McBride Futures Committee
Final Report
May 3, 2010
McBride Futures Committee
J. McNeil (Chair, PH), J. Cuddington (EB), E. Davis (Division Director, LAIS), M. Eberhardt (CH), T. Gianquitto (LAIS), W. Hereman (MACS), D. Muñoz (EG), B. Olds (Assoc. Provost and Director, Trefny Inst.), E. D. Sloan (ChEng)
I. Executive Summary
The McBride Honors Program in Public Affairs (hereafter referred to as "McBride Program", "McBride", or just the "Program") has been a signature program at Mines since its inception in 1978 when a dedicated corps of faculty from across the spectrum of academic disciplines created it. Over the next thirty years they, and others recruited to it, sustained it by overload teaching driven by volunteerism. During this time Mines evolved substantially from having a largely undergraduate focus in the late '70s to a more balanced research/graduate/undergraduate outlook today. New faculty have much greater research expectations placed on them and few have found professional benefit from participation in undergraduate enrichment programs such as McBride. With the retirement of most of the early founders and with few new faculty, currently the McBride Program relies on a mix of retirees, adjuncts, and administrative faculty to deliver its courses. Furthermore, with a far greater menu of undergraduate enrichment options, fewer students are selecting the McBride Program resulting in declining numbers. With the quality and sustainability of the Program in jeopardy, Provost Castillo created and charged the McBride Futures Committee to take a fresh look at all aspects of the Program and make recommendations for securing its future viability.
The McBride Futures Committee met weekly over the spring 2010 term. It reviewed the history and original rationale for the Program, several previous studies, current implementation, resources, and operations as well as the evolution of the undergraduate and research/graduate educational environment at Mines. The committee also considered expanding and altering the scope, scale, and focus of the Program. From its deliberations as well as discussions with several campus constituencies, the committee has adopted the following recommendations:
1. The "McBride Honors Program in Public Affairs for Engineers" should remain an interdisciplinary honors program in the traditional sense of the term. It should be tightly focused in Public Affairs while avoiding unnecessary overlap with other programs or initiatives in the humanities. It should drop the implied restriction to engineers from its title becoming the "McBride Honors Program in Public Affairs".
The committee adopted the following vision for the Program to encapsulate this concept:
The McBride Honors Program in Public Affairs will provide opportunities for exceptional students to explore the political, cultural, economic, environmental, and ethical contexts in which science and technology operate in the world.
In turn, science and engineering faculty participating in the McBride Program will benefit by learning the value of public involvement by technical professionals.
2. The McBride Program should be normalized in the sense that its management, budget, and academic governance follow a more traditional, institutionalized, model. Specifically, the committee recommends housing the Program within LAIS with the McBride Director reporting to the LAIS Division Director. However, like other interdisciplinary programs, the Program should not be thought of exclusively as an LAIS program, but rather as an interdisciplinary institutional program housed in LAIS due to the principal expertise demanded, but drawing resources and expertise from other departments and divisions. The Program should continue to have its own dedicated administrative support and identifiable headquarters of operations.
3. The committee recommends starting the course sequence for the McBride Program in the fall semester of the sophomore year, reducing the number of total credits required from 24 to 21. This may reduce attrition as well as help to match the teaching load to staffing levels as recommended below. The committee recommends that the Program initially be designed to serve approximately 80 McBride honors students, graduating about 25 per year.
4. To adequately resource the normalized McBride Program, the committee recommends a dedicated teaching staff of three FTE regular faculty: two in LAIS (one faculty member in addition to the Director) and one faculty member in Economic and Business. These faculty members will be designated as McBride Faculty and have primary responsibility for programmatic curricular development as well as delivery and instruction modes. The Director will have full time duties within McBride (roughly half administration and half teaching). The other McBride designated faculty should have appropriate subject area expertise with associated research activities, be tenured (or tenure-track) in their respective divisions, and have half of their teaching duties in McBride, and the other half in their home departments. (Division Directors should have management authority to move these teaching resources to optimize performance both within McBride and their Divisions.)
