History of the Learning for Life Initiative for the Liberal Arts
In November 2006, a committee of Boise State University professors compiled the materials necessary for application to Phi Beta Kappa, the prestigious honors society founded in 1776. Phi Beta Kappa’s website notes that

Phi Beta Kappa celebrates and advocates excellence in the liberal arts and sciences. Its campus chapters invite for induction the most outstanding arts and sciences students at America’s leading colleges and universities. The Society sponsors activities to advance these studies — the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences — in higher education and in society at large.

When Phi Beta Kappa rejected Boise State University’s application, that rejection need not have been a crushing blow to the university, since few institutions gain acceptance by Phi Beta Kappa in their first attempt. Yet, the details of the honors society’s rejection letter were in fact demoralizing: “[your] institution was not among those the Committee asked me specifically to encourage to make prompt future reapplication.” This was, we believe, a rather genteel way of telling us that Boise State University has a lot of work to do to make the grade with a venerable organization that is a guardian of liberal arts education in the United States of America. The chair and one member of the committee that had made application to Phi Beta Kappa forwarded a copy of the rejection letter to President Bob Kustra, assuming he would appreciate being kept informed of a negative assessment of Boise State University. He was quite unhappy with the letter and all that it implied for Boise State and requested a meeting with the two faculty who sent him the letter. At the meeting, President Kustra expressed concern for the state of the liberal arts at Boise State University and asked whether the faculty at this university shared his concern. He asked the faculty members present to undertake an initiative that would explore ways to enhance the liberal arts at BSU and seek opportunities to propel liberal arts disciplines toward the university’s goal of becoming a metropolitan research university of distinction. The president’s response was gratifying to the faculty members present at that meeting. In August 2007, a steering committee of ten faculty members from diverse disciplines was formed (see Appendix A). The committee drew up plans to solicit faculty ideas and involvement in addressing both of President Kustra’s charges. The steering committee laid plans for eleven events: a kick-off luncheon in mid-October and ten follow-up forums to be hosted by the Center for Teaching and Learning. Eighty faculty and administrators attended the luncheon and jointly identified areas of concern (see Appendix B). Each follow-up forum focused either on one of these areas or a small cluster of issues. Overall faculty involvement in the forums was moderate, with just over seventy faculty attending at least one forum, and many attending multiple forums (see Appendix C). Notes from each forum were posted on a wiki website (http://l4l.wetpaint.com/) in order to facilitate ongoing conversation about the ideas discussed at the forums . Members of the steering committee held an all-day retreat at the Center for Teaching and Learning on May 20, 2008, to assess the results of the year-long conversation. This report reflects the steering committee’s deliberations and consequent recommendations concerning undergraduate studies and faculty engagement in the Liberal Arts at Boise State.
Summary Conclusions Reflecting its own views and those of the faculty who participated in various forums, the committee has drawn the following general conclusions:

• The liberal arts lack a both a physical place and a sense of place at Boise State University.
• The liberal arts involve a type or style of pedagogy as much as they involve certain disciplines, and the exchange of ideas essential to that pedagogy requires connections among students and between students and faculty. Some of the sources of connections that we believe need to be enhanced are the university’s commitment to diversity, internationalization, and interdisciplinarity.
• Some of what ails the liberal arts at Boise State University can be cured through attention to the curriculum, including the Core.
• Faculty in many liberal arts disciplines – especially those that have limited opportunities for access to grants and other outside funding -- note that research funding opportunities on campus for their disciplines have shrunk in recent years; those opportunities should increase.
• That the single overarching requirement of any successful mission to invigorate the liberal arts at Boise State University will be adding new faculty lines.

