00:00:00Tamara: This is July 30th, 2015, and this is Tamara Kennelly, and I'm here with Dr. Karen DePauw, and it's our third interview. At the end of our last interview we were just beginning to talk about transforming graduate education, and you were saying that you can't have the same kind of educational experience in the twenty-first century that you had in the twentieth. I wondered if you could talk about in what way it needs to be different.
00:00:40Karen: Okay. I guess a couple thoughts are coming to mind that I want to make sure that I say. What we do in terms of higher education and specifically graduate education in the twenty-first century is based upon the foundation that was laid in the centuries before. I want to make sure that I acknowledge the traditions and paths because they do provide a solid foundation. But in terms of the skill sets that are needed and the jobs that are out there--the technology and a number of things that have changed in the twenty-first century, I then believe that it is important for graduate education, for undergraduate, but for graduate education to change, to include opportunities so that our students can be better prepared for wherever it is that they are going in the twenty-first century. In that way I have wanted to, and we have, transformed graduate education here at Virginia Tech.
00:02:09Tamara: You write that your signature initiative was implementing the transformative graduate education with these-- knowledge, inquiry, leadership and social responsibility. So those are the-- would you explain a little more about what this means or why those are the important ones to--why those are part of the signature?
00:02:36Karen: Yes, they are definitely a part of it, and in the graphic that I have used those are kind of corner stones or-- corner stones may not be the best word, but they are part of the framing for transformative, well for graduate education, I believe. What we have done to incorporate all four of those led to transformation, led to transformative graduate education. Now the four-- the scholarly, the knowledge starting with that one, and scholarly inquiry those two. Universities have done a good job of providing opportunities. In fact, that has been our primary role as a research 1 university, in knowledge and scholarly inquiry within a discipline. What we are learning more about and what we need to do a better job on, I believe, is more of the interdisciplinary. What we have tried to do in the graduate school here is to expand the opportunities for interdisciplinary knowledge and interdisciplinary scholarly integrity. Let me, Tamara, make this comment too to put it in context. With the transformative graduate education initiative, I want us to complement what goes on in the academic disciplines. That, I guess, is kind of a fundamental piece of the thinking is that the graduate school should not replace, it can't replace, what goes on in the academic disciplines because that's where the faculty are, that's where a lot of knowledge is produced, revealed, discovered, and the graduate school's role in transforming graduate education is really to complement what goes on and to enhance the experience of the graduate students, master's and doctoral students, and that's what we've attempted to do. So in the cornerstones of the four main areas there, knowledge and scholarly inquiry are key components in the graduate school's role is to help facilitate more of the interdisciplinary with those too. In terms of social responsibility and leadership, those are words that I have used to present the case if you will, for why our grad students--or present the case that our grad students need to, in this experience of graduate education, develop more skills in the area of leadership, social responsibility, and commitment to working with and engaging with society. Virginia Tech is a land grant university. It is just one of our missions, and that's why it is easy here at a land grant to add these things to the experience for our grad students. I believe that all of our grad students wherever they are should have that commitment to understand leadership, to gain skills in that area, to experience leadership opportunities, and the social responsibility is really, obviously, then the connection with society. Skills that are needed for graduates today include things such as collaboration, team work, team science, communication, just the three of those; also critical thinking skills, problem solving, problem posing. Those to me fit under the two headings, if you will, of the leadership and the social responsibility.
00:06:36Tamara: I wonder about the interdisciplinary aspect. Has that been difficult to promote because it means that a different college or department they might -- resources and everything -- then suddenly it's not just them. They have to be sharing or negotiating with others. Has that been a difficult part of the puzzle to work with?
00:07:05Karen: Yes. Interdisciplinarity gets talked about an awful lot in higher education, which is a good thing, and in science in general NSF [National Science Foundation] and NIH [National Institutes of Health] have put forward a lot of ideas about promoting that we need to have more interdisciplinary research in graduate education. Reports have been written, and a lot of our faculty is committed to answering complex problems of the twenty-first century. Those will need teams of individuals, and most often interdisciplinary teams. That's kind of the context. Because the university, a university, and this one has been set up along traditional lines with the long history that we have, and then yes, there are barriers. And it becomes challenging to implement interdisciplinary programs because we are so departmental based. The assumption is that credit is given and earned and recognition all based upon a discipline. So it is trying to change that culture to move into the interdisciplinary where the term that I've used is double and triple count, you know, the credit because I want everybody to have credit for the work that they're doing in interdisciplinary. And we have established some programs that I think get close to that, but the perception still is that I have to work in my department. A faculty member has to work in one department, and the students have to graduate from there in order to get all of the credit that is due. So the resources and the perception, all of that sort of stand as barriers, or have been considered barriers to interdisciplinary graduate education. Virginia Tech has had a couple interdisciplinary programs for a long time, which has been great, and we in the last, I guess, six or seven years have had a concerted effort to develop new interdisciplinary graduate education programs. Not necessarily degree granting, but providing some resources so that people can work in interdisciplinary teams. That is, has been the challenge, will be the challenge. We're moving forward, and in many ways Virginia Tech is seen, I don't want to say model, but as a university that is leading the way in raising some of the questions of how we can get to interdisciplinarity.
00:10:31Tamara: What's an example of one of the double or triple counts successes, just to kind of make it more concrete?
00:10:38Karen: Yes, that's good. Well we have fourteen different IGEPs, I-G-E-P, Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Program.
00:10:50Tamara: Okay, thank you.
00:10:52Karen: We call them IGEPs. I guess a couple of things here, the way we put the program together is I was able to secure some resources from the Provost's Office to put out a call for two faculty who wanted to explore research topics--academic interest areas--so that they would have additional resources. They would have some operating dollars; they would have some recruiting dollars; they would have some administrative support and assistantships. Those dollars came through the graduate school; it was a highly competitive process. Now we have fourteen of these, as I said, that's been spread over a three-year period. The resources stay with--they reside in the graduate school and continue to go to the IGEP as long as they're making progress. I'll get to the double and triple counting in a minute because I think it is important to understand the way it is structured. When I proposed this approach to the provost, Provost McNamee, I wanted to do no harm to the department, and that's why I was asking for dollars that could go directly to the faculty in the programs so that they wouldn't have to rely on, and put kind of a tax on, the operating dollars, the recruiting dollars, and the administrative support, so that I would provide those resources back to the IGEP, so that it wouldn't have to come from the department. Then the assistantships, and I was dividing--that's a longer story of how they all got divided. Now to a specific example, and we can get the whole list. I can't remember all fourteen of them at the moment [laughs].
00:12:33Tamara: That's fine.
00:12:34Karen: But interfaces of global change come to mind right now, another one is water, another one is translational obesity, remote sensing, computational tissue engineering. So there are big questions that are being posed by faculty members. One example of trying to give credit where credit is due in a couple of places is that the students will be identified, as they enter Virginia Tech, as the IGEP student. So they will apply to and be admitted into the program called 'water,' for example, or translational obesity or remote sensing. The student will also identify the department where the faculty member is housed, their primary faculty member. That way we can see they are in IGEPs; see they are in Human Nutrition Foods and Exercise, or whatever program they're in so that the department can see or we can see. The student and faculty will show up in a couple of different programs. That's kind of the concept behind what I have used as double and triple counting. It is really giving credit where credit is due. The bottom line that we send to the state is the--we don't to fudge on enrollment at all--we have the set number, but we can see that this student is actually identified with two programs, and this faculty is doing work in a couple of different areas.
00:14:20Tamara: Are sometimes the IGEPs-- is it or it's not just one faculty from one particular discipline, but two or three who want to work, really want to collaborate working with students as well on an issue or not just one person sort of coming in out of--
00:14:46Karen: Yes, and that's sort the underlying assumption of the IGEPs. The IGEPs it's a team of faculty members that come together from various colleges.
