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Chicago Tribune: A case for special cases

2003-05-24T20:00:00-04:00

Even a newborn, Katie Bufalino spent many a fall weekend on the leafy, tradition-rich campus of the University of Notre Dame.p. The daughter of a Notre Dame alum, she and her Lake Forest family made frequent trips for Friday night pep rallies and Saturday afternoon football games. Blue-and-gold sweatshirts are part of the family uniform.

Not surprisingly, Katie and a younger brother are now Notre Dame students, carrying on the family tradition. Two younger siblings may also attend the university before long.

While there are no guarantees in a highly competitive college admissions environment, the Bufalinos’ status as legacies—sons and daughters of alumni—give them an edge over other applicants to the university. At Notre Dame, legacies make up 23 percent of the student body, among the highest percentages in the country for top universities.

Selective schools have given preferences to children of alumni for decades. Keeping Notre Dame in the family is thought to strengthen campus loyalty and motivate alumni to continue hefty financial contributions.

But with a controversial case challenging affirmative action policies now before the U.S. Supreme Court, legacy preferences are coming under fire because they clearly favor whites. Sons and daughters of African-Americans, for instance, are only now emerging on college campuses in large numbers, so decades-old legacy policies don’t apply to many of them.

Critics charge that it’s hypocritical of President Bush to challenge a University of Michigan policy that gives minorities an advantage when he benefited from a special preference of his own. Bush was a three-generation legacy at Yale despite a less-than-stellar high school record.

Playing both sides

Notre Dame finds itself in a complex position within this national debate. While the university wants to tightly protect its legacy preference, it is also a strong supporter of affirmative action and is working aggressively to boost the number of minorities on campus.

Notre Dame’s admissions director, Dan Saracino, said the Bush administration’s position against Michigan’s affirmative action policy—and the ensuing debate about the legacy policies he benefited from—have only helped put the complex admissions process into a clearer light.

“I’m glad that Bush weighed in on it,” Saracino said. “It shows that affirmative action cannot be looked at as an island. You’re attacking the group that has benefited from some kind of special consideration for the least amount of time, when we have for hundreds of years given special consideration to other groups.”

As Saracino sees it, preferences of all kinds are just a natural part of the admissions process. Universities need to look at a variety of factors—from legacy status to the number of oboe players in a given year—to achieve a lively and interesting freshmen class, he said.

“Half of our alumni children would not be admitted without special consideration and we don’t apologize for it,” he said. “At the same time, we look at affirmative action for ethnic minorities in the same way that we look at special consideration for alumni children, athletes, students with special leadership abilities and any student who brings something to the university that is unique.”

In Notre Dame’s case, there’s also the added challenge of maintaining the university’s Roman Catholic identity and its storied athletics program.

This fall, nearly half of the 1,094 legacy applicants were admitted to Notre Dame, the vast majority of them white. At the same time, the university has shifted its minority recruiting efforts into high gear, flying in top students for all-expense-paid campus visits and beefing up minority recruitment on the West Coast and in other underrepresented areas.

Seeing benefits

This year, some of those efforts appear to have paid off, as the number of minorities jumped from 16 percent of the admitted class last year to 21 percent this year, the highest leap in campus history.

Still, Saracino’s office is always flooded with calls this time of year from angry parents whose children weren’t admitted. Yet at least some current students think the university is on the right track.

That includes not only a lifelong Notre Dame fan like Bufalino but also an Asian-American junior from California who has just joined what he calls “the Notre Dame family.”

“My family is an example of somebody who was freshly introduced to this university, and we’ve spread the word about Notre Dame,” said Richie Dang, who followed his brother to the university. “If our diversity numbers increase, there will be legacies built into that too. Now the children of the new minorities will have a better chance.”

May 25,2003

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Chicago Tribune: Notre Dame professor wins national teaching award

2002-11-20T19:00:00-05:00

Notre Dame professor wins honor *
p. A University of Notre Dame professor who transformed the way chemistry, engineering and physics are taught on campus has won the most prestigious national teaching award in higher education.

Dennis Jacobs, 42, a chemistry professor, was named the 2002 U.S. Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Jacobs—described by students as an exceptional academic teacher and a “teacher about life as well”—was the sole recipient of the national award for teaching at doctoral and research universities. Another professor in Indiana, James Adams, a professor of art at Manchester College in North Manchester, Ind., won in the baccalaureate college category, and two other awards were given for outstanding teaching in a community college and at a master’s university.

