CLAS dean looking to boost grad programs

Joseph Steinmetz has been on the job for six months as dean of the massive College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, which houses 53 departments and programs and accounts for almost half of the bachelor’s degrees KU awards each year. !Steinmetz, who came to KU last fall from Indiana University-Bloomington, said he hasn’t made many big changes yet, and that he planned when he started his job to spend six to eight months studying the college before instituting any major changes. “What I’m stressing in the faculty meetings when I go around is that I want the faculty to be really confident of who they are and how good they are,” he said. “I sometimes think they don’t do that well- they sort of go about their business and don’t much like to publicize the great scholarship and teaching that they do. I’m trying to get them to do that: be a little more boastful and tell people what’s going on here.”So far, just getting to know all the names and faces of the 600-plus faculty members has been a challenge, he said.”I’ve been to 42 faculty meetings around the college, so that constitutes more than 80 percent of the faculty,” Steinmetz said.Steinmetz, a psychologist by training, said he thinks the quality of undergraduate education is the college’s biggest strength. One of his priorities, though, is to give a “shot in the arm” to the college’s graduate-education programs.”It’s not that the graduate programs are weak. That’s not what I’m suggesting,” he said. “I’m really suggesting that strong graduate programs are really the key to maintaining good scholarship and research. I’d like to see some of the programs be a bit bigger than they are.”He said it’s too early to talk about which programs in particular will be a priority.”What we’re doing is going through a strategic planning process,” he said. “We hope to get this plan out to everyone that will look at it sometime in April or May. I think in that plan that’s where we’ll spend some time identifying things that we really want to work on.”-contributed by Eric Weslander.