00:14:58Tamara: Oh I see.
00:14:59Karen: And that's what was required in the proposal that I didn't mention yet is that it had to cross two colleges and three departments. So these are people who are committed to working on remote sensing, or global change, or--
00:15:21Tamara: Water.
00:15:22Karen: Yes, or water. So they are committed, but they come from different departments. Some of the IGEPs require that the student be co-chaired by two faculty members from different departments, and I think that's a terrific way for the faculty to work together as well as the students, and they can't answer the question they are posing without the other departments. That's the beauty of interdisciplinary. The IGEPs is that we really need that other department to look at it in a different way. One of the requirements for the funding in the IGEP is that they have to teach a course called interdisciplinary graduate education that's related to their topic, whatever, like remote sensing; I'll just stick with that one for right now. Maybe once a year or every third semester, they have to teach this interdisciplinary course, and that's where the students are --it's problem solving, problem posing essentially about that topic area. The faculty have to be involved, and the term I've used with them is: this is not serial interdisciplinarity, where a faculty member from X department lectures for a while, then Y comes in, and Z comes in, and then Q. The faculty have to be there too so that they are not just lecturing at, but are actually engaging in the conversations with the students. So that it is pulling faculty out of their disciplines. What many faculties have told me is they have learned so much, and they've really realized a lot that they didn't understand about the problem in interdisciplinarity until they got into that setting. Regenerative medicine is one that comes to mind right now because I met with them a couple of weeks ago, and their primary message was that they have learned so much from each other. That to me is absolutely delightful because that's kind of the goal of interdisciplinary. There's so much wealth of knowledge; let's share it in different ways we haven't thought about it, and that's the key-- going back to the question on the twenty-first century-- the key is being able to solve the complex problems of the twenty-first century. We need people who will get outside of their discipline and bring their discipline knowledge and understanding into the learning environment where faculty and students learn.
00:18:34Tamara: Do sometimes people end up kind of reformulating their concept or their problem that they were working on initially; sort of those moments where the light bulb goes off, and it's like the aha moments. When you're working with someone else--
00:18:50Karen: Yes.
00:18:52Tamara: So that kind of offers that opportunity not just for a student to say, oh biochemistry I'd never thought of that. I don't know, but just for the faculty too the whole thing might take another direction than initially--
00:19:10Karen: Yes, and I think that has to happen in today's society because we stop short of fully understanding the problem and then being able to solve it when we only see it from one perspective. Years ago, I used Katrina, Hurricane Katrina, as an example. The engineers will looks at it one way, the social scientists will look at it another way, and the economists will see it in another way. What we really need to understand is what happens to the people who are displaced by the new bridge that is built or the dike that has been built and what impact upon the economy because in some of the situations social injustice can happen because of how people may look only for the best place for the dike to go up or the bridge, and then who are they displacing? They never displace the wealthy; they would displace the poor. We need to understand that in terms of social justice in making those decisions. I don't know whether that's a good example--
00:20:37Tamara: I think it is. It's becoming the citizen scholar in a way. There is that angle of scholarship and research and then how do I operate in this body of people? Have there been, with all the concern about the count, have there been problems with that or things that you had to work out? Has it gone pretty smoothly?
00:21:10Karen: Yes, there have been bumps; there are a lot of things I had to work out. I think it's going okay, but that's my lens. Usually the people who want to be involved in IGEPs are people who understand that we have to look at things differently. I promised the department heads, when I met with them several times, I would do no harm. I've tried to hold to that in terms of the credit. Facts are facts, but perception is reality. A lot of people are still functioning in, if I do this over here it won't count over there, and that's really not true. So we have worked out some of the technical details, at least from my perspective and that's why I'll say, hey, this is your credit over here. trying to make sure that anybody who want to get credit for something that they've done, like the team teaching of the IGEP course, or co-advising so there's a way to mark in our system. There are critics out there. I totally understand that. There are probably people who are unhappy, but these are not individuals necessarily who are daily engaged with interdisciplinarity. The feedback I get from people who are involved, they're pretty happy.
00:22:39Tamara: And you still get people who are wanting to be, or applying to be in the program?
00:22:43Karen: Yes.
00:22:44Tamara: Well I suppose that it would be complicated if you don't have tenure as a faculty member, things have to count the right way. I mean you're on that path.
00:22:55Karen: Yes, and that's one of the traditions, and it's one of the obstacles that needs to be addressed. I think that we've done a pretty good job through the Provost's Office and others to acknowledge the interdisciplinary, because we do incorporate that into tenure promotion. Oftentimes it's the people who have been tenured for a long time who don't realize some of the changes that have been made in the tenure promotion guidelines. We have to move, not away from, we have to expand our vision of what counts to not just focus on a department because that keeps us from growing and enhancing as much as we can. I hear from faculty, and I've heard this for twenty years--kind of along the lines of what you were saying that, well I have to just focus in X department. That's the change in thinking that we need. That's where change has to occur in our thinking. Rather than focusing on a department, we need to focus on questions and research that are applicable to the department. So I know our provost has wanted--when an interdisciplinary case comes up, and we've seen them--that there's kind of an advocate, not a formal advocate, but that is acknowledged in the tenure promotion process. So that iIf I can't understand-- you said biochemistry-- if I can't understand what's going on in biochemistry, but I'm looking at papers that have that flavor, I need to not say it doesn't apply to human nutrition foods or exercise, or sociology, but to get an understanding from someone who can translate that to me so that I can say, okay, I see it. Actually, Human Nutrition Foods and Exercise and Biochemistry work very well together [laughter]. Not as easily in sociology, my other academic home as you know, but that's where the faculty have to be open to interdisciplinary and its influence. So I suggest that no longer does someone need to absolutely focus on--when they are doing interdisciplinary research--they don't have to focus in a discipline, but they have a responsibility to say how it is related to that academic unit. So that the faculty can see that they meet the standards. This in no way decreases standards; it actually increases standards, but the faculty need to understand it from all the different perspectives--as the person going up, the administrator, and the colleagues evaluating the person.
00:26:04Tamara: It really seems to be going to the idea of, what is a university? It's not departmental; it's trying to be broader, make different kinds of connections.
00:26:18Karen: Yes. That's how I view the university. Especially in research 1s, we have been diving deeper into the discipline. We can do that, but we have to be open and go back to what is a university education, what is a graduate degree? I think it is broader than knowledge and scholarly inquiry in a discipline; it has to be broader than that. Going back to transformative graduate education, that's what we are doing here.
00:26:59Tamara: When you say research 1, is that a class, you know research 1 when you said that?
00:27:05Karen: Yes, technically they aren't classified as research 1's anymore. Carnegie has different classifications, but the terminology that has been used in the past and is just the way we often refer to those four hundred plus, 10 percent of all the universities in the United States. We have over four thousand colleges and universities in the United States. Only 10 percent of them are research focused or research 1's, and Virginia Tech is one of those. That's the context.
00:27:42Tamara: Okay, thanks for explaining. Do you find that this experience--we've been talking a bit from the perspective of a department and of the faculty-- how have the students that have the opportunity to participate, has that really changed their approach to their own education? Have you found that it has really changed the students?
