Reading Matters, Vol. 12, Issue 7

From (under) the Chair's Desk

What fascinating goings on at the upper levels! Who knows whether we are going to have a President/Provost/Board of Regents even by the time you read this? As those at the top of the university structure go through whatever gyrations they find necessary, it makes me think of keeping our own departmental house in order. I’m pleased to report that advising and registration for Spring appears to be progressing smoothly, with a pleasingly even registration pattern. Coming up in the final teaching week of semester will be renewed discussion of Outcomes Assessment and an initial discussion of a Creative Writing Track within the English major (and my apologies for the busyness of next week’s rearranged meeting schedule). Early next semester, we will need to discuss our request for new faculty in the context of a hiring plan (and who knows what the budget situation will look like by then) and also our strategic assessment of our graduate programs, both due in February. As a context for the latter, in particular, and to some extent for all four discussions, this issue of Reading Matters begins with the first half of a fairly exhaustive review of what, in the planning business, they appear to call data—the numbers that describe and contextualize our graduate programs and everything we do as a department. That is followed by an account of a different initiative in progress—updating the website. And as you contemplate a dizzying week of meetings, of final classes, and of grading, don’t forget that the week ends with promise of conviviality at the departmental winter party at the home of Barbara Eckstein, 814 Ronalds, Friday, December 8, 5:30-7:30 p.m. I’ll look forward to seeing you there…

Graduate Student Number Matters, part 1

CLAS is undertaking a strategic assessment of departmental graduate programs with the idea that such an assessment can help in deliberations concerning new faculty lines, in allocating graduate assistantships and other resources, and in departmental reviews. In 2-3 pages we are going to need by February to summarize the mission of our Ph.D. and MFA programs and answer questions about the Admissions Processes and Criteria, the Program Size and Graduate Student Support, the Program Outcomes, and conclude with a candid analysis of the current strengths and weaknesses of the department’s graduate degree programs. In some ways, this should be fairly straightforward (“our graduate programs are about the right size and they are very good”), although it obviously calls for some rhetorical finesse (“no, they’re really very very good, honest”). The whole exercise is undergirded with a huge heap of numbers and data that is offputting in its bulk and format but, to my mind, actually really interesting. Some data has been provided by the Graduate College, some is available in the statistics maintained by the Office of the Registrar, and this has led me to looking at yet more sources to find some more, including our own records and the last strategic assessment plan. My purpose in the present little essay is simply to present these numbers. In doing so, I hope to inform subsequent discussion of our strategic assessment of graduate programs. Even more than that, though, I hope that consciousness of this data can help us in all of our policy decisions as it helps us better understand who we are.

I should immediately add one caveat. I find some of the information here fascinating, but I’m enough of a humanities type that I can only make sense of it discursively or in really clunky low-tech charts. I realize that there are far more slick ways of presenting this info, but that somehow doesn’t quite register for me. So, please bear with the low production.

And a second caveat: do you spot any errors or fallacies here? I’ve found a number of mistakes and I’m hoping that by sharing the data I can get things as accurate as possible before using this for our strategic assessment.

SIZE OF THE PROGRAMS
Here are the number of students as reported in the Office of the Registrar Profile of Students, Fall edition (see http://www.registrar.uiowa.edu/profiles/default.aspx).

NUMBER IN PH.D. PROGRAM

DEGREES AWARDED

2005-06	Ph. D. 9 (5 men, 4 women)	terminal MA 6	MFA 9
2004-05	Ph. D. 11 (4 men, 7 women)	terminal MA 0	MFA 5
2003-04	Ph. D. 7 (2 men, 5 women)	terminal MA 4	MFA 8
2002-03	Ph. D. 9 (3 men, 6 women)	terminal MA 0	MFA 5
2001-02	Ph. D. 14 (7 men, 7 women)	terminal MA 1	MFA 13
2000-01	Ph. D. 15 (1 man, 14 women)	terminal MA 0	MFA 9
1999-2000	Ph. D. 12 (6 men, 6 women)	terminal MA 1	MFA 5

For comparison, here are some indications of the size of the undergraduate population:

