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It's the second week of the term at Smith College. Marc Steinberg, associate professor of sociology, is spinning about his classroom, a custom-made "(Not So) Hard Theory Café" cap cocked on the side of his head, an ill-fitting lab coat draped over his T-shirt and blue jeans. He's trying to impress upon his sociology students the importance of epistemology as they approach the study of theory. But, you ask, why the lab coat and baseball hat? "I'm encouraging, prodding and teaching, trying to have the students engage a debate on positivist versus post-positivist assumptions on theory," explains Steinberg. "The lab coat is a bit of comic relief intended to disarm their sense of irrelevance and distance from the issues at hand: Is sociology a science? If so, in what ways? And what is science anyway?" Theatrics aside, Steinberg, one of approximately 260 faculty members on campus, freely divulges his teaching mission: "I see the great lesson of a liberal arts education in the illumination of critical thinking. 'If you must,' I have the urge to tell my students, 'forget Freud and Foucault'--which most will, in any event--'but never stop refining the critical faculties you used to gain entree into their worlds.'" Steinberg's enthusiasm, which helped earn him the 1997 Junior Teaching Award bestowed by students on Rally Day, is not unique among his colleagues at Smith. Although few faculty members employ as much comic relief, they are as a group dedicated teachers and active scholars. Their strengths and talents have long been acknowledged. Envisioning Our Future, the report prepared by the Steering Committee for the college's 1997 self-study, noted that "the most remarkable dimension of the Smith faculty is their ability to blend excellence in scholarship with an unusually strong commitment to teaching and mentoring students." Indeed, in 1996-97 their scholarly work attracted more than $1.5 million in grants from institutions ranging from the National Science Foundation to the National Endowment for the Humanities to the U.S. Department of the Interior. They are sinologists, developmental psychologists and cell biologists, to name just a few. They are authors, advisers, book reviewers, house fellows, mentors, presenters, performers, panelists as well. They know how to use the music of Madonna to teach the social construction of gender. They bring a preacher's zest for telling a good story and a statistician's love of numbers and patterns. They appreciate the microcosmic as well as the macrocosmic, the sublime as well as the surreal. In all, armed with their passions and their talents, they are vigorous scholars who hope to quicken the metabolic rate of their students' intellectual hearts and to foster empowerment and engagement in a tumultuous world. They are "advertisers for critical thinking," as Steinberg puts it. They are Socrates to their student Platos. But it's not about charisma. "Charisma is a gift," says Dean of the Faculty John Connolly. "If you've got it, it can certainly be useful. But I do think a good teacher needs to have the ability to communicate a true love for the subject. Plato revered Socrates, but Socrates stressed the importance of the lesson." And practically speaking, how each professor delivers the "lesson" varies. "My students seem to appreciate what I do as a teacher," notes Randy Bartlett, professor of economics, winner of the 1993 All-College Distinguished Teaching Award, and 18-year member of the Smith faculty. When he teaches introductory macroeconomics, for example, he employs humor, metaphor and lessons learned from listening as an adolescent to the sermons delivered by his own father, his uncle and his brother, all Protestant preachers. "I came to see the value in clarity and emphasis," he says. "The old rule of thumb is that each sermon has three points. Any more and the message gets buried. Any less and it has too little content. I also came to appreciate the rhythm of the language and the power of an effective illustration." Around campus, Bartlett is as famous for his anecdotes as for his jokes. "To be rigorous, you don't have to be serious all the time," he insists. "I can't go longer than 15 minutes in class anyway without cracking a joke." He adds, "I'm lucky that way. Bad jokes just come to me spontaneously." More than the research Maintaining a sprinting pace during their workweek that might leave any WNBA forward winded, most junior and senior faculty members juggle academic roles that take them from classroom to office to conference room to library and back. Some of their time is spent in service to their departments and the college as student advisers, committee members and department chairs or program directors. But paramount are their roles as teachers and researchers. In fact, for a professor at a teaching-oriented liberal arts college like Smith, tenure and promotion largely hinge on demonstrated accomplishments in those two areas. For full professors who already have tenure, scholarly research and long-term projects such as writing books and journal articles remain essential to staying current and active in their academic fields. "Research keeps you motivated to read, attend conferences, stay tuned in to what's going on in your field," says Steve Williams, Gates Professor of Biological Sciences. "You can't bring the excitement of the discipline to the classroom without your research." He should know. In the last five years, Williams has received grants from the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization (WHO) for his research on genetic factors involved in resistance to a tropical disease transmitted by filarial parasites. He also is the current director for the WHO-sponsored Filarial Genome Project and its eight laboratories around the world. What goes on in his classroom, however, is just as important as what comes out of his research, he says. Williams joined the faculty of Smith because it