00:28:22Karen: Yes. Three things come to mind. One is the interdisciplinary approach is something that the students benefit greatly from. I need to indicate that in many ways the interdisciplinary students are leading the way. The students are leading the faculty to more interdisciplinarity. They see it; they want it. Because of how they have been, not all of them obviously, but a number of them, those that are attracted to the interdisciplinary know that they are interested in questions that cut across disciplines. I've seen it at [Virginia] Tech and seen it at other places where it's really the students that are pushing. They push the faculty; they are much more adaptable to working with others--the ones that are really interested in interdisciplinary, and I've seen that. So they have experiences to explore what they want to explore with the guidance of the faculty. They can't do it without the faculty, but they've been leading the way, and the faculty are learning a great deal. Several years ago now, when I was having conversations with some of the grad students, and they wanted to develop an interdisciplinary--an honor society for interdisciplinary research--it's IDR-- and they convened about a hundred different students who really wanted to explore interdisciplinary. All colleges, not just in a certain subset, so they developed the Interdisciplinary Research Society, IDR. It stands as a model; there is no other one yet. Some of the other colleges, some universities, and even some international would like to develop an IDR society. It is student run. I serve as their advisor just more to be there. They developed it, and they, the students, were pushing the faculty. I was delighted because this is where we created the space and place for graduate education where these ideas could surface and follow through on that. So that's interdisciplinary. In terms of broader transformative graduate education, this is different in that there's a lot of "aha" moments that occur with the students that are engaged with the programs and opportunities that we have. I see that all the time. The students, many of them, are seeking additional information outside of--additional learning not information, maybe information too, but additional learning outside of their academic discipline to develop some of those skills in leadership, to understand what it means to be in the future professoriate, to be a career professional and the skills that are going to be needed there, to understand citizen scholar, citizen engagement, inclusion and diversity. These are obviously a number of the classes are actually taught through the graduate school. Communicating science is a whole new area, and this is not how to do a poster or a PowerPoint. This is how to communicate with others who might not be as familiar with the discipline. So the different ways--one is with interdisciplinary--the students are benefitting and are leading the terms of transformative graduate education. The students are definitely benefitting because I'll pull them out of their discipline, put them in situations where they have to understand that the view of the elephant by the blind folks is very different around the university, if you take the elephant as the university. If you come from a certain discipline one will define it in a certain way, and the university is the elephant as a whole, not what is defined by any given discipline. In the Global Perspectives program that we run out of the graduate school that is extended internationally, so that I want for our folks to understand that higher education is much more complex than what they think from their department and that not all universities around the world look like the U.S. because we have a very ethnocentric view of the world in many things, but in terms of higher education, and there are really some outstanding programs and universities around the world that are very different from Virginia Tech.
00:34:09Tamara: I wonder if it ends up affecting what people do as their career choice afterwards. They might have come into grad school thinking, I'm going to do X, and then suddenly, oh! Especially as things change in the world-- the jobs that are there now, not to be too focused on jobs-- a lot of them weren't there or the emphasis or things that people used to be aspiring towards might not-- I don't know it seems like it's changed. Have you had any feedback?
00:34:50Karen: Yes, I think I have three or four thoughts, and I'll see if I can get them all out and not lose them. One is, I'm thinking about a student in particular who came in and who was headed into industry. An engineering student headed into industry ended up getting involved and taking some of the courses, getting involved at the graduate student assembly, global perspectives and a number of things, and his whole career has changed. He now is interested in becoming a future faculty member, and he's considering internationally. So how some individuals entered with what they thought they could do with additional experiences and opportunities, they see the world is open. Whether or not these individuals take jobs overseas or whatever, I just want for them to know that they have many opportunities available to them. They do. I've had a whole number of students who will write letters commenting to me etcetera how the programs here have changed their lives. That's very significant. I don't know too many other graduate deans, who get that--who receive that kind of information and feedback. They are very pleased with that. Let's see if I can recall the other couple of ones I wanted to mention. One is that yes, there's been estimates that student graduates will change careers, jobs ten to fourteen times in their lives, that I have seen. I think that higher education must prepare folks, give them the foundation, the skills, the knowledge, and the ability to explore more so they can assume any jobs in the future. Ten to fourteen is a whole lot, and it's going to be more than that, and there are so many jobs that we didn't know about. All the IT things as one example. Where people with certain degrees, where they go? I mean it used to be that a Ph.D. in English, the only path for them was higher education as a faculty member. Yes, that's probably still the most common, but why don't we have good English scholars in companies? We should. We should have historians in business and industry, and we have some of those, just not the policy people, just not the ones in certain areas. So jobs are opening up and can be created by those who bring the skills of having a Ph.D. and things that go with that, and being trained in a given area that can help a company or a business or a non-profit move forward. So not all of the Ph.D.'s are going to go into higher education, nor should they, and another thing is that the traditional model that we've had here for the Ph.D. is the Dr. Father, the Dr. Father model where it's the apprenticeship, like apprenticeship and skills, but for the person, the student to then assume the faculty position as a solo thing. We can't have that anymore; we still need strong mentors. But we need to not think of that grad student as replacing the faculty member, because faculty are staying around and living longer and working longer etcetera, but having that student explore other possibilities outside of just the research 1 university. As I said earlier, there are 4,400 colleges and universities, and all of them need trained, educated faculty members. The community college deserves, and those students deserve well-trained educated faculty members. That has to be a viable option. It is, from my perspective, for any of our Ph.D.'s if they want to go into higher education. I'll say there's 4,400 not the 400. Some only want to go to the 400. That's okay, but I want them to know that Hollins up the road, the Roanoke up the road, and Radford down the road a little bit are just as viable options for the teaching, research, and service mission that our students are being trained for. I'm on my high horse here.
00:39:58Tamara: Why was it important to have the Graduate Life Center, to sort of switch to another--
00:40:04Karen: Sure. I guess there are couple of things. One is I realized, or I understood though I probably didn't articulate it as early on that community was very, very important in building community. That typically isn't done in graduate education because it has been more of an isolated experience where one goes deep into the archives, into the books, into the lab, into policy. They go deep into it, and its more isolated. I think we need to build more of a sense of community. So I talked about, early on, a space and place for graduate education. Sandy Hall was part of the space and place for a while, because that's where we were housed when I first arrived here. We used that quad area, I think it's called, that's right outside where we would stage and do some events. So I think, and I've told other graduate deans around the nation, they can have a space and place for graduate education in whatever--it can be a virtual space; it can be a small space; it can be a large space. But it's really about building a sense of community. That's kind of the background. So when the opportunity came to assume some responsibility and create the Graduate Life Center, obviously I would jump all over that because it became a physical space and place for building graduate community and trying something different. So it's been terrific because then I didn't have to be wandering all over campus trying to find a space and place; we had it right there. It just afforded students who could live upstairs, we could renovate the whole downstairs to the various buildings and rooms and programs that we have running in there. Grad student offices, obviously the graduate school, so we're all there in one big sense of community. It's been extremely helpful in building that community, making sure that graduate students know that they have a place and space on campus and building all of that. Colleagues around the nation have come here to [Virginia] Tech to see what we've done. Most of them are very envious of what our physical space looks like, and now other graduate deans in graduate schools are developing-- they may not look like it because they didn't have the benefit of inheriting if you will, a hotel and conference center--they are building spaces and place for graduate education and calling it essentially a graduate life center. The folks from the University of Georgia came to visit, NC State has come here a couple of times, University of Central Florida, three examples that immediately come to mind that are trying to model what we've done here. I was recently asked to write a letter of support for Kansas State University and their efforts to build a Graduate Life Center. Their (now former) President Kirk Schulz is a Ph.D. from here, an alum, and he visited, and I visited there several times. So I know that they are trying to move in that direction. So the movement is to graduate community, and a space and place is terrific, and fortunately, I don't have to use the metaphor of space and place. We've got it in the GLC, although we'll still use the metaphor because I still think it works other places.
00:44:35Tamara: But it is nice to have the physical, and it seems it's another way of fostering, in a way, interdisciplinary. It's like because it's a community in a sense for the students, for the faculty, it's a community there. A way of fostering, getting people out of their silo or whatever it was.
