamental challenge currently facing Arts and Humanities everywhere is the seldom-stated but pervasive sense that our disciplines are valuable only to specialists and largely irrelevant to our high-tech, business-oriented society. It may be that this is why funding for federal agencies such as the NEH and NEA, is considerably smaller than comparable support for the NSF or NIH. Certainly, prospective students question the salary levels they can expect as Arts and Humanities graduates by comparison to those in engineering, science or business.

The challenge we face is two-fold. We must carefully, convincingly and cogently explain to several audiences simultaneously the inherent value to society of graduating citizens who have been well educated in the arts and humanities. Our importance is measured by the large numbers of students in other colleges who eagerly enroll in courses we offer; in the large number of our graduates who are successful in a wide variety of areas in society, especially in government service; in the growing demand for our graduates in business, especially in information technology; and in the near-crisis state of national need for our graduates with expertise in languages and the ability to cross cultural frontiers.

We must face the fact that our ability to produce graduates with the attributes noted above is only part of the equation. We must translate the reality of our value to society into recognition by that same society. We must convince students and their parents, our fellow educators, business leaders, and governments at all levels of our value to them and to society. We have begun this process and progress may be noted in several areas, notably within academia and the business world. Private foundations are increasingly targeting the Arts and Humanities for investment. School systems everywhere recognize the vital nature of our contributions.

Another limiting factor is space. Inadequate space is a specter haunting the entire campus, but problems concerning space are especially acute for the College of Arts and Humanities. For years the facilities in which Arts and Humanities units have been housed have been inadequate in size and substandard in quality. Our situation is improving. Dance, Music and Theatre now reside in the splendid Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts. We have also benefited from recent renovations within Marie Mount Hall, Skinner Hall, and Woods Hall. Within a few years English will have moved to new quarters in a fully renovated Tawes. However, some of our units continue to lack space sufficient to meet their needs. A long overdue plan is now in place to improve the quality of faculty offices in the History Department; but more and better teaching space is needed for that unit. None of our space problems, however, is as grievous as that faced by the language and literature departments in Jiménez Hall. This building, named for the only Nobel laureate ever to teach at the College Park Campus, provides the four resident departments with cramped offices and classrooms and severe HVAC problems. An external study of the renovation needs of Jiménez has begun and an extensive renovation is expected over the next few years.

The College labors under other weaknesses in infrastructure. Staff support and operating budgets are low, both by Campus and by national standards. We need more funding to enable us to recruit and retain elite graduate students whose presence is essential to improving our graduate program rankings. We have fewer endowment dollars than are available in other major colleges, and we have too few endowed professorships and chairs. The very nature of our disciplines offers fewer opportunities for extramural funding than are available to other colleges and provides us with fewer avenues in which we can be entrepreneurial. While we must refocus our energies on making the best use of existing resources, we must also make a concerted effort to secure alumni and external funding for scholarships, fellowships, and endowed professorships.

The enormous extent of Arts and Humanities' contribution to the campus CORE curricula has occasionally given rise to the inaccurate perception that we are merely a service college. In comparison to colleges with fewer faculty and narrower lines of inquiry, our size (both in numbers of faculty and numbers of departments) and disciplinary diversity may make it seem that the College lacks focus. Some of our departments and graduate programs are small (often by design) and while small size is an advantage in many ways, it works to our detriment in others. Indeed, one of the surest lessons apparent from the 1993 National Research Council rankings was the direct correlation between size and prominence of ranking. Despite our leadership in innovative uses of modern technology and our investment in the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), we are occasionally perceived as low-tech, non-tech, or anti-tech.

Opportunities

Opportunities for growth in the Arts and Humanities are greater than many think and universities that pursue them will enjoy an advantage over those who do not. Colleges with innovative and dynamic attitudes toward growth and improvement -- alert to the need for creatively publicizing their value to the larger society -- will set the national agenda in the area of Arts and Humanities development. The College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland is convinced of its importance to state and society and aggressively seeks to be the leader in Arts and Humanities education at both undergraduate and graduate levels.

To realize this goal of becoming the leader in Arts and Humanities in the state and region and to join the national ranks of elite Arts and Humanities programs, we must realize and create opportunities for excellence. We currently boast a number of departments with strong national rankings and regard (English, History, Linguistics, and Music). Other departments (Art History, Communication, Philosophy, and Spanish and Portuguese) have the potential to achieve high national rankings. The College also has the opportunity to take a leadership role nationally in inter- and cross-disciplinary scholarship, which is critical to future knowledge production. We are fortunate to have a number of programs, interdisciplinary by nature (Women's Studies, Communication, and American Studies), whose faculty are committed to taking leadership roles in cross-cultural analyses, cultural difference focusing on race, gender, and ethnicity, and to emerging knowledge domains such as cyberculture. We are home to the Latin American Studies Center, and we have just initiated a new interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance Studies. Linguistics and Philosophy contribute to the vibrant and significant field of cognitive science. We also have the potential to become the leading national center in the study of the African Diaspora, which links English, History, Art History, and Women's Studies, among other departments. Finally, throughout the College there is a strong commitment to increasing scholarship related to international movements and globalization.