A Place for the Liberal Arts Faculty in many of the liberal arts disciplines note that they are housed in two different colleges (Arts and Sciences, Social Sciences and Public Affairs). Furthermore, even those departments that are in the same colleges are dispersed around campus in ways that limit their interaction. A shared physical space would be an excellent starting point for reinvigorating the liberal arts, as it would bring together students and faculty who work in disciplines that may differ in modes of expression but share common interests and methods of inquiry. We suggest that a building (modeled on the new CSED building) be designed and built to house the liberal arts disciplines. Other possibilities to solve the “proximity” problem might include a realignment of the colleges, by which certain liberal arts disciplines are placed in a college of their own (taking from both Arts and Sciences and Social Sciences and Public Affairs). Another alternative could follow the lead of Notre Dame’s Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts (http://isla.nd.edu/). These three recommendations emerge from two different models: the first two would bring disciplines together literally, with the ultimate goal of providing a physical or institutional focus, or both, for every aspect of the liberal arts at Boise State University – from teaching to research to service; the third, were it indeed modeled directly on Notre Dame’s example, would serve primarily as a research institute, although we can imagine ways that its mission could be more far-reaching than Notre Dame’s ISLA. The building, or a reconfigured college structure, would undoubtedly include the institute, but the institute could easily stand alone. Ideally, the institute would be directed by a distinguished faculty member. To provide strong leadership and a focus for the efforts of liberal arts faculty, the director could be a prestigious national figure in the liberal arts hired specifically to help create an identity for the institute. Or, if such a hire could not be made, the director could come from within Boise State University; for this option we would suggest a three-year, renewable term. The institute would serve any number of functions:

• Assistance in external grant procurement
• A support structure for engaging undergraduate students in scholarship in the liberal arts
• Coordination and promotion of liberal arts events on campus
• Sponsorship and coordination of scholarly seminar series in the liberal arts
• Coordination of team-taught, interdisciplinary courses
• A home for Gender Studies, Environmental Studies, and other interdisciplinary programs involving the liberal arts
• A home for relevant international programs
• Advising for programs in the liberal arts
• Perhaps most importantly, the institute would offer the chance to build an identity for the liberal arts at Boise State University

In addition to a director, the Institute would require some staffing support:

• An “embedded” staff member from the Office of the Vice President for Research (Mark Rudin has already pledged this form of support at the college level)
• A full-time administrative assistant
• Other staff, depending on the nature of the institute’s mission

There are obvious areas of potential overlap in this list with existing centers/programs at Boise State University (the Center for Teaching and Learning, the Gateway Center, and International Programs would all have something to say about parts of this list), and we readily admit that there are aspects of this proposal that would require further examination. Nonetheless, we believe that some sort of institutional location for the liberal arts is the best starting place for establishing Boise State’s identity as a home for liberal arts instruction and research and to distinguish it from other large, public universities in the region.
The Liberal Arts: Pedagogy and Curricular Issues Many of the forums covered similar ground, likely because as new individuals attended, issues inevitably were rehashed. The most common element of the discussion at many of the forums was curricular issues. We divide them here into two sets: one is pedagogy, the other is curricular substance. With regard to pedagogy, we would summarize the concerns expressed as follows: participants in the forums and on the steering committee agree that connections are critical. “Connections” here means interactions and engagement among students, among faculty, and between faculty and students. We also refer to connections of particular sorts (after all, every classroom experience could be defined as a connection of some type). A consensus emerged that interdisciplinarity in a variety of forms would serve well the goal of making valuable intellectual connections, and that a move away from large, anonymous classroom settings (i.e., the assurance that at least certain critical subsets of courses could be taken in small settings) would be critical to that goal as well. The available means of achieving the sort of connections that we believe are critical to a liberal arts education include: student learning communities, course stacking, increased funding for and incentives to engage in interdisciplinary teaching, and perhaps a creative approach to University 101-type classes. All of these alternatives are available now, but for fairly obvious reasons they are not pursued: the difficulty of managing such offerings at the departmental level, the lack of funding to make it possible for departments to compensate for the diversion of resources to interdisciplinary offerings, and the lack of incentives for faculty to work together on an interdisciplinary basis (in particular, funds to use as incentives for faculty who develop interdisciplinary offerings), and the more general lack of incentives for faculty to work creatively with the curriculum. A relatively small annual budget could easily ameliorate these problems, were the funds focused on faculty and departmental incentives for participation. Three examples from our current situation highlight the problems faced by faculty interested in curricular innovation. One is the interdisciplinary Environmental Studies major, which currently has over ninety students, but whose budget provides only one course buy-out per year for administrative purposes and only enough adjunct monies to offer the required ENVSTD 121 course once per year. Another is the Diversity Requirement, which was created with much fanfare, but which has floundered as faculty prove unwilling or unable to develop new courses to support it. The third is the report of the Internationalization Task Force, which which we believe has received far too little attention since it was issued. Internationalization, globalization: by whatever name, the world in which our graduates will live and work is highly connected, and the connections that define it are lacking at Boise State University. The underlying problem in each of these cases is that faculty are asked to take on significant work on a volunteer basis, and volunteerism is not something that the university should count on. As it happens, such reliance has not produced satisfactory results. Pedagogical issues lead inexorably to the single most popular suggestion to emerge during the forums: faculty wish to see our Core Curriculum reconceived and restructured. Faculty find our Core to lack focus, to be a collection of courses that suggest no particular goal, and to be organized in a pro-forma fashion. With the overwhelming support of the faculty who attended the various forums, we thus recommend a radical overhaul. We make this recommendation advisedly, because we are well aware of some of the costs that would be incurred (both human and fiscal) and challenges that would be introduced. Recognizing the practical obstacles to overhauling the Core, we offer suggestions for further work. We have been inspired by the general education program at Portland State University, whose most appealing feature is that it places students in concentrated courses at both the beginning and the end of their academic careers. We believe that such a program is capable of making the kinds of connections that our faculty indicate are missing here: connections among students, conceptual connections across disciplines, and connections between coursework and life beyond campus. It is similar to the academic programming currently offered in the Honors College, but it would be available to every undergraduate student at Boise State. Any of the elements could be implemented as a stand-alone feature of a future Core, but their joint implementation promises a coherent curriculum experience for our students and offers a way for Boise State to distinguish itself from other universities. Features of such a Core could include:

