Professors at St. Lawrence University are reacting to Vice President and Academic Dean Alison Del Rossi’s administrative and department restructuring changes. Professors within the impacted departments have mixed responses to the new arrangements.
Dr. Sarah Ashpole, professor of Environmental Studies at SLU, said that it is currently unclear what the new structure will look like for her program and her role in it, having been its chair prior to the restructuring. Environmental Studies, Physics and Geology are being combined into a single department, while the same is happening for Music and Digital Media and Film as well as for Public Health, Sociology, Religious Studies and Anthropology. The consolidated programs may opt to keep their original heads in a multi-chair arrangement, but the original proposal involved a single chair for the whole unit, according to Ashpole.
“All of the restructuring is in the early days and much of the greater staff and faculty are still trying to understand the choice of [Del Rossi] to merge departments, the implications and possible consequences,” she said. “I hope that [Del Rossi] and [departments] affected will have some concrete assessment of the processes.”
Ashpole hopes that her program will not lose its interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary connections to the humanities and social sciences when combined with two other natural sciences, but she said that Environmental Studies faculty are all committed to keeping their identity as a department intact. She is looking forward to collaborating with the experiential learning styles of professors from the other departments, some of whom she met for the first time at the restructuring meeting. She’s excited by the potential of bringing back the Environmental Studies and Geology combined major and wants to try collaborating with the Global Studies department as well, although they are not grouped in the same unit.
The restructuring may pose challenges for the Physics program, which is merging with Geology and Environmental Studies, according to Physics Department Chair Aileen O’Donoghue. “It’s the Dean’s experiment,” she said. “This has been a top-down decision. This did not emerge out of the departments, and we’ll do our best to cope with it and to make it the best possible situation for students.”
O’Donoghue said that most Physics classes require a level of mathematical sophistication —like knowledge of calculus — that Geology and Environmental Studies do not. This could pose a problem when it comes to cross-listing interdisciplinary courses with those programs at the upper levels, because only a few introductory courses would be accessible to most Geology and Environmental Studies students.
O’Donoghue hopes collaboration between the programs can still work out. “For over 20 years, I taught a global climate class that was cross-listed with Environmental Studies and Geology,” she said. “I team-taught it with geologists and with someone from the anthropology department. So, we do share interests in cross-listed courses. We have an energy course that is cross-listed with Environmental Studies that’s accessible beyond the introductory level.” She added that her department is going to approach the restructuring “with as much hope and willingness to experiment as possible.”
Dr. Jayantha Jayman, professor of Global Studies at SLU, said that he was concerned after the Global Dialogue Center was closed as part of the restructuring to consolidate the faculty of smaller departments into one building. The Center served as an off-campus space for student communities to come together, a diversity and LGBTQ+ safe space, and included areas for computers, cooking, and faculty. The Center also provided a space for Jayman to connect with his students over meals and in his office.
Jayman believes that it is important for liberal arts students to have a separate space where they can engage with their peers in deeper dialogues about global issues. “In terms of global economy, it is really important to have a space to critique centers of power,” Jayman said. “Whether the centers are in Moscow or Beijing or Washington or somewhere in Europe, you [need] to have space to sit down and talk, [so that] learning is not only in the classroom.”
Along with losing a space for students to cultivate independent critical thought, Jayman is worried about Global Studies’ classroom space becoming too cramped if departments continue being consolidated. It is already hard to accommodate his 16 to 25-person classes this semester because of the renovations in Atwood, where Global Studies courses are usually housed. “While it may be that you want to consolidate things into a few buildings because of [a] smaller student body here and trying to save money, it’s really important to consider the importance of personal space,” Jayman said. “Humanities and Social science professors may need labs … but we do need space too, to engage the students.”
Jayman believes that students need personal space to be able to comfortably engage with each other, which is an important part of Global Studies classes. He added that people with disabilities are disadvantaged by the lower availability of spacious classrooms. Jayman himself has side pain that makes it difficult for him to get to the top of Richardson, where he has been forced to teach this semester. At the same time, he feels that he is encroaching on other professors’ space by having to move into their building.
To be able to solve these issues, Jayman said that he is not holding SLU accountable as much as the donors and trustees. He spoke about the importance of funding the liberal arts at this moment in history to disseminate a critical understanding of globalization, nationalism, and the positive and negative impacts of global processes on different groups of people. “I’m saying to the donors, do you understand that you need to make sure these institutions are really well-funded?” he said. “If you want a better world for global business, you need to invest in liberal arts and engage in the cutting-edge integration of different cultures, so we can operate seamlessly with each other, respecting each other.”