00:45:01Karen: Yes, and students will--they're in and out of the building all the time. Now we don't get all of them coming into the building. We get a good number of them, and I know that there are faculty and grad students who really don't even know what we're doing over here in the grad school, but those who find their way--and that's in the hundreds or probably into the thousands that will come through. It is over a thousand or more that I interact with every year in some kind of capacity relative to this kind of space and place, and they get to come together, and they learn about each other, and they sit in the GLC café every Thursday afternoon from 3:30 to five. Students wander in, talk and we provide coffee and cookies or ice cream or something.
00:46:01Tamara: So it's like a little--coffee hour or whatever.
00:46:04Karen: It's their time yeah. We have a lot of events that go on throughout the year.
00:46:14Tamara: I understand that you helped to strengthen the Graduate Student Assembly, or I don't know if there was a Graduate Student Assembly. Could you talk about your work with Graduate Student Assembly?
00:46:25Karen: Sure. The Graduate Student Assembly [GSA] existed before I got here, but it was very small. When I interviewed, I remember meeting with about seven students who were in the leadership of the Graduate Student Assembly at that time. What I've seen over the years is the involvement of the graduate dean has helped the grad students feel more and be more empowered to get engaged with policy, with changes, with just the whole governance process. We have seen the folks, the grad students, have much more influence and voice in what has gone on, and that's I think due in great part to the commitment of the graduate school and myself personally, but all of the folks in the grad school to work with graduate students. This is not a student versus graduate school. This is where we're working together. The way universities have been typically functioning is that the division of student affairs would be more focused on undergraduate, and there would be very little attention to graduate students. That was the case here--not unusual. So that was a void, that I thought in building graduate community, needed to get the graduate students involved in their organization and having the voice that I thought they needed. It's just built over time. We've got some good student leaders who have brought their various perspectives to it. We've gotten more students involved on a regular basis, so now we can walk into a GSA meeting and from the seven that were there the first time we can see seventy-eighty. The high is probably over a hundred, but I don't expect that once a month. There are a lot of people engaged. I think it is empowering and creating opportunities where the students feel empowered and that their voice matters. That's what the leadership of GSA would probably say to you that their voices do matter.
00:49:13Tamara: What kind of issues would they be dealing with for an example?
00:49:19Karen: A classic example is health insurance premium coverage. Shortly before I got here there was a premium. Grad students were given--I'm going to say about $120 or so to purchase health insurance. So the university had made a commitment to give them a little bit of money. It was really about 20 percent of the cost. We collected some data with the students, because I knew that other universities were covering 80, 90, 100 percent of the health insurance as part of the package for the students. This other thought that's running through my head is that Virginia Tech needed to understand in '05, '06 around that time that we were not competitive in attracting the top students that we wanted. We were not as competitive because we could not offer a competitive package. A competitive package is the stipend, the health insurance, and the tuition remission. Those three things we were basically lacking. The attitude was Virginia Tech is well known, and we don't have to recruit. Well we have to recruit; I want to recruit. We've got good folks, but we can improve not only the numbers but the quality of the student and the connection with the type of things that we're doing. So tuition remission was not guaranteed, stipend levels were low, and health insurance--what we covered as a university was very low. So the students and the grad school did some research, got some data, and it was their voices and mine that fought for the plan to increase the stipend that we cover to 90 percent. It took us some years to get there, but it was the insistence of the grad students. The voice is always there in front of the budget office and some others, and so that was one example. So we sit at 90 percent right now, which is the same as for faculty and staff. The university doesn't cover 100 percent. Students now want 100 percent, and that's harder for me to argue when the faculty and staff don't get it. So at least there's equity, but that's a different topic. That's one. Parking always comes up. The students have had a big voice in that. The type of health insurance coverage, they have been very active in that. Not only the costs of it, but when we were moving from one company to another, so they were very articulate in what it is they would like to see. Childcare is another thing that they have been vocal about, and rightly so. We've made some progress in that arena. Their voice has been very valuable in some of the policies that are implemented, most recently continuous enrollment type policy and just some of the general requirements. Five grad students sit on the Commission of Grad Studies and Policy, which is very helpful to me as graduate dean and to the governance process as to how we do graduate education here. They've had a lot of voice. I never know what things may be on their mind, and they will share with me what's on their mind, and we will see what we can do.
00:53:52Tamara: The insurance is huge.
00:53:54Karen: Yes, it is.
00:53:55Tamara: That's major. Well since you happen to mention--I was going to ask you later on about the childcare thing. That's been a more I believe maybe it's been in the works for quite a while, but a more recent initiative. Could you explain the childcare cooperative?
00:54:15Karen: Yes, and just a brief history--this has been ongoing for almost the entire time that I've been here. What has happened is that there were groups of people at various times because childcare is very important to staff, faculty, and students. We will lose some grad students if we don't have--we have lost grad students, who won't come here because we don't have childcare. One of the first iterations that I was involved in, I was representing graduate students, but indeed the decision was made, and it went to faculty. That's when Rainbow Riders and a number of things-- now Rainbow Riders is open to grad students, but they can't afford it as some staff and others can't afford it because it's on the higher end. Relatively inexpensive for other cities, but expensive for Blacksburg--I want to put that in context. So we were at the table, but weren't successful in getting any tangible action. Then it came up again, and the committee structure, the bureaucracy of the university, just didn't move it forward. What I will call it is the third attempt, when I was back at the table saying, this has to include grad students this time. Absolutely has to. That's when President Steger finally decided to say okay, he'd support a halftime person to do--or he was supporting a person to come in and kind of manage childcare. So he put some money where his mouth was and gave it to the grad school so we could hire someone to come in, and their full-time job was to wake up every morning thinking about childcare for grad students. I had always talked about a co-op model and was told for many years that that couldn't happen here, and it wouldn't work. The childcare coordinator that we hired was very experienced and had run one of these out of New York and developed it herself. Indeed, she found the laws that allowed us to develop the co-op program, so she got it together and as of January 2015 we had the I think it's called Little Hokies Hangout. The co-op model means relatively inexpensive pricing for the grad students, and they have to donate some time. So it was successful for the spring. We've got a program going on right now in the summer time, and we'll get more enrollments in the fall. So it's partially meeting the need because it's not full time. They can pick whether its three hours in the morning, three hours in the afternoon, and some evening hours because it's not intended to be full-time. It is intended to be kind of a part-time, and that is solving or addressing part of the problem. We still need affordable childcare, and I'm still trying to get that realized, but that will take more doing. We also need graduate family housing, and I've coupled the two of them in my head, so if we can get graduate family housing off-campus with childcare that would be absolutely terrific. We are working towards that end as well. So we've made some progress. At least people can see partially what we're doing. It's coming up again for childcare, and we'll see where it goes.
00:58:44Tamara: The location is fairly near campus isn't it?
00:58:52Karen: Yes, it's the Lutheran Church, which is right across the street from the signature engineering building, the new one there. So it's very convenient. People can walk back and forth, and they have a nice parking lot. The church is happy to have Little Hokies Hangout, and it's very clear that there's a division between the church facility and the facility that they [childcare] run. There's a very clear separation, so it really is not an issue. It's the space that we're using. I just need to make that clear so that people understand, but it's a wonderful opportunity.
00:59:31Tamara: As far as the graduate family housing that would need to be some kind of subsidized housing?
00:59:40Karen: Well the people that I've been talking to, or they've been talking with me because this is not a Virginia Tech initiative. They have contacted me in my role as graduate dean because they would like to provide affordable housing for graduate families. They see it as a need. It came from a person who had been a graduate student here some years ago, and her daughter lived under her desk essentially, because there was no place to live and no childcare. So that was part of the original conversation some years ago. It would need to be affordable, and affordable could mean subsidized, but it could mean that whoever might ultimately build this that they don't subsidize it per se, but they know it needs to be affordable, but they have other ways of making a profit that they can put into resourcing the graduate family housing.