The U.S. Professors of the Year Awards, created in 1981, spotlight exceptional teaching at universities and colleges across the country.

The four professors of the year win a $5,000 cash award and Carnegie encourages them to spread their ideas for improving teaching and learning nationwide.

Jacobs takes a passionate and unconventional approach. This fall, he introduced a chemistry course that has students going into the community to test lead levels in homes.

“They’re seeing a human side of science that they don’t normally see,” Jacobs said. “The average sample is just thrown into a test tube but in this course, they collect the sample and analyze and process it, and they can attach a human face to it. They know it’s been collected from the living room where there’s a 3-year-old running around.”

For the last several years, Jacobs has spent much of his time researching ways to improve his methods. For years, he watched students struggle with an introductory general chemistry course that had been considered a weeding-out class for would-be chemists and doctors.

After seeing struggling students revamp their career aspirations because of a single course, he advocated big changes. Jacobs introduced an alternative class section aimed at students with the lowest SAT math scores.

In a letter of recommendation for the award, Notre Dame’s president, Rev. Edward Malloy, praised Jacobs’ initiative.

“He might have simply concluded that these students did not belong in science,” Malloy said. “But instead, he asked himself, `How could we help them learn?’”

November 21, 2002

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Professors relearn value of classroom

2002-01-13T19:00:00-05:00

Instructors seek better balance in teaching, research p. During more than 40 years as a professor of biological sciences, Harvey Bender used the same basic approach to undergraduate teaching.

“You could just wind me up and I’d stand there and lecture for 45 minutes,” quipped Bender, a professor at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind.

Like most professors, his research captured the bulk of his attention.

But during the past several years, Bender has overhauled his approach. He started varying his lectures and utilizing more discussion and small-group work. He examined his teaching methods with the same intensity as his scientific research.

Even after years of positive student reviews, it was clear he was getting through to many more students and helping them grasp basic genetics.

Bender’s experience is one of a growing number of examples on campuses nationwide, where there is an explosion of interest in an area that long has been ignored, especially at major research universities: teaching skills. More professors are throwing out ineffective teaching methods and hundreds are researching how to better capture students’ attention.

“If you had told me four years ago that we’d have the kind of evidence we now have about the spread of these new [teaching] ideas and practices, I might have supposed you were eating mushrooms of some sort,” said Lee Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, akey supporter of the movement.

Shulman said some of the interest comes from university boards.

“One factor is the growing embarrassment [board members] received that even though we say we value teaching, we continue to reward primarily research and publication,” Shulman said. “The boards and university folks are beginning to tire of that.”

In the past four years, about 200 universities have set up Carnegie-supported teaching academies that research effective teaching practices, hold teaching forums and sometimes offer grants for research projects on improving student learning.

Especially at large state-supported research universities, this shift is a huge transformation.

Frustration over the priority put on research at top-tier universities has led to complaints from parents and students. There is worry that classes are overcrowded, that too few full-time professors are actually teaching and that too much of the teaching responsibility falls on graduate students.

Being a good teacher could be considered a career detriment because it reveals a lack of focus on serious research.

“Universities are guilty of an advertising practice they would condemn in the commercial world,” states a 1998 Carnegie Foundation commission report, “Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America’s Research Universities.” “Recruitment materials display proudly the world-famous professors, the splendid facilities and the ground-breaking research that goes on within them, but thousands of students graduate without ever seeing the world-famous professors or tasting genuine research.”

Rewarding better teaching

To help change that, Carnegie identifies professors like Bender for annual Carnegie Scholar awards, which go to a handful of professors nationally for outstanding work in studying effective teaching. Carnegie leaders hope the program pushes teaching stars’ prestige closer to that of top researchers.

Notre Dame has had three Carnegie Scholars and has set up a Carnegie teaching academy and a center for teaching excellence. The university also launched a campuswide initiative to refocus on high-quality teaching, interviewing scores of top faculty for direction. Several staff members have received grants to reinvent classroom approaches and improve learning.

In the Midwest, Notre Dame joins Illinois State University and Indiana University in working to improve teaching methods. IU has one of the largest groups of Carnegie Scholars, with four, has a Carnegie teaching academy and is sponsoring scores of teaching forums.

Illinois State recently received a $2.5 million gift from Patricia Cross, a retired Harvard and University of California—Berkeley scholar, to establish the first endowed faculty chair of its kind in the country. The ISU chair is designated for what the Carnegie Foundation calls the “scholarship of teaching and learning.”