The College has a strong, recent record of success in creating and realizing opportunities that will enhance scholarly work. The Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Laboratory in Linguistics, the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the African Diaspora, the Center for Historical Studies, the Consortium for Race, Gender and Ethnicity, the Center for Political Communication and Civic Leadership, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities are all products of the last two years, all take advantage of partnerships with others, all thrive on external funding, and all exploit existing strengths in the College. In doing this, they join the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies (rapidly expanding into new areas of outreach). The very recent (July 2000) acquisition of the National Foreign Language Center has brought to the College a group of expert and dedicated researchers and policy analysts in Language studies who brilliantly complement our strengths in Second Language Acquisition and Application; and they too draw strength from state and private funding. What the College has done in these areas is the proverbial tip of the iceberg -- the opportunity is there for us to exploit.

The College boasts one of the largest groups of alumni of any college on campus -- approximately 24,000 -- giving Arts and Humanities the potential for substantially increased alumni participation and support. Governmental institutions of all kinds offer an array of potential partnerships exceeded only by the enormous opportunities presented by the presence of foreign embassies and institutes. Demand for our graduates and our specialties is nowhere greater than in the K-12 educational community of both local counties and the state as a whole. Increasing demand for Arts and Humanities graduates who possess the right combination of intelligence, education, and specialized skills will reward those colleges who creatively and innovatively best prepare their graduates for the challenges of the world. Possessing as we do the finest teachers in the University, the College is poised to compete more successfully than ever before for the best students in the state of Maryland and the nation. This college is well grounded in each of these areas and is well positioned to take full advantage of these opportunities.

Threats

Success not only breeds success; it also makes us vulnerable to "raids" from other academic institutions. We must devote resources to our retention efforts for our outstanding faculty while simultaneously recruiting more. Economic good times are unlikely to go on indefinitely. The memory of the economic downturn of the early 1990's should be warning enough against complacency. Our best defense against future rescission will be the construction of an excellent College rooted in a highly productive faculty, high quality students, strong alumni and legislative friends, and the respect of our peers.

INITATIVE ONE: Continue to elevate the quality of undergraduate education in order to provide all students an enriched and challenging educational experience.

The past six years have brought a significant improvement -- across the Campus and within the College -- in the undergraduate student population. The University Honors Program, Honors Humanities, and the various College Park Scholars Programs have brought to UMCP a more talented group of undergraduate students than ever before. We need to find the most effective ways to expose this body of talented undergraduates to the resources of our equally talented research faculty, to find ways to take advantage of the new Performing Arts Center, to exploit the national and international opportunities afforded by our location, and to leverage the pioneering work in the uses of information technology in MITH. Specifically we propose to:

	Increase opportunities for students to gain a significant international experience, particularly study-abroad opportunities in Winter Term and Summer Sessions.
	Seek additional ways for students to take advantage of the special circumstances provided by a world-class research university and increase substantially the ways for students to become involved in research with faculty members.
	Encourage academic units to increase the number of academically based teaching, outreach, internship, and fellowship opportunities that leverage our locational advantage in the Baltimore-Washington region.
	Ensure that the highest academic standards be maintained in all Arts and Humanities courses; and expand training and support for curricular redesign emphasizing student participation and interaction, team-based problem solving, and the innovative pedagogical uses of information technology.
	Raise an endowment for undergraduate scholarships sufficient to ensure that no student admitted to the College has to leave solely for economic reasons or is forced to take employment to an extent that impairs academic progress.
	Take increased advantage of the special educational opportunities provided by the small classes in many Arts and Humanities disciplines.
	Take advantage of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center to strengthen undergraduate programs in Dance, Music, and Theatre.

INITIATIVE TWO: Build a strong college-wide culture of excellence in graduate and professional education, research, scholarship, and the creative and performing arts.

Our goal is to equal or surpass the peer institutions against which we measure ourselves in the rankings of our programs. We recognize that the sine qua non is a highly visible, world-class research faculty. We have committed ourselves to building a first-rate faculty and have stepped up our recruiting efforts in the past three years, bringing in fifty-five new tenured or tenure-track faculty, and are searching for another twenty this year. Our standards for appointment and also for the promotion and tenure of these faculty have become increasingly rigorous. One result of this is that our best graduate students in many disciplines are already as strong or stronger than those at our peer institutions. Yet as we seek aggressively to improve the overall quality of the research faculty of the College, we must also improve the compensation packages the College offers to attract and retain talented faculty. We must similarly improve the graduate stipends and fellowships that will enable us to continue attracting excellent graduate students. And we must find ways of nurturing and mentoring those top-flight graduate students through our programs and into successful professional placements. In order to achieve these goals we intend to:

	Increase the competitiveness of our faculty compensation packages to enable us to recruit and retain the very best faculty; and raise our average faculty salaries to the 75th percentile of AAU public universities (85th percentile of Carnegie I institutions).
	Ensure that our graduate assistant stipends and teaching loads are competitive with our aspirational peers, and review the distribution of graduate assistant resources throughout the College.
	Strengthen all programs within the College and ensure that key programs are commensurate in quality and national reputation with our aspirational peers.
	Ensure that the learning environment, faculty mentoring, and other support for our graduate students, is comparable to that provided by our aspirational peers; make the professional placements of our graduate students comparable to the placements of those graduating from our peers.
	Take advantage of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center to strengthen our graduate programs in Dance, Music, and Theatre.
	Increase the number of endowed chairs and professorships in the Arts and Humanities.

