A message from the Dean
The goal of my deanship has been to move the College from a teaching-centered mission to a research-centered mission. This does not mean we are disregarding our teaching mission. On the contrary, by increasing the national competitiveness of our faculty we can offer cutting edge courses, programs, and research experiences to our students. In many ways, improvements have taken place. Besides creating communications intensive courses in all majors, the College has created a new communications studio where students receive guidance to prepare multimedia presentations. The ratio professors/instructors has increased, the number of graduate assistants has increased, the volume of nationally competitive proposals and grants has increased, and the research groups in the departments have been strengthened. In recent years, hiring, promoting and retaining highly competitive faculty has been strongly pursued in the college, resulting in marked faculty improvement.
We have also worked to improve the college’s diversity and breadth of intellectual inquiry. The College of Arts and Sciences has received new funds for an interdisciplinary cluster research initiative, Environments, Histories, Cultures: The South, the Caribbean, and Atlantic Worlds. New faculty will be hired, drawing on and developing LSU’s and Louisiana’s position as a multi-lingual, multi-cultural crossroads. One of the college’s new hires, distinguished critic, novelist, and editor, Myriam Chancy, will be working with this initiative. Professor Chancy joins a number of junior colleagues hired in the past year, including three joint appointments in African and African American Studies and History, English and Political Science, and four joint appointments in Women’s and Gender Studies in Sociology, Political Science, and English. A new undergraduate minor in Chinese Culture and Commerce has been created, and nine new faculty with research interests in China have been appointed in nine departments across the College of Arts and Sciences and the E.J. Ourso College of Business.
I intend to continue these improvements by having a superb student counseling office; facilitating the introduction of innovative courses and curricula; recruiting faculty of the highest caliber, both at the junior and the senior level; mentoring and supporting junior faculty so they achieve their fullest potential; retaining the most productive faculty as they progress from junior to senior level; maintaining high standards in hiring, and promotion and tenure; providing merit raises strongly influenced by productivity measures and on a regular basis; providing quality staff support with problem-solving attitude; fundraising; streamlining processes and optimizing the allocation of resources; and increasing the number of filled tenure track positions in areas of research strength with attention paid to interdisciplinary areas as new funding reaches the college.