Val Farmer-Dougan, an award-winning teacher at ISU, said there is a noticeable shift toward teaching. The university’s Foundations of Inquiry program, of which she is a part, guarantees freshmen at least one class of about 30 students. Many of the courses are taught by full-time professors who never had taught a freshmen course.

The Foundations of Inquiry courses focus heavily on class discussions and group work designed to get students to think critically and develop a close relationship with professors.

“What’s great is they get interaction from a real professor, as opposed to these superlarge classes, and they come to understand early on that they can be passionate about academics,” Farmer-Dougan said.

A meaningful change?

Still, some scholars wonder whether there’s enough momentum to make a lasting impact. In 1999 Vernon Burton, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, won one of the highest distinctions in the nation for teaching. The Carnegie Foundation and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education named him the winner of the professor of the year award for faculty at doctoral institutions.

But Burton’s treatment by his own history department makes him question his status. After returning from sabbatical this winter, he learned in a memo from his chairman that he would lose his office to make room for teaching assistants. In the academic world, it was the equivalent of Brad Pitt being asked to give up his trailer for a group of extras.

Burton was offered a new, smaller office. But he is unsure where he’ll find the laboratory space needed to continue working with students on some of the research that helped build his reputation. The Carnegie award led to no other campus recognition and he had to appeal to the dean before getting a raise, he said.

“While chancellors, provosts and deans can lead great initiatives, the real life of the professor is largely determined with her or his department,” Burton said. “If the department is not supportive, it is difficult to do either quality research or teaching.”

Burton’s department chairman, Peter Fritzsche, said Burton’s office rearrangement was never meant to slight a highly regarded professor. It was aimed at solving a crisis among graduate teaching assistants in a department with limited resources, he said.

“It has become very clear to us on the executive committee that we have created conditions of squalor: more TAs, more undergraduate students, and no increase in the amount of TA office space. TAs feel mistreated and forgotten,” Fritzsche wrote in a memo.

The U. of I.’s top leadership is trying to re-emphasize teaching quality and hopes to set up a Carnegie teaching academy.

Even though history faculty regularly win campus teaching awards and rank high in student evaluations, research has to be the ultimate priority, Fritzsche said.

“We’d very quickly become a second-rate school” if research took a back seat to teaching, he said.

Farmer-Dougan sees that in action on her campus as well.

“I know when we bring in new professors, we’re far more willing to scrutinize their research background than their teaching background,” Farmer-Dougan said. “When people come in for interviews, they do a presentation of their research but they never teach a class.”