• New lower-division Core courses, detached from major programs of study: Nearly all current Core courses serve primarily as gateway courses for the given department’s major. We believe that they are ill-suited to serve the aims of a liberal education. Many faculty at our forums expressed strong support for separating lower-division Core courses from majors (many departments already do this). For example, we envision a HIST 100 Core course that would not be required for History majors, which would present a more comprehensive view of the methods of historical inquiry and situates the discipline within the broader intellectual landscape. The content focus of such a course would be variable, which would allow it to be geared to different conceptual outcomes, while retaining its focus on methods and goals of historical inquiry. The same type of course could be taught in other departments. (See #6 below, where we discuss Diversity, Globalization/Internationalization, and Citizenship as possible tracks within the Core).

• Upper-division Core courses (possibly even Core capstone courses): We found widespread agreement among faculty that students are better able to appreciate the “big picture” later in their career, after having acquired the detailed, discipline-specific knowledge from their major requirements. Further, sustaining the broad, interdisciplinary approach to learning throughout the college experience will be more likely to produce graduates who continue to find value in exploring ideas and traditions outside their major area of study and training.

• “Stacking” of courses and co-curricular work for more than 3 credits: Team teaching and other opportunities for interdisciplinary course structures are severely constrained by the three-credit course model. Course stacking involves coordination of more than one class – and often co-curricular activity, such as service learning – into a single course structure which typically carries six to nine credit hours. Such an arrangement not only fosters interdisciplinary connections, it also provides for greater instructional flexibility and more efficient use of class room space.

• Greater use of Student Learning Communities in the Core: There was agreement that linking core courses through Student Learning Communities and giving faculty the time/reward for coordinating with others would foster these connections.

• Freshman seminars: Freshman seminars offer another substantive way to engage students in a liberal education. They could be designed to resemble current UNIV 101 courses in that one of their goals would include helping students to learn about the how to be a successful university student. They would differ in that each course would include substantive content chosen by the faculty member.

• Construct “modules” of new and existing Core courses designed to cater to various academic plans: As it exists now, the Core requirement can be satisfied by any arbitrary collection of designated courses, making it challenging, if not impossible, for students to see the connections intrinsic to a liberal education. We suggest replacing the arbitrary list of classes with a series of well-designed modules that are thematically focused and consistent. Three such modules could be Diversity, Globalization/Internationalization, or Citizenship, while many others are possible. We would encourage the development of new courses to serve these modules, keeping in mind the problems associated with our current Diversity requirement (see above).

• The consensus of faculty at the forums was that a foreign language requirement is not practical at Boise State University, given the enormous growth it would require in the size of the Modern Languages Department. But, where appropriate, and specifically in some of the modules discussed above, a foreign language requirement would be highly desirable, and we encourage continuing discussions of the place of foreign language study at Boise State University. We also suggest that where there is a foreign language requirement, it demand two years of study rather than the usual one year, as it is only after two years that students begin to be able to actually use the language.