5. The committee recognizes that better incentives for participation by regular faculty in the science and engineering departments as associate McBride faculty are essential to maintain the strong interdisciplinary character of the Program. As the principal impediment to such participation is overload teaching, the committee recommends treating such participation as part of the faculty member's normal teaching load. To assist departments that would lose teaching capacity under these circumstances, the committee recommends providing an adjunct replacement budget to the home departments of participating faculty. As an additional incentive, the committee recommends continuing the practice of offering a supplement to the non-McBride faculty. Finally, to break down stovepipe mentalities and give credence to the value the institution places on interdisciplinary activities, the committee recommends that the Provost include McBride participation in evaluating departments and divisions as part of a broader area of "interdisciplinary enhancement activities" which will, in turn, lead DH/DD's to consider McBride participation by their faculty in a positive light.
6. The committee recommends a governance structure consisting of a Director, tenured in LAIS and reporting to the LAIS Division Director. The committee further recommends the creation of the McBride Advisory Board consisting of the McBride Director, the LAIS Division Director, EB Division Director, EG Division Director, a DH from one geo-related department and a DH from one math/science department. In addition the committee recommends the creation of a McBride Curriculum Committee consisting of the McBride faculty which will have authority over the curriculum.
7. The committee recommends implementing the new McBride Program over 4 years starting in AY2011-12 using AY2010-11 to reform the curriculum and recruit the first cohort of students to go through the new Program. The current cohort of McBride students will go through the Program in its current configuration with budgets moved from the old program to the new program in each of the transition years. The additional budget required to achieve McBride Program normalization is estimated at $95k. The committee suggests that half of this come from institutional funds and the other half from an increase of approximately $1.06M in the McBride endowment.
II. Introduction
The McBride Program in Public Affairs was instituted in 1978 by a small cadre of dedicated faculty who were convinced of the central importance of the social contexts in which engineers practice their profession, and, by creating and participating in this honors program, they would convey this core value to a selective cohort of student leaders. In the words of long-time McBride Faculty Member Gene Woolsey,
“This program is founded on the ideal that pure technical problems do not exist – only those embedded in political, cultural, ethical and moral problems. Our purpose is to produce a graduate who will both know and act on this reality.”
In the late 1970's, the Economics and Humanities divisions were relatively weak and somewhat marginalized by CSM's engineering and science emphasis. In this environment, the bottoms-up creation of the McBride Program required the intellectual energy and initiative of a broad multi-disciplinary group of faculty drawn from the humanities and social sciences, the sciences and engineering. They showed initiative and were persistent and self-motivated in launching the Program, volunteering their time and energy for extra undergraduate teaching to make their vision a reality as well as for the professional satisfaction of working with a group of very talented students. The initial governance of the Program was designed to exploit this energy and spirit of volunteerism; thereby enabling the Program to start up at minimal institutional cost and vesting this core group of faculty with curricular oversight. A fund-raising program grew a dedicated McBride endowment that now covers between a quarter to a third of the cost to deliver the Program.
Since that time, CSM has grown a thriving research enterprise with far greater depth of expertise in all of its specialties. In particular, the Division of Economics and Business has grown and attracted large numbers of undergraduate and graduate students in its degree programs, and the Division of Liberal Arts and International Studies has also grown the number and strength of its research faculty, has developed a graduate program, and is currently developing a second, while still delivering many of CSM's undergraduate credits in humanities and social sciences. Nevertheless, as noted by Provost Castillo, the involvement of regular Mines humanities and social sciences faculty in McBride has been very limited for several years, a source of substantial concern given that the Program is ostensibly in “public affairs” which has an inherent social science focus.
In addition, with greater institutional priority given to research and graduate education, new faculty, regardless of discipline, were necessarily focused on their research and funding endeavors and had less time and attention available for undergraduate enrichment activities. Insufficient institutional or Program endowment resources were available to “buy out” regular faculty from their home department obligations using the normal mechanisms; so teaching in the McBride Program became an overload activity which, unfortunately, is widely viewed as detrimental to the primary mission of the home department and the individual faculty member's professional goals, not to mention the family or personal time sacrificed. As a result, the Program increasingly has been forced to draw instructional faculty from retired faculty, administrative faculty, and adjunct faculty from off campus. In addition, there have been frequent and disruptive changes of the McBride leadership as well as an ambiguous and frequently altered governance structure that has contributed to the Program's instability.
The undergraduate academic environment has evolved substantially as well. As Provost Castillo noted in the memo charging the committee: "While the research and graduate education environment has changed over time, so has that of the undergraduate program. When the Honors Program was initiated, there were few undergraduate enrichment opportunities available to students, whereas today there are many exciting minors and areas of special interest that compete for high-performing students (e.g., economics; humanitarian engineering; international political economy; biological engineering and life sciences; energy; and space and planetary science). Accordingly, the McBride Program, which once had over 150 students enrolled, has declined to the 80-90 range, and retention, always an issue with the Program, remains a major concern with some 50% of the students leaving the Program before completion."
