[This week marks the start of the Fall 2023 semester and my 19th year at Fitchburg State. So as ever, I’ll kick off the semester with preview posts, this time focused on ongoing challenges and leading up to an update on my current book project!]
Semesters
and academic years are about more than just teaching, of course, and this year
my English Studies Department will be embarking on a particularly significant
project: our departmental Program Review. We create that review for outside
accreditors every five years, which can feel pretty quick but is enough time to
really have to rethink where we are, where we want to go, and how we might get
there. A key layer to all those questions are the challenges we’re facing, and
for this Program Review the unavoidable and quite frankly overwhelming
challenge is that of enrollments: the student of Majors in our department has
contracted quite significantly in the five years since the last Program Review,
and represents a clear crisis point here in 2023-24. That trend is far bigger
than one department, and there are many elements to it that we can neither
control nor change. But obviously that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t engage it, nor
think about the ways we can respond and recruit and reimagine and so on. At the
very least, I believe all of us in the Humanities need to do a far more
consistent job talking about all the amazing and vital things we do, and all
the ways students and communities can and will benefit from them. Looking
forward to being part of those conversations during this Program Review
process!
Update
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Fall previews you’d share?
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