TopicID: 176

Dorms give leaders room with view

2001-04-14T20:00:00-04:00

It’s a typical Thursday night at the University of Notre Dame, and Sorin Hall—the all-male residence hall that stands a stone’s throw from the famous Golden Dome—is a rowdy place.p. Students crowd into a first-floor lounge for a college basketball game on a big-screen TV and shuffle out of their tiny rooms full of books, empty beer cans and posters of scantily-clad women.p. Just down the hall from this raucous crowd, a lanky, white-haired man with a serious air slips out of his own room (without the posters) and makes his way to the floor chapel for 10 p.m. mass.p. Just one of the guys in Sorin Hall, Rev. Edward “Monk” Malloy is also the president of the South Bend, Ind., university. For more than a decade now, Malloy—the leading figure at one of the nation’s top universities—has chosen to live not in a swanky president’s abode but in an enlarged room in the university’s oldest residence hall, a space that had been his home for years before he took the school’s top job.p. In a few months, Loyola University Chicago’s incoming president, Rev. Michael Garanzini, hopes to join Malloy in the decidedly small but growing club of college administrators who dwell in the same dormitories as their students. Those able to handle the headaches that go along with late-night parties and screeching stereos consider it an intriguing way to build a close-knit university community.p. When he arrives in June, Garanzini wants to live modestly among Loyola’s students as he has done for several years at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and he is working with university administrators to decide if there’s a feasible location.p. Like Malloy, Garanzini finds residence hall living the perfect way to build relationships with the students.p. “In there, you meet them in a context that’s relaxed and informal and immediately you begin to talk about things that wouldn’t normally come up in your faculty office,” he said.p. Though it is more common at religious schools, university chiefs in residence halls are somewhat of a throwback to a different era, when there were far fewer political and administrative demands on a college leader’s time.p. Still, a number of top administrators have spent a night or two in a dorm in recent years to get a sense of student concerns, said Stanley Ikenberry, president of the American Council on Education. Among those who’ve embraced that idea is Penn State University President Graham Spanier, who has spent the weekend in a residence hall—with a student roommate every year for the past six years.p. Some local universities are working to get faculty members to live in residence halls, not to act as disciplinarians but to inspire a more intense intellectual community.p. At the University of Illinois at Chicago, administrators are recruiting two professors to live in a hall that is under construction, and they expect to bring in others in the future. DePaul University administrators also hope to lure faculty members to residence halls in coming years.p. At the same time, hundreds of universities nationally have revamped their approach to dorm life, often creating “learning communities” in which students with similar interests live together and sometimes share meals with faculty mentors.p. “For a long time there has been this concern about the deterioration of the quality of life in residence halls,” Ikenberry said. “Part of this is a deliberate effort to improve that quality of life.”p. While many of his presidential colleagues still shake their heads in amazement, Malloy is at ease in his various roles as hallmate, teacher and campus leader at Notre Dame.p. “I think you have to teach to be a good president,” he said. “And in our setting, which is heavily residential, it’s just part of our heritage and tradition. So I’m just trying to do my part.”p. On Notre Dame’s campus, where there are no fraternities or sororities, residence halls are the focal point of student social life. Unlike most college campuses, half the seniors at Notre Dame still live in residence halls.p. Malloy’s room—which sits inside a turret—certainly has a different feel than the student rooms. Soaring bookcases make the room feel like a library reading room. But other than some extra space and a small bathroom, his amenities are as sparse as his students’. To keep his sanity on loud nights, he turns to the constant hum of a “white noise” machine.p. Malloy surprises students with his deadpan humor, delivered in monotone, and an unexpected ability to relate to 18-year-olds.p. After years in the hall, Malloy has a presence that seems natural to students. They’ve shared a laugh with him on the vast Sorin porch after football games, picnicked with him and their parents on move-in weekend, and stopped in his room for a chat when the welcome sign was posted outside his door. Many refer to him as “Monk,” a nickname from childhood.p. Nick Otto, a senior who has lived in Malloy’s hall for the past four years, used to play basketball with the president and a group of regulars before Malloy, a former high school basketball star, injured his shoulder and had to call off the games.p. “He had this running jump shot and he always hit it. He was really good,” Otto said. “We didn’t play just to say we played basketball with the president. It was just like he was one of the guys.”p. The president’s presence doesn’t seem to have hurt students’ social lives. Alcohol in hall rooms for students of legal age is accepted, and Sorin has its share of soirees. One larger room is well-known because it houses seven students and has been organized with stacks of bunk beds piled on desks, making room for a gathering spot ideal for big parties.p. At Sorin, Rev. John Jenkins, vice president and associate provost, also lives among the students, which has made for some memorable moments on party nights.p. At the invitation of sophomore Trip Foley to one party, Jenkins arrived with a smirk on his face just before his 10 p.m. mass in the chapel downstairs. “He said I shouldn’t compete with God,” Foley said.p. Malloy and other faculty members living with students can work easily on student relationships partly because they’re freed from daily discipline responsibilities. That job is left to residence hall assistants and rectors. “You kind of keep your eyes down,” Jenkins said with a laugh.p. To reach out to students outside his hall, Malloy regularly celebrates mass at other halls on campus, sometimes using those moments to share some inspiration.p. During one recent mass, he told students of how he initially majored in engineering at Notre Dame, “and in my first semester in college, I almost flunked out.” He switched to English and ended up with a stellar academic and professional career. “Now it’s nice to be the president of a university I almost flunked out of,” he told students.p. Malloy also stays in touch by teaching a Sunday-night freshman seminar for 15 students. He sets strict standards for discussion and papers; he challenges students to think deeply about their lives and motivations.p. “I think he contributes a lot to the feeling you get at this university,” said one of his students, Claire McAuliffe. “He avails himself to students. Instead of being a head figure, he’s one of us.”p. Notre Dame leaders say Malloy’s commitment to residence hall living, with 10 other top administrators and a handful of faculty members, helps set a tone of intimacy that contributes to student success. The school has one of the highest freshmen retention rates in the country—96 percent return for their sophomore year.p. Those kinds of numbers are clearly attractive to other large universities.p. “We’re trying to build a sense of community here, where we engage students and help establish connections and make them feel a part of the place,” said Anthony Martin, director of housing at UIC. “Our simple goal is, `How do we help students succeed?’” he said. “One of the things we have to do is make a large university smaller.”

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