Dean of the College Maud Mandel and Vice President for Campus Life and Student Services Margaret Klawunn discussed the initiatives they intend to pursue in the coming year at the Undergraduate Council of Students general body meeting Wednesday evening.
Appearing before the council for the first time as dean, Mandel said, “Once I took on the position, I really stopped working directly with Brown students.” But UCS, she added, “is one of the forums where I can still really talk to Brown students.”
Mandel named three main areas where she intends to focus her attention.
The first issue addressed was the Engaged Scholars Initiative, a program run out of the Swearer Center for Public Service that integrates classwork with community service in order to connect outside work “more deeply to things that you’re doing in the classroom,” Mandel said. Though these unique tracks are currently available in only four concentrations, “ideally the goal is every department” having access to them, she said.
Mandel’s second topic was advising. “Advising at Brown is like the Middle East peace for every American president,” she said, joking that many deans promise to fix it “and then go limping out of office.” Though she said Brown first-years were happier with advising in past years than those at other universities, Mandel expressed her desire to enhance the program based on the premise that advising and the open curriculum go together in a unique way.
“Instead of being the president who does nothing for Middle East peace, I’d rather be the one who focuses on certain pieces of it,” she said.
Lastly, Mandel described the general project of “how to enhance the process of how students learn at Brown,” especially through the creation of a learning center where students could more creatively link classroom education with certain learning skills. Looking forward, the project could potentially “over time revolutionize how we think about learning skills at Brown,” she added.
Klawunn also started her remarks by emphasizing the importance of UCS as a source of student input to administrative “decision-making, and even ways that we decide priorities.”
“Dean Mandel supports your learning inside the classroom, and I’m responsible for your experience outside the classroom,” she added.
Klawunn addressed her role in continuing to focus on campus issues from last year that still affect students. “As a campus, we didn’t do the best job we could do last year about different topics like race, privilege, class and gender identities,” she said.
“We had a spring where sexual assault was a roiling issue, we also had a summer that saw Ferguson, Missouri, and Gaza literally explode,” she said. Those varied issues made administrators question, “‘How do we provide a lot of opportunities for conversations on topics like that?’” she said, referencing the administration’s new Transformative Conversations@Brown Project.
After discussing their agendas, Mandel and Klawunn answered questions from council members. General body member John Brewer ’17 asked about opportunities for students to work with administrators on advising. Mandel responded that the main body currently addressing the issue was a “working group of DOC staff” that plan on holding open discussions such as “UCS lunches or something where you could talk to the committee about your experiences.”
General body member Sam Karlin ’16 said certain departments had shown themselves to be particularly good at advising, citing departments that allowed students to choose their own concentration advisers.
A couple of general body members also spoke about increasing the number of faculty members of color. Timothy Ittner ’18 asked about hiring faculty members “to mirror the student body.”
Mandel responded that since potential candidates need “to be in certain positions already, of a certain caliber,” the University often looks to its rising-star graduate students of color for potential faculty positions. “After (post-doctoral students) have been here for two or three years, they can be a target for hiring,” she said. “I think a lot of departments will take advantage of that.”
General body member Justice Gaines ’16 asked about compensation and recognition for “faculty of color (who) bear a really heavy burden of talking to students of color, because they’re really the only ones for them to talk to.”
“I would like to say that students of color would feel comfortable getting advising from a broad range of faculty, but … that’s not how things are,” Mandel said. “The best way I think is to reward the work” of existing faculty members, she continued.
Mandel and Klawunn also both described pending plans to renovate the Sharpe Refectory. Since data has shown the Ratty to be a central hub for student life, “we don’t need to do a renovation that fixes the building but doesn’t give you the food that you want to eat,” Klawunn said.
After discussing ideas of a temporary tent serving food on Benevolent Street while construction went on, administrators decided they would favor making permanent improvements to other eateries such as the Verney-Woolley Dining Hall and Josiah’s to make them more accessible and attractive during the Ratty’s renovation.
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