00:00:58Tamara: I know it's something that the town is thinking about as well. I don't know about getting to the step of actually having it available.
00:01:08Karen: It's really important that the town be involved with this as well, because they need to be supportive of it. It needs to be affordable. It's not just the granite tops and all high end. For some of the families of our undergrads who can afford that, I think it's terrific that we have those kinds of places, but graduate students don't--some have some wealth-- most of them are living on stipends that are far less than well, they're not very much. The average stipend right now for nine months is sixteen thousand dollars a year to seventeen thousand dollars a year. I don't know how people live on that right now.
00:02:08Tamara: If you have a child.
00:02:12Karen: Yes, and its challenging. The people at First and Main are the ones that have talked with me about it. They understand that we need affordable family housing.
00:02:27Tamara: So you actually developed a business plan to address these issues that we've just been talking about--stipend level, tuition remission, health insurance coverage, housing-- was it difficult to get support for this plan, or was it just something you just kept pushing at? It's not like it's there, it's in the process.
00:02:52Karen: We're in a pretty good place in terms of the package that we have for the grad students in terms of the stipend, the health insurance and tuition remissions. I had to push early on when I was hired, and President Steger wanted a thousand more graduate students, my first response was we can do that, but it will cost. Because they're not just going to come to [Virginia] Tech because it is a wonderful place. It may be a wonderful place, but they have to live.
00:03:27Tamara: And they want quality.
00:03:28Karen: They want quality. They don't want to be camping out on the Drillfield trying to go to grad school. There was a commitment early on to increase the health insurance, so we put together the business plan to do that. Over the years and with the growth, we realized before some of the serious cuts--there were a lot of resources put into it. I look at it as being very stable in the package that we offer. Where we could always add to that is by increasing stipend. The departments have the flexibility to increase the stipend because the way we set that up was more constrained previously, but we set it up so they have some choices. Whether or not they have the money is the challenge here because that comes from the college dean and the resources that are given to the college. So they have the ability to increase the stipend. More fellowships and more dollars to support stipends would help the colleges in recruiting. The package I think is in pretty good shape.
00:04:41Tamara: Would you explain the process for identifying new graduate degrees at Virginia Tech? I think it's called the Institutional Plan for Graduate Degrees.
00:04:53Karen: Yes, the Institutional Plan for Graduate Degrees, and we also have a parallel activity at the undergraduate level, which I think is terrific. We started it at the graduate level where we asked departments and colleges to think about and to let us know about the graduate degrees that they wanted to offer in the future to get them thinking about it. To put a two-page proposal together so that we then could just identify the possibilities that faculty wanted to pursue. To put it on a piece of paper electronically or on a paper, so that we could see it across the colleges that would come to me. I would vet it through the provost and the college dean so everybody put their eyes on it and could weigh in on other colleges relative to--whether it might be synergies where duplication overlap. Then we would agree that when the plan was pre-approved--that's the language that I used--that then faculty could develop the full proposal that then would need to go entirely through governance. At the pre-approval level there was no guarantee of new university resources, but there was a commitment to see the new degree proposals as part of where Virginia Tech wanted to go. The first couple of years a lot of degrees were proposed, and some of them have been realized. I've got two thoughts running here. One is we have now gotten into a place where we are not just putting things on there, but we're thinking about strategy as to how do we increase our presence in Northern Virginia? How do we increase and what are the degree types that we might want to put online? So I think we're being more strategic in that kind of focus. We will see some more growth in graduate education. It's been declining in the last couple of years. It's not surprising; nation-wide that's what has happened. By using the plan, we've been able to see what other departments are thinking about, indeed maybe combined. I think building construction may have been one of those--and there are just some other examples. I've asked the deans and their colleagues to think differently about the graduate education that we need. Not just creating programs that we haven't had, but to think differently. An example of this is the ASPECT program, Alliance for Social, Political, and Ethical, and Cultural Thought. That's kind of an odd title for a degree, but that didn't exist until we started this process of strategically adding degrees to have more of an AAU-like [Association of American Universities] portfolio, which meant we needed to have more master's and Ph.D.'s in the social sciences. We were not going to be able to have a Ph.D. in philosophy, for example, or history. So the way that we went about it was interdisciplinary, so how we could all come together and develop something that was unique or designed for Virginia Tech and our strengths and not to compete against others in the state. The Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Writing is another new one that came off of the institutional plan--off meaning positively that it went through the governance. Some individuals wanted a Ph.D. in English and the literature portion of it. UVa [University of Virginia] is very strong, and there are others, so that was not needed in the state. We looked at what we could do with our strengths, and we went down the rhetoric and writing has been very good because of the hiring and things that came along with that. So I got away from the process of the institutional plan. Just a couple more comments there. Now every semester now we put out a call for what are the departments and programs thinking about. This is done with the undergraduate and graduate degrees. Then we bring it to the provost's academic council [Academic Affairs Council] where we discuss all of the proposals that are there and then agree that this is worthy of putting forward. It seems to be working very well. I'm pleased that it's happening at the undergraduate level as well because it helps us look at where we should be going and what the faculty have an interest in. This is faculty driven rather than administrators saying well you've got to do this, but seeing how they're driven and for us to take a look to see how all the pieces fit.
00:11:00Tamara: Playing to their institutional strengths I guess seems to be an important part of it. What was the business plan for increasing doctoral enrollment Ph.D. 2010, I think it's called, initiative?
00:11:23Karen: There was, and I worked closely with the Provost's Office in putting together that plan. A couple of key points here is we did initially an analysis of the capacity at the college and departmental level to enroll more graduate students, but primarily doctoral students. What we found was in some colleges, they had an average of one Ph.D. per faculty member. Other colleges had a lot more than that. I used a general rule of thumb that a faculty member should be able to work with about four Ph.D.'s-- not necessarily graduating four in a year, but to have enrolled. Sometimes it's too many; sometimes faculty can take more, but I just use that generally as the metric. Then we were able to design some strategies for growth areas. The dean at the time for Agriculture and Life Sciences-- there was great capacity there as shown by the numbers, and some of the resources. She put in resources and wanted to be a part of growth, so that has happened and continued. There were a couple of other colleges where we could see that there was real potential for growth. Then we asked the college deans to propose the number of students that they wanted to take, that they thought they could enroll, then new resources. That's where the Ph.D. 2010--because that was the goal for 2010. So the resources, assistantship dollars and whatnot were given to the graduate school to distribute to the colleges to go towards that increase in enrollment. The deans said how many they thought they could do in the first year, the second year, and the third year. First year, everybody was allocated what they thought they could enroll, and they got the resources. In year two the number of additional Ph.D. 2010, depended on how well they met their goals in year one. A couple of colleges did excellent. They had said whatever the number was, seven, seven, and seven. Seven they got the first year, so they got seven the next year. They kept increasing as long as they met their goal of enrollment. These were all new resources that were provided. By resources, I'm talking about stipend, tuition remission, and health insurance that came out of the budgeting process. Some colleges were not as successful in meeting their goal, where they didn't, they didn't. They got some new, but they didn't get as many Ph.D. 2010s. That's how we kind of managed that process. Once 2010 happened, we had to change the title because that didn't work anymore. I guess that wasn't as long-term thinking as I should have been. The program still exists, and the baseline allocations are still there with the college--these are just some--coming through the grad school. They're called grad school doctoral assistantships, I think.
00:15:34Tamara: So some units or departments they keep getting more for whatever reasons, and others have more of a struggle to have them come, but they can still get the resources as they go on.
