A first conversation with President-elect Jill Beck, in which we learn that she already says "we, us, and ours" when talking about Lawrence.
Lawrence Today magazine, Summer 2004
Jill Beck, former dean of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at the University
of California, Irvine and current director of the da Vinci Research Center
for Learning Through the Arts at UCI, will take office on July 1 as the 15th
president of Lawrence University. As this issue was going to press, Lawrence
Today had an opportunity to pose some questions about her values, her beliefs,
and her aspirations for Lawrence.
Tell us about your background. What professional
and personal experiences do you bring to your work here?
My years as a director of theatre and dance have been very influential on
my work in education. In general, I can say that my work as a director has
led
me to endorse a collaborative and consultative approach to leadership, which
I intend to use at Lawrence.
Sometimes it is difficult for people to imagine how a background as a performing-arts
director can be a preparation for academic leadership. But consider that
directors work with large numbers of people who contribute various kinds
of expertise
to any given theatre production: all of the members of the cast; the lighting,
costume, and set designers; the choreographer and music director; the marketing
and publicity staff; and others.
The director needs to enable that group of diverse individuals to work together
as a collaborative team, both in the development of a vision for the stage
production and in the implementation of all the components of that vision.
The final production needs to come in on budget, and it certainly needs to
open on time. The results are subject to public review and are judged on
their merits as to whether the production makes a contribution to culture.
These are all modes of working that translate effectively to university leadership — interacting
collaboratively with different groups to develop a shared vision, establishing
timelines and budgets and adhering to them, and pausing periodically for review
and comment, with the goal of building a strong, deep educational culture.
Ideally, the members of the group, and the director, feel that they have
had a creative experience in the process.
What do you see as the challenges and opportunities before you?
Higher education throughout the country is at a difficult point, with endowment
incomes dropping, expenses increasing, and expectations continuing to rise.
I’ve just finished reading an essay by D. Bruce Johnstone, the respected
former chancellor of the State University of New York system, who asserts
that both private
and public higher education in the United States are facing a period of damaging
and intractable austerity.
There is no question that I am coming to Lawrence to ensure its future stability
and success to the very best of my ability. One crucial resource that our
college needs is a significantly more substantial endowment. A challenge
for all of us who love Lawrence will be to work together to guarantee its
financial
strength.
I look forward with enthusiasm to my work with alumni and other supporters
of Lawrence to build a foundation of increased financial stability for the
college. We need to ensure that opportunities remain undiluted for our students,
faculty, and staff to immerse themselves in the intellectual vitality, creative
initiatives, interdisciplinary inquiry, and personal growth that define education
at Lawrence.
I plan to begin meeting early in the fall with a number of groups concerned
with Lawrence’s future. We need to approach the funding problem from
two perspectives simultaneously. First, what are our fund-raising priorities;
what parts of education at Lawrence need increased support? Second, what
would be the specific consequences at Lawrence of failing to address the
climate
of sustained austerity that faces American higher education?
I am confident that, if we conduct productive dialogues about the kind of
future that we envision for
Lawrence, we can develop a plan for realizing our goals.
Coming from a large public university, what do you anticipate will be the
major personal adjustments you will have to make? How will Lawrence be different
from your recent experience?
In a large, public research institution, such as the University of California,
there are vast resources available to support ongoing work. However, there
is an equally vast bureaucracy, which often impedes getting work done that
is outside the routine, which can make innovation difficult.
One adjustment I will have to make will be to the scale of Lawrence, but
I anticipate this will have many positive aspects, such as working in a more
cohesive community and greater ability to have meaningful dialogue about
educational values.
I also expect that Lawrence will be more balanced in its respect for the
disciplines, with less bias in favor of the sciences. Let me quickly state
that I am a
supporter of the sciences and in fact have
worked
in the past year to raise public awareness of the teaching and research missions
of the College of Medicine at UCI.
However, because of the grant dollars that accompany big science, there is
a preferential tilt in public research universities toward these fields.
At Lawrence, I expect to find a healthier equivalency among fields of study,
setting
up an environment within which scholars from all fields generate both knowledge
and mutual respect.
How do you plan to “immerse yourself” in Lawrence — to
learn what you need to know about the college and its people in order to
be an effective president?
This process has already begun long distance, with assistance from a number
of sources.
The alumni kindly invited me to an event in Santa Monica that was part of
Rik Warch’s farewell tour, and that gave me the opportunity to meet Lawrence
graduates, family members of current students, and friends of the college.
I heard from them about the things that mattered most about their years at
Lawrence and the ways they reflect back upon the value of their Lawrence experiences.
