Background

This page presents the overview of our findings from the focus group interview of Nov 28, 2006.  The focus group panel was comprised of the following faculty: Wendy Martin, Teresa Shaw, Lorne Olfman, Dale Berger, Dean McHenry, David Drew and Janet Brodie. The interviewers were Kevin Williams and Chris Malek.

The attendees had each been faculty members at CGU for at least ten years, and so represented a sample of experienced faculty and academic administrators; the average length of tenure at CGU of the panel members was around fifteen years.  They represented most of the schools of CGU:  English (Martin), Religion (Shaw), IS (Olfman), Psychology (Berger), Political Science (McHenry), Education (Drew), and History (Brodie).

We asked the panel participants three questions over the course of ninety minutes. 

• How would you describe your 'scholarly' interaction within CGU and the other colleges?  That is, what does the "Claremont Conversation" mean to you?
• Please describe the scholarly "life of the mind" at CGU.  For example, how would you describe what it is like to work at CGU to a colleague in terms of your creativity and productivity?
• What are specific examples of the nature of your work?  To what extent is it emblematic or not of the scholarly life at CGU?

Analysis

Analysis of the interview data was performed by three groups of six to eight researchers (all students in TDNY4010/IS366A).  Each group analyzed the interview both by listening to notes and recordings of the panel discussion in relation to one of the three questions asked during the interview and wrote up their findings to the class blog.  The focus group team (Group 2) then collated these findings into the coherent text below and identified the persistent themes.  The multimedia team (Groups 5 and 6) then inserted video clips to provide quotes from the participants.

Persistent themes 

Before we discuss our findings from the individual questions, we would like to describe two persistent themes in the panel's responses.  Faculty life is high pressure, and highly demanding on one's time.  It is competetive.  CGU faculty spend much time participating in committees, mentoring graduate students, attending conferences, applying for research grants, and generally dealing with the administrative aspect of being a faculty member at CGU.  There seemed to be little time left to participate in the types of things we asked them about, or at least it appeared that the non-research oriented aspects of their life so dominated their thoughts that they returned to discussing them repeatedly.

The second theme that ran throughout the discussion was the obvious joy the participants felt in working and conversing together -- with other faculty and with graduate students -- on an academic level, and in how much desire there was to have it in much greater abundance.

Findings

How would you describe your 'scholarly' interaction within CGU and the other colleges?  That is, what does the "Claremont Conversation" mean to you?

The “Conversation” exists in a larger context rather than in solely a “Claremont Conversation” context.  Focus group participants gave examples that that in other contexts (Dale in Australia) that the scholarly conversation was perhaps more central than it is in the United States as evidence by “Tea Time.” 

Dean spoke about the semantic distance between fields that are quantitatively based rather than qualitatively based.  Some fields might not even consider qualitative research to be science. 

While some social interaction take place these seemed to be focused upon social rather than scholarly interactions, even though that at the social occasions they did speak about their field of study.  Information technology may be impacting the nature of scholarly communities at CGU by allowing physically disparate members of larger scholarly groups to still frequently interact.   This enables scholars at CGU to live a vicarious scholarly life with other scholars who are not CGU faculty, partially replacing the need for interaction with other CGU faculty.  Along with this was the change to CGU policy (cited by Janet) so that faculty members at CGU are no longer required to live in Claremont, thus changing CGU into a largely commuter college, with the attendent loss of local community.

The panel participants indicated that they were very busy (too busy, actually) and that this has a negative impact on the opportunity for conversation.  While this may seem to be a negative finding, it can also be framed as an identification of needs for improving the “Claremont Conversation.”  Wendy spoke about the governance structure at CGU and how this contributes to the large amount of time required to run the administrative life of the university.  This differes from other universities which do not require such an extensive investment of time in administrative activities.

Please describe the scholarly "life of the mind" at CGU.  For example, how would you describe what it is like to work at CGU to a colleague in terms of your creativity and productivity?

CGU is trying to encourage the scholarly “life of the mind” through structural initiatives.  Examples include transdisciplinary courses, funding and regular meeting of study groups, and topic-focused labs.  Lorne spoke about SISAT’s move to get all students into topic focused labs to further the high level of interaction and lower the possibility that students lose their way as they are pursuing their degrees.  Dean said that restricting the potential areas of study for graduate students can keep them from venturing into fields in which their faculty members are unable or unwilling advise them.  Many of the panelists agreed that CGU put no constraints on inter-scholar interactions, but that the the practical limitations come from a lack of time to pursue them.  Janet and Wendy both agreed that the lab context is very helpful in some fields and they wondered how the lab context might be implemented for their fields (History and Literature, respectively).

David and Dean spoke about supervising graduate dissertations as one of their major activities and joys. They maintained that students in their respective departments have a choice as to what they want their research topics to be. David said that talking to other scholars is more lucrative than attending conferences, while Dean found the conferences particularly invigorating to attend because you see new faces and do not have to listen to the same people make the same comments.  Some faculty (such as Teresa) spend so much time on administrative duties that they have gotten away from research. 

Wendy spoke about how competitive academic work is and how researchers need to work together and help each other. She later said that there is so much emphasis on research because the idea was that research would make a professor more prepared and knowledgeable. Finally, she discussed how there is a wealth of ideas when you work with graduate students and that you get research ideas from the oddest of places.

What are specific examples of the nature of your work?  To what extent is it emblematic or not of the scholarly life at CGU?

 All participants spoke at length about the academic life that surrounds their work, and indeed, appeared to prefer to talk about that rather than to speak specifically about their own research.  Some general examples of research areas were given, including Math and Science skills by David and Early Christian Culture by Teresa.  One of the ways that they spend much of their time is on committees (too much, according to Wendy), in mentoring graduate students, and in searching for funding.  Janet spoke of her work on “the gender of history;” how did the image of the typical historian become that of the “lone male historian isolated in his archives?”  Dale spoke about the fact that it is an institutional policy to encourage faculty to publish with graduate students. His work, at least at one time, focused on drinking and driving culture in several countries (Australia, New Zealand, Britain, at least).