English Department

Planning Compact (Draft 5/13/99)

Introduction

The Department of English is committed to being an outstanding center of teaching, research, and intellectual activity in literature, language, and writing. Its goals are to maintain and be recognized as maintaining excellent bachelors and masters programs in English, serving students with a wide range of interests; to provide all undergraduates a background in majors works of their culture, a set of skills for reading literature of many kinds, and proficiency in written communication; to assist in the training of future teachers of English; and to maintain a quality of research and professional activity that warrants and receives respect nationally in the profession.

The department seeks to create an atmosphere that encourages faculty and students to achieve at the highest levels. We are committed to fostering diversity in order to bring out the department's unique interplay of excellent teaching, important scholarly and creative work, and serious service to the university and to the public.

The department compact that follows takes into account the department's past performance, opportunities identified through strategic planning and creative solutions to challenges facing us now.

The department aspires to improve its national position relative to other departments at Research I institutions, according to [?]. We have targeted for improvement the following areas: reduction in the ratio of non-tenure-track to tenure-track faculty by ten percent, increased faculty book publications each year by x percent and publications in referred journals by y percent, increase enrollment in the undergraduate major by 10%, and increase enrollment in each of the graduate programs by ten percent.

Over the next eighteen months, the department will address the following initiatives.

Initiatives Supporting University Goals

1. Diversity: The department will continue to recruit faculty of different nationalities and perspectives within the disciplines of English. Among tenure-track faculty we have 26 females and 29 males. We have four African-American faculty in tenure-track positions, two of them with tenure. We welcome guidance about the appropriateness of these ratios and strategies for addressing them as needed.

2. Partnerships

a. With groups outside the campus: the department is in the process of using the Internship Advisory Board to develop a Connecting in the Triangle program, modeled on the NCSU Connecting in North Carolina. Under this program English Department faculty volunteers would spend a day or two visiting businesses and non-profit organizations in the Triangle area. The organizations represented on the Internship Board would be the core of the program, but we hope to expand it to include other businesses and organizations.

The goals of the program are to strengthen our links with the community, to learn more about how to prepare our students for employment, to explore funding opportunities, to make faculty in all the disciplines within English aware of the opportunities for English majors, and to make businesses and organizations more aware of what a major in English prepares one of our graduates to do.

b. Within the department, the American Literature, British Literature and Creative Writing disciplinary groups are all developing plans to work with, and emulate, the efforts of the World Literature group by providing programs and workshops for high school and junior college teachers. These efforts are described more fully under "Departmental Initiatives."

c. On campus we will continue to work with the College of Education and Psychology on the teacher-training program.

d. We will continue to work toward the development of a major in Film Studies with the Department of Communication and the Division of Multidisciplinary Studies.

e. We will also continue to explore service opportunities in teaching ENG 111-113 and 331-333, with guidance from the nascent Writing Across the Curriculum Program, whose director (beginning in 1999-2000) will also be a member of the English Dept. tenured faculty. The efforts we are already involved with include links to ENGR,Textiles and HIST.

f. We will continue our partnership with the Tutorial Center and Student Housing to provide tutoring in English in the dorms.

g. We will encourage the development of more cross-disciplinary courses, such as Science and Literature, that might attract students to our undergraduate offerings and meet the GER in Science, Technology and Society.

3. Effective Business Practices

We will continue our efforts to manage the temporary-teaching budget prudently by careful planning and assessment. We have recently reorganized the secretarial staff to distribute the clerical work of the department more equitably and efficiently.

Initiative Arising from Unit Issues and Priorities

1. Reduce reliance on non-tenure-track faculty: See attached proposal.

In addition to the plan set forth in the attached proposal, it is imperative that we hire at least six tenure-track faculty to make up for the losses this year of Amiran, Betts (retiring in December), Haskin, Keetley, Smoot (retiring in December) and Smith. We have reconsidered the idea of hiring in historical periods and come up with a more flexible approach to the problem. As we have done many times in the past, our advertisements for positions should be written to enable us to attract strong candidates who are able to teach in more than one area of English studies. We might, for example, advertise a position in American Literature by saying that candidates with expertise in more than one area would receive special attention.