Susan Richards, director of the library, thoughtfully provided books and
archival materials to read about Lawrence’s history, which contain some impressive
educational philosophy and a record of remarkable achievement.
I’ve been logging onto The Lawrentian over the Internet regularly, to
read the student editorials and opinion pieces and the campus news.
Dan Taylor [’63, the Hiram A. Jones Professor of Classics] kept me
and my husband, Rob, in the loop about the exciting adventures of LU
men’s
basketball. We found ourselves
already fiercely loyal to Lawrence during the basketball run.
A campus visit for three days in April helped me become more familiar with
college operations, and we had the pleasure of welcoming Bob Buchanan [’62]
from the Board of Trustees to California in May.
This process will, of course, accelerate in July, when we arrive in Appleton
and I can begin meeting people in earnest. The best way to get to know Lawrence
is to get to know as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, but
with genuine interest in who they are, the focus of their work, and their
aspirations for themselves, Lawrence, and their community. Social immersion,
if you will, as a necessary precursor to academic collaboration.
What strategies will you employ to balance being a college president with
also having a personal life? What do you do to unwind?
Rob and I enjoy being outdoors and taking long walks. We are in the habit
now of taking at least three walks a week that can be as long as 6-7 miles,
in
the extremely hilly town of Laguna Beach. I hope we’ll get some advice
about trails and interesting places to walk around Appleton. We also are interested
in getting back on ice skates and snowshoes, which we enjoyed very much during
our years in Montreal.
I really like to work, but I’m not a workaholic. I’ve never had
a problem stopping work and having good times with friends and family. To
unwind, I like to cook, enjoy some fine red wine, see a movie, attend a play,
go to
a gallery, curl up with a book or with my favorite weekly magazine, The
New Yorker. I also like to get on planes and travel. I hear that might come in
handy
as president
of Lawrence.
What was the last book you read for professional reasons? For recreation?
I’m just finishing Charles Breunig’s A Great and Good Work about
the history of Lawrence University. It’s very absorbing to read about
the approaches and contributions of past presidents — their differing
priorities, skills, and personalities. My initial image of Lawrence as a uniquely
important liberal arts college is being substantiated and becoming more nuanced
by reading this history.
An important professional collection I’ve just read is a series of
three essays in “Charting the Course: Earl V. Pullias Lecture Series
on the Future of Higher Education” out of the
University of Southern California.
Vincent Tinto, Distinguished Professor of Higher Education at Syracuse University,
has a very interesting piece about student involvement in learning. He writes
about the problem of “isolated learners,” whose learning in college
is disassociated from other students and also often takes place in courses
that are disconnected, so that subject areas are learned in isolation.
Freshman Studies at Lawrence strikes me as the prototype for the “involved
learning” that Tinto advocates. The question that follows is: How can
we keep the connections between fields and between people that make Freshman
Studies excel, as our students move through the rest of their college career?
For serious pleasure, I’m reading The Heirs of Molière, a series
of four plays edited and translated by Marvin Carlson, a former professor of
mine from CUNY’s superb doctoral program in theatre.
For sheer fun, I like to read in a slightly esoteric area: Swedish mystery
stories. The best are by Kurt Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall from
the 1960s, but Henning Mankell carries the torch now, and I stay current
with his
tales, the latest being The Return of the Dancing Master.
One view of the college or university presidency says that the president
should be the institutional “thinker-in-chief.” Do you agree,
and, if so, how will you try to fulfill this role?
I do agree with this view, in the sense that it is beneficial for the institution
to have someone at the helm who assumes responsibility for synthesizing all
of the details of the university into a “big picture” and
who presents that comprehensive viewpoint to the college community and to
external constituencies. The president needs to assimilate all of the components
of
the campus into a cohesive, meaningful whole that can be communicated powerfully
and persuasively. Referring back to my earlier answer, this is another example
of a parallel between the work of a theatre director and a university president.
As a former professor, I remain conscious of aspects of the university that
are the proper domain of the faculty, such as the curriculum. The president
as “thinker-in-chief” should not interfere in these areas. However,
it can be one of the creative functions of education leadership to see possibilities
and to suggest connections between work or programs that are happening on
different parts of the campus and that may have themes in common.
Two examples of this in my work at UCI were in the areas of art and technology,
and international programs.
As dean, I noticed that a number of professors were beginning to work independently
in the arts and technology. I brought these faculty members together, and
two results of this “grouping” were a new degree program in Arts,
Computation, and Engineering and a capital campaign objective for a Center
for Art and Technology (eventually funded by Rockwell International).