00:15:51Karen: One of the components of the Ph.D. 2010's is that I gave them allocated to the college, and the college could then determine where they went in terms of the type of growth that the college deans wanted in particular areas. So I still look at it as the college dean has that. Once something is given to a department, they pretty much want to keep it, and I totally understand that, but that's in the hands of the dean to make that decision. So it will appear that for some, others are getting more and they're getting less, and that's a college dean's decision.
00:16:38Tamara: I see. Is it difficult to reach the goals with sponsored research providing support to get-- I have these numbers I don't know where I got them-- 35 percent of 48 percent desired. I mean is it hard to work with the sponsored research aspect to get their support I guess for students and for programs?
00:17:09Karen: Yes, what you're referring to is the goal that, in putting together the Ph.D. originally and for the growth of Ph.D. 2010's and the growth, I early on had suggested that 48 percent, I think it was 48 percent, of our assistantships should come from sponsored programs. And 10 percent should come from--that was a goal to get out of foundation fellowships etcetera, and the remainder, I guess 42 percent should be GTAs [Graduate teaching Assistants] paid for by the state. So those were round figures; I may be off a little bit on those. We knew, and I believe the 35 percent was the number of grad students who were on sponsored programs; it was going to be a stretch goal to get them to 48 percent. I totally over shot the 10 percent from foundation; I must have been pipe dreaming to think that we could raise that much money that quickly to get to where 10 percent of our graduate student Ph.D.'s would be supported on fellowships. So we fell short of that, but we're still working on increasing that portion of it. We have not yet reached that 48 percent on sponsored programs for a variety of reasons. One is it's harder to get the grants to support the grad students. We're still increasing and making good progress, but it is harder for faculty to secure as many grants. What we have is more of the huge grants, which are much harder to get, but can support more grad students. So that's a challenge, and faculty will say that, and I think that's very important to acknowledge. The second, and more challenging to me in my role, is the perception and partial reality that it is cheaper to hire a post doc or a technician to do some of the work than to have a Ph.D. student or a graduate student on the grant. In some ways, what the argument is, which is true, which is accurate, is that the stipend, which is less than what the post doc, and others would get, the additional costs on the grant are the tuition remission as well as the health insurance. So it puts the package up, to be perhaps equal with the expenses for a post doc. The post doc can work forty hours, and the grad student can only work an average of twenty a week on an assistantship, and the fact that the post doc comes trained, and the grad student is more developing. So two very logical and understandable reasons that PIs [principal investigators] would prefer post docs. So grants decreasing, the use of the dollars to the faculty members-- I understand why they're saying, "I'll hire a post doc not a grad student." It's all of these things that have contributed to that. Other colleges and universities around the United States we all face the same type of thing. No one's really solved you know that one.
00:21:25Tamara: I wondered-- you spoke a little bit earlier about international education or how ethnographic--
00:21:36Karen: Ethnocentric.
00:21:38Tamara: I'm sorry, yes ethnocentric [laughter]. How at a university what a graduate education is, and how it's done in other places, so I wondered what was happening with Virginia Tech's international efforts for global graduate education.
00:22:00Karen: There are several things that I believe are happening. One is that we are attractive to many international students to apply to and attend Virginia Tech. At the graduate level, which are the only figures I know for sure, about 27 percent of our enrollment are international students from over one hundred different countries, which is pretty cool. The top three are China, India and South Korea. They are the top three, for the most part, around the nation as well. Iran comes in as a close fourth; Egypt might as well. That's one piece. I think international enrollment is going to increase this fall just from looking at what's been happening. We've been running pretty steady at 27 percent. I'm fine with that; I think we could go to 30 percent, but that's not really a goal. My goal is to actually keep things in balance. I really like having international students around, but we shouldn't look to them to provide revenues for the university. So that's one piece just on the enrollment. I've worked with the vice president for Outreach and International Affairs and individuals in his office to formulate meaningful partnerships with other universities for exchanges, research exchanges, grad student exchanges, for dual degrees. We have a lot of MOUs [Memorandum of Understanding] in place; not all of them are as active. My philosophical approach has been to partner with institutions where we are either of like kind or we complement or we have synergies. We can transfer faculty, not transfer jobs, but work together on efforts. That includes recruiting of graduate students. We have a new program of the accelerated undergrad to grad degree--it happens to be Shandong University in China--where the students there will finish up three years, and those who qualify will come to [Virginia] Tech in year four of their undergraduate, finish their undergraduate degree in the fall and become fully vetted graduate students in the spring. So they will send back the credits that they take, graduate from Shandong and then enter a graduate program, a master's program and spend a year and a half, and then they're done. They have two degrees in two different universities. That's something that we intentionally accepted. The faculty member was very much involved, and I visited there, and it's a success. So that's an example of a partnership that we would be working on. There's the global perspectives program run out of the graduate school, which is a whole different type of approach. This is associated with the future professoriate program, where those who have taken two of the required courses can then apply for the global perspectives program. We've been doing that--we just celebrated our tenth year this past summer. This is where those who qualify have to apply, and then they are selected. This last summer we took fourteen graduate students from five different colleges. This gets back to the interdisciplinary and just being from different perspectives for sure. We visit programs in Switzerland, primarily Italy and France. This is not about their discipline. It's about understanding higher education and seeing and realizing the real differences. So Switzerland is obvious because Virginia Tech has its Villa there, so it makes it easier logistically. We will visit seven or eight different universities, and then we have connections with the University of Basel who does a similar program in reverse--brings their students here--and then ultimately we end up at the Swiss Embassy in D.C. with a global summit on higher education. In that way they are learning, but this is where a lot of the students actually realize a whole lot of change because it opens up their world. We talk about--each year we have a theme that is being explored by the students on the University of Basel side and the Virginia Tech side. So that's a different type of effort to help understand more about the global society that we have out there. Again, through the grad school, I offered a program in Chile that went fine, but that's harder logistically to manage. I've got something new going with Ecuador-- it's a different type than what we have in Switzerland, taking folks there who could be potential visiting professors for one university and maybe a couple of others for one, two, or three years. So they get to learn, and they can help the university there learn more about teaching and learning. We have other kinds of study abroad programs. There are some faculty who do programs in sending their grad students to do some research in another country. Where we are lacking-- that is really challenging, but I hope to put some efforts into it--is how do we leverage the expertise and the knowledge and understanding of the international students that are here to help the entire university learn more about what it means to be a global citizen. We have the events, the International Street Fair that is at one level. We learn a lot from that, but it doesn't get in depth to the conversations that I think we need to have about the politics, the realities. I mean right now the nuclear agreement with Iran-- I know that's being discussed within the Iranian community here in Blacksburg. Let's have that conversation. Let's get out the biases; let's get out the facts and the figures. Let's hear from the Iranian students what their perspective is. It won't be a singular perspective, but we have rich opportunities. When the uprising happened in Egypt, the "Spring Awakening" I guess it was called, again incredible conversations. I was able to participate in some of them, but we need to do a better job--"we," meaning the grad school and university-- of leveraging those opportunities, so those who don't have the experience of traveling, or the opportunity, or who aren't even open to it, have the challenge of being faced with a conversation about more than the United States.
00:31:07Tamara: That would be great to have, I don't know, an event or something where other people could attend too. Staff, faculty, whoever is interested in just hearing--
00:31:23Karen: I mean you would be interested. I know many others would be. I've talked to the VP for Outreach and International Affairs. What we try to do, we do some of those things within the grad school, but yet we really have not focused on that as much as I think we could.
00:31:45Tamara: That's just a possible direction. What's the theme this year? You said when you take the group abroad you have a theme.
00:31:53Karen: The theme for 2015 was, yes it was because we haven't set it for 2016 yet, global higher education, accountability, and relevance.