was one of the few institutions of learning in the country "where teaching and research are put on equal footing"-an equilibrium he still values. Such a commitment to both research and teaching is not uncommon. "My teaching tends to guide my research," insists Bartlett. "I take what I get out of my classes and apply those ideas to research. I carry out the research and publish because it keeps my mind lively. I can't ask my students to take on hard work without my doing the same." What also appeals to faculty is the fact that in the classroom they can revisit their scholarship by way of making the subject at hand spellbinding and compelling. "'Gotcha!' I sometimes think to myself in class," says Steinberg, "when I see the animated hands fluttering and students hanging on the edge of their chairs, jostling to speak." Once a professional staff consultant to the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Greg White is glad to be in the classroom. "I think teaching is a great gig," says the assistant professor of government with a smile. "I enjoy working as a professor because it gives me a blend of efficacy-contributing to the project of higher education, that is-and of intellectual challenge." Thanks to a three-year Fulbright-Hays Serial Scholarship, White was able to spend four consecutive summers conducting research in Morocco. He is now writing a book about the political economy of Tunisia's and Morocco's relationships to Europe. He also is analyzing the domestic origins of an international dispute, a "really messy situation with European fishing boats wanting to fish the Moroccan coastal waters." In his classes he points out how this situation and the tensions caused by U.S. boats fishing in Canadian waters are useful examples of the politics of natural resource exploitation and, more importantly, how "we are all implicated as consumers. Every time we enjoy a piece of fish in a restaurant," White insists, "we are tied into the international economy in ways that we may not even realize." More than a sage on the stage In her 1995 presidential installation speech, President Ruth Simmons I said, "Whatever fancy things we do in the academy--and there are many--none is as central, none as elegant, none as powerful as a teacher guiding a student's mind toward discovery, knowledge and achievement." Since then, she has continued to emphasize the importance of the exchange of information between teacher and student. Some professors, like Brenda Allen, associate professor of psychology, bring so much enthusiasm for their field to their classes that many students sign up for special academic projects under their tutelage. Allen, for example, is in a field of psychology that studies cultural context and the human processes of learning, and relies on research findings to initiate change. "Through my own scholarship, I get students involved in data collection and I help them get started on their own research," she explains. "It's very rewarding to me to see so many students who, after taking one of my courses, get interested in the statistical material itself and in cultural analysis," Allen says. "The field of psychology is an active science, but unfortunately a lot of women try to stay away from the research and statistical aspects of the discipline. But if you are going to make changes, in social policy or education, for example, you've got to have some research skills." Her own research looks at the relationship between culture and learning, and the effects of movement and music on how young children learn. "We're trying to figure out how to manipulate a child's early learning environment to enhance the performance of African-American children in certain tasks." A sinologist's love for ancient Chinese literature also lights up a Smith classroom. "I'm not just handing my students the dregs of the past; I'm giving them the immediate present, too," says new faculty member Paula Varsano, assistant professor of East Asian language and literature. Her affection for the visual imagery and lyric poetry of eighth-century China "transmits itself," she says. "When you do something you love, it certainly shows up in the classroom. I tell my students all my little stories about the years I spent in China. I try to fill in the spaces around the literature, because eighth-century China doesn't exist anymore and the T'ang dynasty is gone." Varsano, who taught for eight years at the large Canadian state Université de Montréal, arrived at Smith this fall. "I haven't yet had any students come to me to try and negotiate their workload. These students are smart," she insists. "They really seem to be here to learn." Another professor who strongly opposes the notion of teaching as a one-way conversation is Ann Rosalind Jones, Esther Cloudman Dunn Professor of Comparative Literature. When she opens her door for office hours, visitors often find her espresso machine murmuring and a comfortable overstuffed chair waiting. "I do love the teaching as much as the research," notes Jones, whose current project is a book manuscript focusing on clothes and identity in the English Renaissance. She also is the author of a scholarly study of female Renaissance poets, and numerous journal articles on Renaissance literature and culture, Renaissance and modern women writers, and contemporary literary theory. "My students are a wonderful group to be listening to, talking with, learning from," she says. "I'm actually feeding my research from my teaching." Likewise, the rich teacher-student dialogue that often occurs with classroom discussion compels her to declare, "I don't lecture. I don't like to lecture. I don't like to take up a lot of air space in class. I find you really have to be relaxed enough to pay attention to what the students are saying and to respond. There's real value in that." Ileana Streinu, assistant professor of computer science, kindles in her students a fascination for computers and computer research. "Computer science is