Research in the Liberal Arts Needs Support Faculty in the liberal arts disciplines expressed concern that they are being left behind by a new model of research at Boise State University that urges faculty to seek outside funding. While recognizing that this emphasis places a burden on all faculty, we would note that for many disciplines in the humanities, opportunities to secure external funding are quite rare in comparison to the opportunities for disciplines in the sciences and applied arts; where such opportunities exist, the funding is comparatively weak. One explanation for this fact is that research in many of the liberal arts disciplines is typically a solitary task, not involving infrastructure or a team of researchers. Thus, the shift at Boise State from funding travel and research grants to “seed grants” for the preparation of applications for large outside grants leaves many of our faculty without options for funding the comparatively modest needs of scholarship in the liberal arts. To be clear, we recognize that funding is available for scholars in the liberal arts – but not the sort of funding that brings “indirects,” course buy-outs, and travel with it. That is why the shift outlined above has such negative consequences for many disciplines. We thus urge the university to consider various ways of ensuring more support for research in the liberal arts. We would suggest the following, as a start:

• Departments should have an adequate Operating Expenses budget to guarantee a minimum of $1,000.00 per year in research travel per faculty member, without having to cannibalize other operating expense needs.

• Faculty in disciplines that are not well-funded by outside sources be guaranteed a minimum of $2,000.00 per year in a research account. This is in line with the minimum that occurs at recognized research institutions. If the goal of Boise State University is to become a research university, such monies need to become part of the landscape here.

• We are encouraged by the fact that the Vice President for Research has given approximately $20,000.00 per year to the Colleges of Social Sciences and Public Affairs and Arts and Sciences for research, but note that the amount does not come close to meeting the need.

• Release time needs to be more readily available. Funding for release time for faculty to work on research projects has shrunk at Boise State University. In part this is due to the fact that large grants typically come with “buy outs,” but, again, many disciplines are unable to play the “buy out” game.

• Encouragement needs to be given to faculty in the liberal arts to incorporate students in their research. This is more difficult than it might seem at first blush, because, again, much research in the humanities is in fact solitary. Nonetheless, creative solutions must be sought.

The Need for New Faculty The plea for additional faculty was second only to interest in curricular issues at our forums. Participants from many disciplines, but particularly those in the liberal arts, described the strained human resources available to meet the increasing demands on them and their departments. Given the shared opinion that faculty numbers are currently too low, any hope of successfully implementing any of our recommendations is borne by the promise of new faculty lines, whether as full time, tenure-track faculty or special lecturers.
Conclusion This is a time of unprecedented change at Boise State. Many faculty have been energized by changes that have recently taken place and are excited about the university’s prospects as an emerging locus of creativity and economic development for the Treasure Valley. There is, however, significant concern among very many faculty about preserving balance in the university’s mission and establishing parity among the academic units that serve it. While a few faculty who participated in our forums expressed some doubts about the results of this committee’s work, everyone voiced gratitude for the opportunity to discuss the status and role of the liberal arts at Boise State. We wish to emphasize the fact that a metropolitan research university of distinction is in the first place a university: an institution with diverse academic “organs” that each serves an essential role in its preservation and flourishing. None of the recommendations outlined above can be implemented without further investigation, and their implementation will undoubtedly cause some pain to individuals and units within the university. Pain is never good as such, but growing pains are an appropriate response to maturation, and far graver fates than pain can befall an institution that resists directing its development in a thoughtful and purposeful way. We hope that this report serves as an opening move in further determining the ways in which Boise State University will continue to develop and grow.
APPENDIX A
Learning For Life Steering Committee

Lisa Brady History

Craig Hemmens Criminal Justice, Honors College

Nick Miller History

Amy Moll Materials Science

Tara Penry English

Tony Roark Philosophy

Susan Shadle Chemistry, CTL

Sarah Toevs Community and Environmental Health

David Wilkins Geosciences

Scott Yenor Political Science

APPENDIX B
Learning For Life 10/17 Kick-Off Luncheon Attendeees



APPENDIX C
Faculty Who Attended At Least One Learning For Life Forum