In an interview with The Herald Wednesday afternoon, Vice President for Campus Life and Student Services David Greene discussed some details of an evaluation of the mission and format of the Third World Transition Program conducted by an independent researcher. The report was completed near the end of the Fall 2004 semester by Brad Rose, who was contracted after a number of research groups submitted proposals at the request of the University, Greene said.
A major recommendation was to establish a faculty advisory board to the Third World Center, which was in fact established last year. Among other things, the new board helps to identify academic areas that can be part of programming for cultural months and connect student staffers with speakers of national prominence, Greene said.
The faculty on the advisory board are also charged with helping to "think about ways that the TWC could be fully integrated into the programs of the University" - another of the report's recommendations.
Also as a response to the evaluation, Barrymore Bogues, professor of Africana studies, worked with students to produce a video about the origins and current usages of the term "Third World." Greene said he has not seen the video yet, but Bogues and the students involved are thinking about how to "have broad dissemination (of the video) on the Web as a way of thinking about the sort of historical context and the current sociological context that's involved in using that term, and thinking about whether it's still relevant today," Greene said.
The report also recommended that TWTP be more directly linked to the academic and intellectual resources of the University. Response to this included four new TWTP programs this year on how to approach faculty, succeeding in the sciences, the Writing Center and how to develop proposals for internships.
One of the recommendations of the report "had to do with clarifying the mission of TWTP and communicating about that much more clearly than in the past," Greene said.
The report included "some survey research and ... some analysis of data," Greene said. "This was not a huge study, but it gave us some information to think about," he added. It's "the sort of thing we want to do on a regular basis with all our programs, is actually take a rigorous review of them," Greene said.