00:32:04Tamara: Accountability to…
00:32:09Karen: That was the open question.
00:32:10Tamara: Oh that was the open question. It does bring in the citizen scholar notion, as well as--
00:32:24Karen: Yes, who are they accountable to?
00:32:29Tamara: I've wondered, this might not have to do with graduate school, but I noticed Cranwell Center moved on campus. Even though, to me, it wasn't really very far, but they were--we weren't really physically far, but where they are now seems a bit more central. Was that a deliberate effort too-- do you know?
00:32:56Karen: Yes, it was a deliberate effort on the part of the vice president for Student Affairs to bring Cranwell back onto campus. I agree. I don't think it was that far away. Physically for some it seemed far away. I think she wanted to get more within the residents' community. The Cranwell Center does an excellent job of helping the international students in residential and social and a number of things. It really doesn't do as much in terms of academics and especially grad students. Grad students are very much involved with the Cranwell Center as they should be, but we do, the grad school does the processing of the visas, working with them on admissions and academic progress and that needs to remain because it is more an integrated portion of the international student's life. So we work very closely with them [Cranwell Center], which is great.
00:34:09Tamara: Do you have several languages?
00:34:10Karen: Me personally?
00:34:13Tamara: Yeah.
00:34:13Karen: No. I have survival languages. When I go some place, I can make do. No, that's unfortunate. I don't think in the United States we have a done a good enough job to get our --from early on to learn languages. I took Spanish, and I took German, and I passed those in my doctoral program because I had to have foreign language competency. I would not say competency. There is no competency in those other languages. That's something I would like to see Virginia Tech do, and it has done-- offered some language courses for students, faculty, and staff.
00:35:01Tamara: Right. They do have those. How would you describe your management style?
00:35:12Karen: That's a good question. Actually, I think I was asked that when I was interviewed here. I do not micro-manage. That's not my skill set nor my desire. I like to make sure that the individuals are given the freedom and the flexibility to explore and develop the programs that we have. I have a very flattened hierarchy. If you look at what HR describes the hierarchy in the grad school, you'll see the typical one, but that's not how I approach it. They have the organizational chart that goes on down. The organizational chart that I use conceptually is myself and the associate deans kind of in the center, with overlapping ovals and circles below showing that the connection between academic progress, student services, technology, and recruitment are all inter-related. You can find it if you want to take a look at it. That's kind of how I've viewed it rather than top down it's really kind of a team approach trying to work together. I like to be informed, and my direct reports and others will keep me informed on some things that they're doing, which is terrific. If they are wondering whether or not I would approve of it, they bounce things off of me. I think they know pretty much the type of things that I'm supportive of. I'm supportive of innovation, creativity, thinking into the future. I don't want to live in the past; I want us to keep pushing forward. That is hopefully reflected in the managers,' associate deans,' directors' ability to have the freedom to do their job and to push and to communicate. I mean they really need to communicate.
00:37:52Tamara: I guess I should have asked this question a little earlier, but in addition to the GLC-- now there's, I think it's called the Amphitheater and Cobblestone Café outside that's kind of located between the GLC, Squires Student Center, and the library. To me it seems very nice to have that out there. Were there special thoughts you had about why it was important to develop that space?
00:38:29Karen: Yes, and that's kind of a fun story. I heard that space referred to as "Squires" and "Library," and that's just how people were commenting on it. It's shared; I mean there's open spaces right there.
00:38:48Tamara: Yes, it's right there.
00:38:50Karen: The story of that you know because you were here. There was just kind of a hole in the ground. There was I think a fountain or something.
00:39:00Tamara: There was a fountain.
00:39:02Karen: I never saw it functioning. One time I was coming back from--well I always had the idea of the Graduate Life Center and to have outdoor space around. I was coming back from a meeting, and I saw these two gentlemen looking in and talking about the space. I didn't know who they were, but I walked up to them, and I said, I have an idea for this space. So I told them what my idea was and that was to create a plaza and amphitheater where grad students, where anybody, could hangout and interact. We could have music; we could have poetry readings. We could have movies for kids, just a space and place for people to gather out there and that it could also be used as a café. I didn't know at the time, but one person was with the fundraising part of it, development, and the other guy was a former employee here who was heading up the gift for the class of 1959. Both of them really liked the idea and I said, I'm happy to talk with class of '59 if you want to make it as one of the gifts, I would be delighted. Let's go for it. So it happened. They selected the GLC Plaza and Amphitheater as one of their gift sites. So with the architect section, they designed some things that we liked. What I wanted was very much what is there now: to have the amphitheater, to have the stage, to have the chairs, and to have it wired with electricity and water. I really wanted to be able, and I still want to be able, to rope it off--not rope it off for coffee-- but if we wanted to do wine socials type things we could mark it off. We make such a big deal about underage drinking that we have to follow those rules. It was all designed with that in mind. The class of '59 gave the gift, except the university wouldn't allow for the fountain. I had to fight for the fountain. They said, people will put bubbles in it. It's a mess to keep up. I said, I want it. So I had to find other money for the fountain. Now, no one knows that anymore because they think it's a wonderful site. The Inn at Virginia Tech had a fountain. We had the second fountain; we had outdoor space. So we were really creating a whole different environment. If you look across campus now, what do we see? A lot more open spaces. We had the furniture out there; now Squires has the same kind of furniture.
00:42:36Tamara: The Library has it.
00:42:37Karen: The library has it. I mean you all [library]; the former dean I think was very interested in creating that space. And the new dean. We are now seeing a whole lot of these kinds of spaces and places around campus, some with fountains. The grad school was really the first one to do it. The GLC Plaza and the Amphitheater, it could be used more. I try to talk to the arts people, and the performing arts say that the arts corridor goes from the Moss Arts Center to the GLC Plaza and Amphitheater. Let's put things out there. When the Friday afternoon Blacksburg things end, bring them on down onto campus for a while. The Cobblestone Café part of that is harder to realize because of university rules. One is about alcohol, and alcohol is not the main thing there, but that presents challenges in and of itself. I wanted a place, and the Cobblestone Café is just my European experiences or international, where it's metaphor for a place and space where people can talk, eat, and have a beverage of choice, coffee, wine--not getting into the hard alcohol--teas, you know whatever. The conversation about Iran could take place, where we could just have that and engage in that. It's so common in European cities or big cities around the world, and that's the kind of flavor that I want. What we are doing for this fall, we won't be out in the GLC Plaza area, but next to--you know where those trees are outside of the multipurpose room? The hedges?
00:44:44Tamara: On the side?
00:44:46Karen: On the side, yes. There now we have some pavers and some cobblestones in the ground; we have some chairs where people can sit. It's isolated, and what we we're going to offer--we haven't decided whether it's going to be monthly or every couple of weeks--where we will have what I'm going to call the Cobblestone Café. We can get catering in there. We'll have some appetizers. We'll have a beer and wine and soda--I don't know that we'll do coffee-- but in the afternoon/evening where people can come sit and chat.
00:45:26Tamara: Oh that's nice.
00:45:28Karen: We're going to do it. I've been fighting for this. People have to pay, but catering within Virginia Tech can do that. I've talked with them. I've held a dinner with the dean where they catered it and the grad school paid for it, but we can have beer, wine, and food there. I want it to become a conversation place. Grad students--some may want to go Thursday night into the downtown. I'd rather have them in the Cobblestone Café. And bring the faculty members because it's a different feel.; I know; I can see them from my office.
00:46:09Tamara: All right. That's a good place to mingle. I think the fountain is really--there's something about a fountain. I don't have the research on it, but I've always felt there is something about fountains, something you get from a fountain that makes a difference.