NUMBER OF DECLARED ENGLISH MAJORS

FALL 2006: 992
FALL 2005: 1018
FALL 2004: 997
FALL 2003: 998
FALL 2002: 1057
FALL 2001: 1075
FALL 2000: 1071

NUMBER OF ENGLISH MAJORS GRADUATED (and minors awarded)

FALL 2006: 291 (+ 45 minors)
FALL 2005: 280 (+ 42 minors)
FALL 2004: 267 (+ 41 minors)
FALL 2003: 264 + 30? (+ 57 minors)
FALL 2002: 270 + 30? (+ 46 minors)
FALL 2001: 259 + 30? (+ 62 minors)
FALL 2000: 286 + 30? (+ 46 minors)
[NOTE: Before 2003, the Office of the Registrar only provides graduation numbers for students who declared English as their first major. Once they started including second majors as well, we had 29, 34, and 29 of those, which leads me to guess that figures from Fall 2003 back underreport by about 30.]

NUMBER OF ENGLISH FACULTY
as recorded by CLAS, representing all commitments to faculty lines that are in the English Department, including folks on leave of any kind, in Full Time Equivalents (i.e. FTEs):

FALL 2006: 47.85
FALL 2005: 44.6
FALL 2004: 41.6
FALL 2003: 41.6
FALL 2002: 43.1
FALL 2001: 42.6
FALL 2000: 44.1

ANALYSIS

The Office of the Registrar has been reporting the number of students in the English Department in a consistent way since Fall 2000, which was the year when they separated out Writers’ Workshop and NWP graduate students from the English count. In that period, the number of graduate students registered for the Ph.D. and MA in Literary Studies within the department has remained strikingly steady at about 110, +/-7. The number of Ph.D.s granted each year has also been fairly consistent, with a perhaps meaningful drop from the 1999-2002 figures of 12-15 and the 2002-06 figures of 9-11, probably reflecting a shrinking of the Ph.D. program that occurred in the early 1990s. In the same years, the size of the NWP MFA program has grown, with a 2000-04 norm of about 32 students (+/-4) to what may be a new norm of about 42 students (+/-2) reflected in the 2004-06 figures. Presumably the year of completion of an MFA is unpredictable, explaining the variety in the number graduating each year. I’m not sure why the number of terminal MAs spiked last year—again, the pattern looks unpredictable to me. Over the same period, our undergraduate program has remained roughly stable at a thousand majors (with slightly higher numbers in 2000-02).

In terms of the composition of the graduate group, it is clear that women outnumber men, if by only a little in the Ph.D. program and more so in the NWP MFA program. The number of under-represented minorities in both tracks has been growing, now standing at 11% in the MFA program, and 15% in the Ph.D. program. The Office of the Registrar breaks down the minority figures into four groups and the Ph.D. program has seen the biggest increase in African American Ph.D. students, who currently constitute 10 of the 17 who self-identify as members of minority groups.

The Graduate College has provided comparative data for the current exercise. Here it is evident that our 111 currently enrolled Ph.D. students (2 more are enrolled for the MA) makes us the second biggest Ph.D. program in CLAS, following Chemistry (with 133 enrolled Ph.D. students) and ahead of Psychology (with 91) and Math (with 82), and well ahead of, e.g., Communication Studies (with 62), History (with 63), and Political Science (with 45). The 44 currently enrolled in the NWP MFA program makes it about half the size of the Writers’ Workshop (with 98 MFA students) and somewhat smaller than Theatre Arts (with 49 MFAs), but bigger than Film Video Production (10 MFAs), Dance (10 MFAs), Translation Workshop (6 MFAs).

After some successful hiring, and with the reorganization of African American World Studies, we have seen a recent increase in our FTE count. Our current 47.85 FTE represents some 55 tenured or tenure track faculty with more than a 0% appointment in English. Those numbers are crucial in assessing the appropriateness of the size of the graduate program. One crude way is by adding up the number of graduate students registered in the department (157) and dividing them by the faculty FTE, to give a 2006 figure of 3.2 graduate students per faculty member. That is a calculation that was included in the recent strategic assessment of the university, where our 2002-05 average of graduate students to faculty came out at 3.6. That compares with an average in the humanities at the UI of 4.6 and an average in the social sciences of 5.0. Presumably a lower number is better, suggesting we can give more personalized attention to our graduates.