These financial, structural, leadership, and academic environment issues with the McBride Program undermine the quality and sustainability of the Program. However, these issues are not new; they have been recognized and articulated to the CSM administration in various forms in the past. Recent examples include the Dean, Eggert, and Hitzman report of 2004 and the follow-up plan of action by a committee chaired by Harrison (2005). The core recommendation of this group was to "normalize" the Program by reducing the reliance on volunteer faculty through adequate resourcing and improved incentives for regular faculty participation. However, with changes in leadership and distracting budget pressures, the administration took no action.
In the fall of 2010 Provost Castillo created the current ad hoc committee to reexamine the future of the McBride Program and make recommendations. In his memo charging this committee, Provost Castillo stated:
"I believe that an honors program is an essential part of a world-class university. In addition, Mines’ special place as an institution focused on applied sciences and engineering surrounding the theme of ' “Earth, Energy and the Environment”' has a special responsibility to produce engineers that are not only technically capable, but are also good citizens in a complex society. Given the changing environment at Mines and in the world, as well as an institutional desire to broaden and advance undergraduate research experience and classroom and related educational opportunities, we seek a fresh perspective on the nature and operational realities of the McBride Program."
This report attempts to meet this charge.
III. Vision, Scope, and Scale
In his charge, Provost Castillo specifically requested the committee to address the following questions:
In light of the current vision for the Colorado School of Mines and it’s focus on energy, earth, and environment, does the existing McBride Program continue to serve the needs of the School in the 21st century?
Should the McBride Honors Program remain an undergraduate minor, encompass other existing minors, or should it expand its range of responsibility to other levels of instruction (e.g., develop a major in concert with departments/divisions), take on other responsibilities such as promoting a broad-based program in undergraduate research experiences both in the disciplines and in the interdisciplinary focus areas of the School, and work with Student Life to expand honors student activities or even develop an honors residence hall? Are there ways to expand honors course experiences to the disciplines outside of the existing minor in public affairs? Should Mines be looking ahead to define a “McBride Honors College” as opposed to simply the existing minor in public affairs? What would be the benefits and the costs of doing so?
In the course of its early deliberations the Committee considered the broad question of what should be the vision and scope of the McBride Honors Program within the current - and future - CSM academic focus. For example, in some institutions, honors programs are general umbrella organizations under which a diverse set of discipline-specific as well as interdisciplinary honors activities occur. The committee felt that CSM already does an outstanding job at technical education, but there is a significant educational gap in the typical CSM student's understanding of and experience with the wider social contexts in which technology functions. In addition, many high-performing, technically-proficient Mines graduates in their future careers have experienced difficulty moving into leadership roles where a deep understanding of the complex contexts of technology is essential to success. The committee believes that addressing this gap is very well aligned with the Mines core mission by meeting the need of society for technically knowledgeable leadership that can operate in a complex interconnected world. Of course, these were the same core concerns motivating the original McBride Program, and these are still very much with us today. The committee unanimously and enthusiastically reaffirmed the original vision of the Program expressed by Prof. Woolsey:
The McBride Honors Program in Public Affairs will provide opportunities for exceptional students to explore the political, cultural, economic, and ethical contexts in which science and technology operate in the world.
In turn, science and engineering faculty participating in the McBride Program will benefit by learning the value of public involvement by technical professionals in advancing society.
The committee also reaffirmed the desire to enhance the principal hallmarks of an "Honors" program by having rigorous admissions and on-going academic performance standards, with higher than normal workload and quality expectations, as well as close student-teacher mentorship and outreach experiences.
The concept of an HonorsCollege is attractive, yet the committee did not feel that expanding the scope of the McBride Program is advisable at this time given the current and near-term fiscal environment. Indeed, given the importance of social contexts to any realistic technological application, something akin to an interdisciplinary program in public affairs, i.e. something very much like the envisioned McBride Honors Program, would be a central component of any such entity at CSM. There is no escaping the need for training technical leaders in the wider social contexts of their activities. A designated McBride residence hall, large enough to house the junior and senior (50) McBride student scholars, is also an attractive concept and should be considered but only after the McBride Program has proven itself to be sustainable.