00:46:27Karen: Well I have two fountains in my office, so I know that same thing, and that's why I wanted a fountain there. They were going to take it out. They weren't going to include it, and I said, no, I want it there. I said, if I raise the money, can I have it? They said, yes, you have to raise the money. Then you can have it. They didn't think I could do it.
00:46:46Tamara: But you did.
00:46:48Karen: Yes.
00:46:52Tamara: Would you comment on your work for the National Research Council's project on assessment for doctoral programs?
00:47:08Karen: There's a lot to be said, but except for that one report that came out, it hasn't really continued. This was out of the NRC [National Research Council] is what you're talking about. I was involved on some reviewing or input into how doctoral programs would be assessed. This goes back historically; I think there were two or three other studies that had been done. I'm flipping through my brain to see how much I can recall. I do know that I did have great concern about who was included and who was excluded from that and what metrics they were using to evaluate, to assess the doctoral programs. We submitted data ultimately, and there were some evaluations made. I thought it was pretty traditional in its approach, and it was not all inclusive of all of the degree programs. I'm not a fan of rankings, so that always tainted my view of that. I helped them as the graduate dean and in my leadership role on the Council of Graduate Schools, and I was trying to be a gentle critic of trying to make sure that people understood and heard other voices. That's about all I can remember at the moment, and obviously it is not as important in the work that I have done.
00:49:06Tamara: What role did you play in the development of the Principles of Community?
00:49:17Karen: I played several roles with the Principles of Community, and you might have heard some of the stories. I remember very distinctly the meeting with the provost and the Monday morning meeting that we would have regularly with him. The VP for Research at the time, he and I actually brought in--well I brought a sample from Washington State, and he brought in a couple of others. They weren't called Principles of Community, but they were some guidelines along the same lines. We had been talking about diversity issues and non-discrimination because of the things that had happened early on in '02, '03, '04 all of that. So Brad Fenwick and I were talking with Mark, the provost, about that and indeed suggesting that we do have some principles of community. What I can't recall exactly is how it moved from that conversation to then sharing the document, or drafts of it with CEOD. That piece I don't know for sure.
00:50:48Tamara: Sharing it with?
00:50:49Karen: Commission on Equal Opportunity and Diversity [CEOD].
00:50:51Tamara: Thank you.
00:50:55Karen: It was that body that then took the initial work and edited it and proposed and ran it through the university governance. Throughout all of that, I was obviously a very strong advocate for getting this done. Now part of the story that is not very well known, and I haven't talked publicly about it too much, is after it was approved through governance I believe, and then they were identifying the people who would sign-- I need to back up. What was imbedded in the Principles of Community in the top paragraph or so was a statement of non-discrimination, so it included our non-discrimination policy. That was done by design so that it couldn't be; it was also to be non-discrimination as well as the principles by which we should all live and interact and that becomes important in a minute. So that discrimination clause, which included sexual orientation, it hadn't been in the others, but it had been added back into our discrimination clause. They were lining up the people who would sign below, the president and leadership and alumni persons, etcetera. I was at another one of those Mondays morning meetings when it was shared with me by a couple of individuals that one person would not sign if sexual orientation was in there. So the recommendation that apparently everybody else had accepted--the president, the provost and everybody, also the VP for diversity at the time--was to take out the non-discrimination policy statement there. What I recall very distinctly, and you can ask one of my colleagues because he was there with me, I looked at the two of them that were telling me this, and I said, we can't do that. This is unacceptable. We have to keep that non-discrimination policy in that. I felt, at that time, that it was a decision that was being made in favor of alumni who wouldn't want sexual orientation in there versus where I thought we needed to go. I don't remember exactly what I said, but I basically said something like, if that's the way it's going to be, then I'm out of here. I made it very clear in what I was thinking that I couldn't be at this university if that type of thing was allowed to happen. I wheeled out of there, went back to my office. By the time I got back to my office, I had a phone call from one of my colleagues because I must have said something about job offers because at that point I had been recruited to a couple of different places or at least interest or what not. I must have implied that I was going to activate my candidacy to leave, which I was planning to do and probably did in those moments. This was in Burruss. By the time I got back to my office, I had a phone call from my colleague and then one from the provost wanting to talk with me because they knew how serious I was. This was not about me staying; this was a principle. I was very, very ticked, frustrated, irritated--you know, all of those words, and I was insistent that we keep it in there. It just became kind of interesting. It's longer in all of the conversations, but a lot of things were happening that day, and people knew that this was very serious and that I was taking it very seriously. What I was to find out later--again this is probably not publicly known--was one alumnus that was in some kind of leadership position who said he would not sign. He fought against it. The guy who was the Alumni Association President (I think), he was watching the university to see what we would do. I happened to know him, and he told me later that he wouldn't have signed it if it had been taken out.
00:56:25Tamara: The vice president for alumni or whatever?
00:56:29Karen: No, this was an alum who was on the alumni board.
00:56:32Tamara: But the alumni board was going to be signing it too?
00:56:36Karen: Well the alumni board member was going to sign, and it was somebody on the board that said we cannot have sexual orientation--he didn't say sexual orientation, he just said we can't have the nondiscrimination. The actual president or chair of the board was of a different opinion, and he's the one who then told me later that he was watching to see what the university was going to do because he wanted it in there. So I created the stink--terrible word for a recording, but--I created the opportunity for the university to rethink what it would do, and it finally decided to keep it in. So the non-discrimination clause remains in the Principles of Community and included sexual orientation at the time. So I felt personally and professionally upset by the alumni's action of that one person in particular, and honestly that the university initially did not stand up. It took me in the hallway saying, this is really just not acceptable. Then my colleagues stepping up and saying, okay we'll keep it in there.
00:58:08Tamara: What year was that? Can you remember around what year that would be?
00:58:15Karen: Maybe '05. Yes, because we are celebrating ten years of the Principles of Community, and you probably know I was awarded the Principles of Community award this year 2015. I'm going to have to run back to my office, but it's interesting to be now the recipient. A lot of people don't know a lot of the backstory, and most people absolutely do not know what happened in the hallway and all of that. I'm choosing not to use names, a very many of them. The individual, and I'll name him, Kimble Reynolds was the chair or president of the Alumni Board, and he is a very strong supporter. He is the one who wanted to make sure that the university did the right thing ultimately.
00:59:14Tamara: Again it's maybe a question of maybe someone was watching or thinking about it, but even on those levels, then you have to make the actual move. I mean you have to take the stand in a sense. It sort of brings back to mind the meetings that you referred to earlier in the provost's office where it's like you had to take a stand because other people might think in their heads, but to actually say it-- even on that level of people who obviously have learned to communicate.
00:00:00Karen: Yes, I was disappointed initially because I thought people had caved in without thinking of the ramifications. I know I would have said, "What message are you sending if we do this. It's the wrong message."
00:00:21Tamara: Yes, especially after everything that happened before.
00:00:23Karen: Although I was disappointed and frustrated, I then was pleased that the work that we had done previously with my colleagues--they realized what the message was or could be and how impactful it was. I was ready to leave if it had not been-- Not a threat or a promise or anything like that. It was one of those moments where it was the closest I've come to leaving [Virginia] Tech.
00:01:00Tamara: Well congratulations on your award! It's well deserved.
00:01:05Karen: Thank you. I do have to go, but you're getting a lot of the stories--this is for the archives. You know I talk publicly about this, and I try not to place blame, but I will place responsibility.
00:01:23Tamara: On particular people--
00:01:25Karen: Yes.
00:01:26Tamara: Well I do have more questions, so maybe we could have another session in the future at your convenience. Thank you so much.
00:01:36Karen: Sure, no that's fine. I know I get long winded.
00:01:39Tamara: No, it's great.
[End of interview] NOTE TRANSCRIPTION END