Perhaps a more meaningful way of looking at the question of size is to consider the nature of dissertations and of comprehensive exams. 40 Ph.Ds. were completed in the five years of 2001 to 2006, or an average of 8 per year. Related to our FTE count, that suggests an average of about one dissertation per FTE over a five-year period. Given our practice of discouraging untenured faculty from directing dissertations, it might be more meaningful to see that as about one dissertation per tenured faculty member with more than a 0% appointment. In practice, 19 faculty directed or co-directed a dissertation that came to completion in those years, with most directing just one. At the high end, two colleagues directed four (Emery and Folsom) and two colleagues directed five (Boos and Lutz) (1 x 8, 2 x 3, 3 x 4, 4 x 2, 5 x 2). Comprehensive exams look more evenly distributed across faculty. 51 Ph.D. comprehensive exams were held in the same five year period, for an average of about 10 per year, each of which called for five faculty, three with central involvement. At the level of courses, we are currently offering ten graduate-level courses aimed at Ph.D. students for Spring 2007. All graduate students are allowed to sign up in the first two days of preregistration. By the end of the first week, all ten English courses had more than minimum enrollment but none had filled, suggesting we are offering about the right number of courses for this population.

ADMISSIONS DATA

The Graduate College has given us back plentiful data about admissions which suggests that we are a pretty competitive program to get into. For the MA/Ph.D. class, starting in:

Fall 2005: applied 198, admitted 42, enrolled 19
Fall 2004: applied 190, admitted 45, enrolled 16
Fall 2003: applied 144, enrolled 18
Fall 2002: applied 121, enrolled 16
Fall 2001: applied 115, enrolled 14
Fall 2000: applied 118, enrolled 14

For the NWP MFA program, starting:
Fall 2005: applied 75, admitted 23, enrolled 14
Fall 2004: applied 77, admitted 25, enrolled 13
Fall 2003: applied 55, enrolled 9
Fall 2002: applied 59, enrolled 6
Fall 2001: applied 56, enrolled 9
Fall 2000: applied 42, enrolled 8

The Graduate College has also provided abundant data for analyzing our incoming class. I don’t think any of us are going to be all that interested in their gpa and GREs, although these were included in the university-wide strategic assessment so we have abundant comparative data demonstrating that our incoming students are significantly better than the norms for either this university or the profession. (For entering English students, which in this case appears to collapse together the Ph.D., the NWP MFA and the WW MFA, the average GPA in 2002-05 was 3.57 compared with 3.52 for the average of the Humanities in general at UI and 3.40 for the average of all graduate programs at the UI. The average total GRE score, adding together verbal, quantitative, and analytical, was 1879, which puts us 60 points above the UI humanities average, 113 points above the UI total graduate average, 123 points above the national average for English departments and 164 points above the national average for humanities.)

More meaningful to us, I think, are the numbers of competitive fellowships our incoming students received, namely, in the Ph.D. classes starting:

FALL 2006: 2 Presidential Fellows (of ??), 5 Graduate Merit Fellows (of 23)
FALL 2005: 3 Presidential Fellows (of 24), 5 Graduate Merit Fellows (of 24)
FALL 2004: 3 Presidential Fellows (of 30), 2 Graduate Merit Fellows (of 20)
FALL 2003: 5 Presidential Fellows (of 24), 3 Graduate Merit Fellows (of 19)
FALL 2002: 3 Presidential Fellows (of 19), 2 Graduate Merit Fellows (of 17)
FALL 2001: 1 Presidential Fellow (of 12), 3 Graduate Merit Fellows (of 15)
FALL 2000: 1 Presidential Fellow (of 19), 2 Graduate Merit Fellows (of 19).

(the number in brackets is the university total). For MFA students, the equivalent is the Iowa Arts Fellowship. Here is the number of incoming Iowa Arts Fellows in the NWP MFA class:

FALL 2006: 3 (of 19)
FALL 2005: 2 (of 13)
FALL 2004: 0 (of 13)
FALL 2003: 0 (of 13)
FALL 2002: 0 (of 9)
FALL 2001: 0 (of 12)
FALL 2000: 0 (of 8).