INITIATIVE THREE: Insure a College environment that is inclusive as well as diverse and that fosters a spirit of community among faculty, staff, and students.

The College of Arts and Humanities has every right to be proud of its record in promoting diversity. Many of our disciplines focus on the understanding of cultures other than our own; we are the collegial home of the Women's Studies Department and the Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity; we were the academic birthplace of the Committee on Africa and the Americas. The Latin American Studies Center and Spanish Department have mounted an ongoing outreach program to local Hispanic communities. This commitment to inclusiveness is reflected in the composition of our faculty. At the close of the 1980s the College of Arts and Humanities boasted sixteen black faculty, twelve Hispanic faculty, and five Asian faculty. A decade later we have twenty-five black faculty, sixteen Hispanic faculty and fifteen Asian faculty, an increase of 70% in a single decade. Inclusiveness is part of the culture of the College of Arts and Humanities. It is important that we recognize that such evidence of a culture of inclusiveness is only a start. We must build upon it, and we must never take it for granted. We must:

	Establish and disseminate procedures to facilitate "opportunity hires" and develop specific retention mechanisms for members of under-represented groups; work to broaden the pool of candidates at all levels.
	Provide financial and administrative support for fields and initiatives in which we have a strong cadre of ethnic minority scholars, and work to increase public awareness of the College's success in this area.
	Increase the racial diversity of the administrative infrastructure of the College both in the Dean's office and in the departments.
	Increase the amount of scholarship aid for graduate students and reward the achievement of diversity in the allocation of individual student aid and of block grant awards.
	Promote alumni relations that stress the importance of alumni as members of the College and University family and as an important resource to students and faculty.

INITIATIVE FOUR: Engage the College more fully in outreach and collaborative partnerships with the greater community.

Our location within the Baltimore-Washington corridor argues powerfully for finding new ways to engage the community. This will, of course, include bringing that community to campus when the Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts becomes fully operational. But the process of engagement is a two way street. It has long taken the form of scholarly partnerships of mutual advantage between the Campus and the intellectual, cultural, and research institutions of the area (the Smithsonian, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Folger Shakespeare Library, to name a few). In recent years, the College has also built an increasingly successful record - through such programs as CAST, Theatre East and West, the Literacy Internship Project and the extensive interface with Northwestern High School -- of collaborative partnerships making the expertise of our faculty available to the educational community of the surrounding area. All of these linkages with our external partners offer us a starting point upon which we can build in the coming years. We must:

	Work with the Office of International Programs to integrate our many international initiatives under a coherent vision and strategy that acknowledge our locational advantages and systematically engage the international and diplomatic community of Washington, DC.
	Promote collaboration with the cultural and research institutions in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and beyond.
	Increase dramatically the support for and the number of excellent and highly visible professional and scholarly conferences, seminars, and workshops held within the College each year.
	Make the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center a magnet for performers and audiences throughout Maryland and the Washington region.

INITIATIVE FIVE: Ensure an administrative, operational, and physical infra-structure that fully supports a first-class university.

Much of the effort in shoring up the infrastructure of the College will ultimately come from the University as a response to our continuing quest for increased fiscal resources. We must dedicate ourselves to the efficient use of such resources as we have, human as well as fiscal. Crucial here will be the tandem efforts of striving to identify and gain from state and non-state sources the financial resource base to allow our units to carry out their missions and striving to make the very best use of our pool of human resources to increase the professionalism and service orientation inherent in every transaction undertaken by the faculty, staff, and administrators within the College. We will:

	Examine the adequacy of current operating budgets and staffing levels for fulfilling the missions of all College units, and, to the extent that resources allow and in line with College priorities, adjust operating budgets and staffing levels as necessary.
	Ensure that the physical appearance and the functionality of all College offices and classrooms are brought up to and maintained at the highest standard.
	Ensure that all public information representing the College - whether paper, video, or IT -- is of the very highest quality. Be especially vigilant to keep the websites representing the College and its units user friendly, accurate, and exciting.
	Continue improving the IT capabilities and infrastructure of the College, seeking new ways to meet ongoing needs; and continue to invest in training to enable the faculty, staff and students to take advantage of enhanced IT capabilities.
	Promote a uniform spirit of professionalism in all College units that demands and delivers the highest quality of service in every administrative process to every internal and external "client"; and provide the resources to make this possible.
	Ensure the participation of staff in departmental planning and decision making and recognize staff members as important stakeholders.
	Engage all departments in the fund raising process and create the collaborative environment that encourages major gifts and annual giving from alumni and other potential partners.