Given that shift in approach, hiring priorities for the department include the following:

Creative writing: we need to hire a senior level faculty member to balance the losses of Professors Gerald Barrax and Lee Smith.

The LTN program. The program is growing again, and we have only one tenure-track faculty member (Lucinda MacKethan) in that area. Prof. MacKethan's other interests and responsibilities make it imperative that we have another tenure-track position in that area as soon as possible.

Drama: Based on the outside reviewers' suggestions, we have rethought last year's request for a hiring in 18th Century Drama. Rather we would like to change our approach and advertise a position in drama, which will give us a broader pool of applicants to chose from and will allow us to hire a faculty member able to be more flexible in meeting department needs than a straight "period-based" hiring would be.

American Literature: With the losses of Profs. Haskin and Keetley on top of other faculty losses in recent years, it is imperative that we hire in American Literature. A broadly defined position would allow us to find the best candidate.

Rhetoric/Composition/Technical Writing: Student enrollment continues to grow in those areas while faculty are being called upon to meet other university needs. The applicant pool in this are tends to be smaller than in literature. We would like to advertise a general opening in these areas and interview the best candidates.

World literature: the world literature committee has asked that we request a hiring in that area soon. The specific position would be agreed upon by both the Department of English and the Department of Foreign Languages.

Literary Theory: Although in some senses all the literature faculty are literary theorists, in recent years we have lost faculty such as Graham Hammill and Eyal Amiran who were hired for their special skills in theory as well as in particular literary periods. If not a hiring specifically in theory, we need at least to hire a versatile scholar who can teach current theory as well as meet other departmental needs.

Literature and Science: As part of our efforts to respond to the needs and interests of students at NC State, we would like to look for a faculty member with an interest in, and the ability to teach, Literature and Science. To an even greater extent than with the theory position, we need to hire a faculty member who might be able to meet other needs in the literature program as well.

2. Increase enrollment in the major: A study of graduate rates over the last thirty years has revealed that for the last several years the number of students graduating with a major in English has remained steady. In the face of the projected enrollment increase for the whole UNC system over the next five years, it seems sensible for the English Department to prepare for that increase and, indeed, to aggressively seek an increase.

We are convinced that the thinking, writing and problem-solving skills our majors graduate with prepare them for a variety of careers, as well as for graduate education in a number of disciplines. It is our goal to use the Compact Planning process to acquire data that will, we hope, support that conviction. Increasing communication with alumni will establish a database to help us learn more systematically what happens to our graduates and to adjust our curricula, as appropriate, to meet changing workplace demands while at the same time emphasizing the virtues of education as opposed to job training.

3. Increase enrollment in MA and MS programs

The English Department graduate programs are, by NC State's own measures, among the best in the university. Our goal is to maintain that excellence while gradually increasing both the quantity and the quality of our graduates.

Initiatives to Improve Performance

1. Increase faculty success in teaching, research and service. To work toward this overarching goal, we would like to put forth a proposal for reducing faculty teaching loads to 3:2 (or 2:3). We believe that by eliminating release time for such things as journal editing and pre-tenure research and creative activity, we can propose a teaching load reduction for all tenure-track faculty at a reasonable cost. It is our hope that if the 3:2 load cannot be implemented immediately, it can be phased in over the next 3 years.

2. To improve student advising by reducing the corps of advisors and by recognizing advising as part of the advisor's workload. Professor Linda Holley, Director of Advising, has put forth a proposal to the departmental Advisory Committee to appoint a smaller corps of advisors. This smaller corps can be better trained and monitored as advisors, which should improve the quality of student advising, as well as freeing other faculty to spend more time on teaching and research. Prof. Holley has sought and been granted funding by the Dean of the First Year College to implement a pilot version of this plan.

Initiatives to Support Projected Enrollment

Adjusting the hiring on non-tenure-track faculty will address this area to some extent, but space, both office and classroom, remains a major obstacle to expansion. Ideally, increasing class size and using TAs as assistants in literature survey courses (as well as in teaching ENG 111-112) will reduce some of our reliance on non-tenure-track faculty and relieve some of our space problem. As it stands, however, simply to provide the GA-recommended 140 square feet for each faculty office for the faculty we now have would require an additional floor of offices in Tompkins Hall

dean:compact

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