the science of an artificial world created by the power of human imagination," she tells her students. For her, teaching computer science means enabling the students to think creatively with the help of the new technology, and not to be simple consumers of technology. Streinu, now in her fourth year of teaching at Smith, emigrated to the United States from Romania in 1989. She had been working toward her doctorate at the University of Bucharest, but in pre-1989 Romania the Communist Party of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu would not grant its approval for nonmember Streinu to defend her thesis before a doctoral committee. Immediately upon arriving in the U.S., she entered a Ph.D. program in computer science and in 1994 received her degree from Rutgers University. "I've always loved mathematics and computer science, and I always wanted to teach. The political system just made it impossible for me to teach in Romania," Streinu says. She accepted a position at Smith in 1994-the perfect place to teach, she says, as well as continue with her research. Her current research is in computational geometry, an elegant combination of the old liberal art of geometry with the new science of computation, she says. "My research is geared toward designing efficient algorithmic solutions for fundamental geometric problems using mathematical ideas." The problems may come from computer vision, robotics, computer graphics, virtual reality, spatial databases, to name just a few. Streinu points to a cityscape on her computer screen, one that is full of vertical geometric objects whose lines intersect and form tall angular buildings and street surfaces, and notes, "The world around us is full of geometry. "The computer models of this world have to solve geometric problems in order to work. But I am not building the actual computer systems," she explains. "That can rarely be done outside large, well-equipped research labs. My own research starts when someone else has isolated an algorithmic geometric problem and is looking for a solution." Of course, the process of finding solutions is unpredictable, and Streinu continues to investigate several problems. "Now I have students working together with me," she says, "and this is very stimulating." She also is willing to help her students with their own practical problems, such as homework. "I like it when students knock at my office door, even if it's midnight, and say, 'This program is not working? Why?'" she says with a smile. "Programs tend to have this weird behavior: when you have a homework assignment due the next day, they never work right. So students know I work late and they will come for help. I'm really quite happy that they know where to find me--and I like to find the bugs in their programs. Programming is discovery and teamwork," Streinu maintains. "My students are part of my team and the source of many discoveries. That is why I like to teach." It's the same for Professor of Biological Sciences Dick Briggs. If you're looking for him, try the general vicinity of the Clark Science Center anytime from 5:30 a.m. until 6 p.m., just about every day of the workweek. His early career path veered after only one year of med school toward whole biology and the teaching of it. He's had no regrets in the 20-plus years since. Although he has tenure and has taught at Smith for 19 years, he still frets every year over the 140 to 180 students, most of them first-years, who take his introductory biology class. "This business of making contact with students seems more important every year," he maintains. He is concerned: in how many will he really be able to instill a love of biology? "You just worry: 'If I only had a little more time.' If you could just get them for another afternoon doing fun stuff in the lab or the field, what would happen?" Ultimately, he hopes to convert high numbers of young women to a love for the discipline. "The more you teach biology, the more connections you make about how amazing it is. Light bulbs are still going on for me," he insists. There are two groups of students a teacher always remembers, Briggs says. "In one group is the really excited and enthusiastic student who just never leaves you alone. She's hanging around after class, in the lab, in my office. She's really engaged with the material. It's great. "Students in the other group are the ones who work so hard that you really start to see them think and study before your eyes. You catch them just at the right time, something catches on, they connect with the material, and they're hooked!" As he speaks, he is interrupted by a young woman who tentatively appears in his open office doorway. "You busy?" she asks. "Yes," he says. "But come back in 20 minutes. I want to talk with you." The student agrees to return. "An alum," Briggs explains, "just back on campus today for a quick visit. I like it that they keep in touch." This scene gets played out in professorial office doorways and on computer screens, via electronic mail, all over campus, all year long. "I don't know what I would do without e-mail," says Greg White. "I hear from a lot of former students. I don't know what professors did to stay in touch before there was e-mail." It's all about staying connected and wanting to be remembered as having made a difference. Perhaps economist Randy Bartlett best sums it up: "If you ask me at the end of my life what difference I have made to the world, I think I'd have to say that my research and the books I've written will have been long forgotten. Why? Well, for one thing, I don't think I will have come up with the research that eliminates poverty and banishes all social injustices from the world forever. "But," he says, "I think I will have made a difference reaching into some students' minds and changing the way the wheels crank in their brains, changing the way they think about economics and--who knows?--maybe even the world!" |
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