I also noticed that a number of professors were sending in reports about
research and creative work in international locations. I offered to supply
funding for
programs that would involve students in a professor’s international
work, and I funded subsequent proposals for a study and performance exchange
with
the Conservatoire National de Paris, for performance tours to Edinburgh and
Madrid, and for high-end computers that enabled students to collaborate with
their professor during his artistic residency in Japan.
If I had not been operating as “thinker-in-chief,” seeing the
patterns and possibilities in the gestalt of my school, these connections
might not have been made. They were made, and they ultimately
were to the benefit
of the faculty and students and added definition to our campus.
What achievement or achievements are you proudest of in your professional
or personal life?
Most of the work that I do is highly collaborative, but I am personally proud
to have created the ArtsBridge program, which began in 1996 at UCI, and which
is now at work in ten states.
ArtsBridge offers scholarship awards to outstanding arts students, who partner
with local schools to teach the arts to children and to create culminating
performances or exhibitions of the children’s work. ArtsBridge has
restored the arts to schools where they had been eliminated due to budget
cuts, and
the program has given university students the opportunity to grow as artists
while engaged with their community.
Current ArtsBridge projects include “Mapping the Beat,” a collaboration
between the University of California, San Diego and the San Diego schools,
in which students trace the migration of musical rhythms and styles. The National
Geographic Society supports this project. “Picturing Peace” is
an ArtsBridge project in digital photography and concept development, in
schools in Santa Ana, California, and Belfast, Northern Ireland, in collaboration
with
the University of Ulster and supported by Hewlett-Packard.
In your initial remarks to the Lawrence community, you stressed the
importance of “the basic questions of how the arts,
humanities, and sciences may share methods of understanding the world and
of how inquiry in one field can support inquiry in another.” How do
you envision Lawrence responding to these basic questions?
I believe it is helpful, as we search for better ways to teach and learn,
to continue to look for points of commonality among different fields of inquiry.
We can refer back to the essay by Tinto that I mentioned earlier on the inferiority
of “isolated learning,” and we can cite precedents at Lawrence,
including [former President] Henry Wriston’s statement that rigid departmental
boundaries can be hindrances to liberal arts education. It is desirable to
identify shared methods or questions among disciplines, in order to increase
the possibility for mutually beneficial associations and influence among
the content areas.
Let me offer an example. I was approached last year by the UCI College of
Medicine to think about whether studies in the arts could improve observation
skills
in medical students, so that young doctors could make better clinical decisions — i.e., diagnoses.
We held a meeting with several professors to discuss what the arts and medicine
might share in their decision-making processes. A study at Yale University
(by Dolev and Braverman) formed the basis for the discussion, which yielded
the insight that medical decision-making and aesthetic valuing both involve
steps such as close observation of multiple details, grouping of details
into patterns, initial interpretations, and
reference to historicity (the social context of the person or work of art)
prior to the
formation of summary opinion.
Both a course and a research project came from this discussion, to determine
if classes that relied upon a shared methodology for aesthetic valuing and
clinical decision-making could lead to better diagnosticians,
to more cultured doctors, to more empathetic physicians. That study culminates
this summer.
The point here is that disciplines that are frequently perceived in isolation
may, in fact, have a great deal in common. A liberal arts college is particularly
well positioned to establish connections between content areas and to use
these connections to enhance
the learning environment. Lawrence University already does this in Freshman
Studies
and in other ways. We could consciously build on this work to set a high
standard for liberal arts education that is very timely.
By taking advantage of Lawrence’s identity — its unique strengths
in the arts that couple with those in the sciences, social sciences, and
humanities — we
could respond to current calls for greater permeability between fields as
opportunities to showcase
our innovative approaches to teaching, learning, and research.
These questions occur to me in musing on this issue: Because of the unique
identity of Lawrence, do we in fact already have more students who double-major
or who major and minor in disciplines that cross the arts, liberal arts,
and sciences? Does the faculty see potential in addressing the question of
how
more integrated thinking can be mirrored in the daily scholarship of our
college? Is this an area in which Lawrence can excel among its peer institutions,
bringing
new ways of thinking and knowing from different disciplines into mutually
beneficial interaction?
What significance do you attach to your being the first woman president
in Lawrence’s history and how will that affect how you approach the
presidency, if at all?
On my first job interview after undergraduate school, I was advised that
the position I was applying for would go to a man, because men had families
to
support. (This was in 1971.) During graduate school, I was offered less fellowship
support than the men, with the explanation that I was married and my husband
would be taking care of me. (This was in 1975.) These sorts of overt discrimination
are impossible today, but there is more subtle
discrimination still at work against women, in the form of glass ceilings,
lower salaries, and exclusion from leadership cliques within organizations.
I am pleased to be the first woman president of Lawrence, because it offers
an opportunity to model a community with equal access,
and without
prejudice.