WELCOME From the Dean Dear Harriot College Friends,
Alan White Dean, Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences
It is with great pride and pleasure that I welcome you to the 2012 issue of Cornerstone. In my seven years as Dean of Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences, there has been much to celebrate: superb scholarship by both faculty and students; generous-spirited service to academic disciplines and to constituencies increasingly far-flung. And then there is also the dramatic trajectory of success of Harriot College’s Voyages of Discovery Lecture Series – certainly an intellectual beacon in North Carolina’s coastal plain. But in this particular welcome, I am taking the opportunity to examine and, hopefully, begin a conversation with readers both on and off campus about higher education today. I invite your responses and shall include them and respond to them as we continue this conversation. Recent higher education news reports (whether national or more local) have been using the term “the new norm.” Inherent in such language is the notion that there is a norm, a somehow stable “new reality;” and if we can “get a handle on this,” we can begin to operate within the new parameters. Nothing could be farther from the actual.
Assumptions about ethics, communication, student demographics, costs and benefits, and the very nature and purpose of education seem to bump into each other in a confusing array. What does seem to be apparent is that there is a constantly shifting set of conditions and, perhaps, an even less coherent set of responses that verge on (or actually are) purely improvisational as institutions of higher learning and their student constituents react to this kaleidoscopic present. Verities of the past are shattered. Assumptions about ethics, communication, student demographics, costs and benefits, and the very nature and purpose of education seem to bump into each other in a confusing array. Laws of logic seem to be suspended. Linearity and cause and effect seem less applicable, much less “inevitable” than they once may have been. What, then, are some of the exploded assumptions? Because of the costs associated with US higher education today, students sometimes think of themselves as academic consumers. The benefit of a higher education diploma is measurable in real dollars earned over a lifetime, so students (and sometimes parents) assert that something should be received (maybe the grade of A?) for the time and money invested. Taking this assumption a short step 2