ANALYSIS

It is clear that we are a competitive program that attracts a healthy applicant pool for both the Ph.D. and the NWP MFA and are therefore able to be seriously selective in choosing our incoming class. The comparative data suggests that we are more competitive than most programs in the university, which presumably leads to us being able to select a higher caliber of students than most departments. That may be reflected in the GRE and gpa stats, although I refuse to take those very seriously, lacking confidence that they are a very astute assessment of quality. Rather, I think the high quality of our Ph.D. and MFA classes is evident in their person and may be evident in subsequent statistics, such a placement rate, publication rate, and perhaps even time to degree.

While that is the good news, there is also a challenge that is evident in this data and in the realities of the admission process: only slightly under half of those students that we admit choose to take up our offer and come to Iowa. The biggest single problem for recruitment seems to be our financial aid packages, which seem to be less competitive than what some comparable institutions are offering. This applies both to promising candidates offered Presidential and Graduate Merit fellowships and to those offered general admission. It makes it hard to plan for the size or to balance the interests of the incoming class, although I think experience suggests that those students who do enter the program will generally distribute fairly evenly, if not entirely predictably, across the areas of the department.

TO BE CONTINUED

Even those readers who are still with me by this stage are probably feeling number exhaustion. Still to come are figures on time to completion, a somewhat vexed statistic that the Graduate College and CLAS are both insisting that we take seriously; financial aid data (what proportion of our graduates are teaching what programs for how long?); some attempt at quantifying the quality of our graduate students (e.g. publication rates, success at winning fellowships and prizes); and placement data. I will report on all of these in the next Reading Matters and draw a few conclusions that may inform our strategic assessment of our graduate programs. If you have questions or suggestions based on any of this, do let me know.

Website Matters

Isn’t it striking how crucial the website is these days for presenting our professional face? I’m forever getting frustrated at department websites across the country and throughout the world that don’t give me quick access to some form of faculty profile and e-mail address, which is usually what I’m looking for. I also realize that our graduate students are increasingly coming to select us as a department on the strength of information revealed on our website. And I’m surely not alone in suspecting that most of my undergraduates think research begins and ends at a terminal rather than in front of some printed matter. The news on that one is that I’m increasingly coming to think they may be right!

In this context, you will likely have noticed discussions throughout the semester about maintaining and revitalizing the English Department website, http://english.uiowa.edu/. Most of us are agreed that we have a pretty good site—with thanks, above all, to Brooks Landon, who made this such a priority, and to Karla Tonella who has maintained the site. I especially like the ease of access to our faculty profiles at http://english.uiowa.edu/faculty/index.html, and that one can choose different levels of detail there, either stopping at the initial brief bio-description or clicking down to cv, publications, and courses. More on those in a minute, but first let me encourage you all to click on your own profile. If (like me) you haven’t touched this for the five years or so that it has been in place, and if it now looks a little out-of-date, let me encourage you to send an updated statement (and picture if you like) to Karla Tonella (karla-tonella@uiowa.edu), who will be happy to post such statements whenever she receives them.

I also have two systemic suggestions for maintaining the currency of information on the site, both now discussed and approved by the executive committee. The first concerns the curriculum vitae. With one small update, my one on the website appears to date from 2002, which now looks to me embarrassingly outdated, but not quite embarrassing enough for me to act to replace it. To make that process of replacement painless and straightforward, I propose that when the chair collects paper and electronic copies of faculty cvs every year, he or she pass along the complete run of electronic copies to our webmeister for placing on the website, replacing the cv there. That will become the default system. I understand that some colleagues do not care to share with the world their cv as formatted according to the CLAS and university guidelines. In such a case, you are most welcome to provide a different cv, which I’ll forward for mounting on the website, or to request that your old cv remain in place. But it will be most straightforward and the greatest economy of effort to simply submit one cv each year and know that it will serve multiple duties. I will remind you of all this when the annual request for cvs goes out, most likely in late January or February.

The other systemic suggestion relates to syllabuses. It is CLAS policy that the department collect all syllabuses at the beginning of each semester and keep these on file (http://www.clas.uiowa.edu/faculty/teaching/classroom_p&p/syllabus_etc.shtml). These prove extremely useful if a faculty member is unexpectedly sick or if there is some question about a class. But those syllabuses could be yet more useful if they were more accessible. A straightforward way of doing this with no extra work for faculty is to gather an electronic copy of the syllabus at the start of the semester and to mount these for each faculty member under the faculty profile. In most cases these syllabuses would feature all the standard material describing the course along with the schedule. They need not be the main electronic home for the course, although they could be (i.e. this syllabus would go into place regardless of any ICON or other course site, to which it could offer a link). Such an electronic syllabus provided at the start of the semester would satisfy the CLAS requirement for the department to gather syllabuses and therefore require no extra effort by faculty, yet make them much more useful as more available. In planning the reading for a course one could see what texts students covered in what might likely serve as a preceding course (e.g. one could see at a glance the texts covered in an Introduction to the Novel course and avoid those in deciding the reading for an American Novel course, etc). Again, though, if anyone wants to opt out of having their syllabuses visible to the world, they can instead continue to hand over a paper copy of the syllabus. I’ll remind you of this again ahead of the start of next semester.

In addition to those two changes in our systems, I have some additional suggestions based on looking at numerous sites and conversation with our webmeister, Karla Tonella. The first comes from the realization that people look at websites for the content that they contain. No surprise there, of course, but an implication of that is to suggest everyone consider posting some of their published research on our website, if this is legal for you in terms of copyright. One brilliant example of this is provided by Kevin Kopelson, who includes the introduction or part of a chapter from each of his books at http://english.uiowa.edu/faculty/kopelson/publications.html, presumably whetting the reader’s appetite enough to move from screen to library or bookstore. For a more high-tech portfolio, see Robin Hemley’s site at http://english.uiowa.edu/faculty/hemley/index.html, which includes both essays and audio interviews. If you publish on open-access electronic sites, this is also the place to put a link to your full text, as with Laura Rigal’s essay placed on the History Cooperative site and linked at http://english.uiowa.edu/faculty/rigal/publications.html. For help with getting your work posted somewhere on our site, contact Karla Tonella.

A more tentative suggestion is to remember the English Department website when you are thinking about how to present your course material. There are multiple possibilities for course materials. The chief one suggested by the university is to use Iowa Courses Online, or ICON (see http://icon.uiowa.edu/index.shtml), which has the advantages of password protection for copyright material and various teacherly features pre-established in the site’s architecture. If you prefer, or as a companion to ICON, you can mount material on the English site at english.uiowa.edu/courses. Here you can either use the space on your own or get help from Karla Tonella. You can access your course directory with your HawkID and password. The most powerful and flexible approach is to use ICON for password-protected functions like homework submission, copyright-protected readings and grade posting but to use english.uiowa.edu/courses/ for course descriptions, reading lists, and other materials that would be better to make public. See the sites of Florence Boos and Dee Morris for wonderful examples of this, http://english.uiowa.edu/courses/boos/index.html and http://english.uiowa.edu/courses/morris/index.html. Again, ask Karla Tonella for help in posting teaching materials to the English site, although bear in mind that I may need to ask her to prioritize general work on the website over spending time on specific faculty courses if the flow of requests for work on the web increases substantially.

I’m sure there are other ways of improving our site. One small internal convenience I have long pondered is placing executive committee minutes somewhere on the faculty resource pages, along with some of the material available to faculty on the shared drive—but is that worth the effort and should those be visible to the public? Other parts of the site will see overhaul as they are updated (see the NWP link, http://english.uiowa.edu/nonfiction/index.html, for part of the site that is particularly energetic at present). And the website is always going to be a work in progress, with some parts more up-to-date than others (thank heavens we managed to miss the fad for moving banners and complicated drop-down menus), and finally a competition between what is desirable and the time and energy available to make the desirable a reality. If you can see economical ways of making our web presence yet stronger, do let me know. It certainly serves us all to have a strong departmental presence on the web.

Graduate Matters

News from the Graduate College (via Barbara Eckstein): That NRC faculty questionnaire should be arriving in your inboxes any day now. As you count the days, remember to update your cv so that we put the best face on the department. And if you don’t know where your doctoral students got jobs, please contact Cherie and the Graduate Office will provide that information. (Robin is the best source for MFA graduate placement.) The deadline has been extended until January 15. More later. Barbara

Nov. 30 (Thr.), 3:45 p.m., Gerber Lounge—DCG Meeting to discuss promotion and tenure cases and fifth-year reviews.

Nov. 30 (Thr.), 7:30 p.m., Art Building West, Auditorium – Robert Rosenblum will give a lecture titled “From Stubbs to Delacroix: Animal Liberation in Romantic Art.” Professor Rosenblum is the Henry Ittleson, Jr., Professor of Modern European Art, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and Stephen and Nan Swid Curator of Twentieth-Century Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. His lecture is linked to the UI Art Museum "Animal Expressions" exhibit and is hosted by the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Colloquium, International Programs, the UI Museum of Art, and the School of Art and Art History. All are invited to attend a reception in the Willis Atrium of the Museum after the lecture. CANCELLED

Dec. 1 (Fri.) – Deadline for submissions to the Obermann Symposium "Obscenity."

Dec. 6 (Wed.), 7:30 p.m., Gerber Lounge—"Writers Gone Public," the first of two evenings of readings by undergraduate students in nonfiction writing courses

Dec. 7 (Thr.), 3:45-5:15 p.m., Gerber Lounge—Full Faculty Department Meeting: Outcomes Assessment

Dec. 7 (Thr.), 7:30 p.m., Gerber Lounge—"Writers Gone Public," the second of two evenings of readings by undergraduate students in nonfiction writing courses

Dec. 8 (Fri.), 2:30-4:00 p.m., 331 EPB – The Early Modern Reading Group will discuss a chapter from "Collaboration in the Marketplace: Writers, Publishers, and Printers in Early Modern London" by Stacy Erickson. To be rescheduled in the spring.

Dec. 8 (Fri.), 3:30-5:00 p.m., 109 EPB—Full Faculty Department Meeting: Creative Writing Track. Please note the change in location and time.

Dec. 8 (Fri.), 5:30-7:30—Departmental Winter Party (faculty and staff), 814 Ronalds Street

Jan. 9-15, 2007 – Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy, directed by Teresa Mangum (English) and David Redlawsk (Political Science)

Feb. 22 (Thr.) - Feb. 24 (Sat.), 2007 – Studies in Sound: Listening in the Age of Visual Culture, an interdisciplinary graduate conference hosted by the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature. The conference will feature Caryl Flinn as the keynote speaker as well as "The Audible Picture Show," a performance of sound works for a "dark screen." The Call for Papers is available here.

Mar. 1-4, 2007 – Obermann Symposium "Obscenity," organized by Loren Glass

March 15, 2007 – Submission deadline for the 7th annual Craft Critique Culture Conference. Details available here.

Apr. 5-7, 2007 – Poetries Symposium, beginning with a keynote lecture by Cary Nelson

Apr. 19 (Thr.), 2007, 3:45-5:15 p.m., Ritchey Ballroom, IMU – The Graduate Awards Ceremony

Apr. 27 (Fri.), 2007, 3:30-5:00 p.m., the Museum of Art's Lasansky Print Room and Willis Atrium – Undergraduate Honors Award Ceremony. Thesis advisors: Please note this date on your calendars and that this year the event is scheduled on a Friday rather than a Thursday as has been the tradition in the past.

Other Calendars

Future Issues

Please send any items for Reading Matters or the departmental calendar to Carolyn Jacobson at carolyn-jacobson@uiowa.edu. Reading Matters will appear every other Thursday, and submissions should be received by 5 p.m. the day before. Please send submissions for the next issue by 5 p.m. on Wed., Dec. 13. Thanks very much.

From (under) the Chair's Desk

Graduate Student Number Matters, part 1

Website Matters

Graduate Matters

Publications, Presentations, and other Faculty Matters

News Matters

Staff Matters

Department Calendar

Other Calendars

Future Issues