Final Project Home Page > 6 Focus Group FindingsBackground
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.
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:
The “Conversation” exists in a larger context rather than in a “Claremont Conversation” context. Examples were given 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. The technology change may be impacting the nature of the community where physical disparate members can still frequently interact. Along with this was the cited change by Janet that does not require faculty members to live in Claremont.
The faculty indicated that they were too busy and 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 and how this contributes to the large amount of time required to run the academic life of the university, even though other universities do not require the extensive investment of time in administrative activities.
The University is trying to encourage the scholarly “life of the mind” through structural initiatives. Examples include Transdisciplinary courses, regular meeting of study groups, and labs. In fact Lorne spoke about SISAT’s move to get all students into labs to further the high level of interactions and lower the possibility that the students get lost as they are pursuing their degrees. Dean cited that by concentrating the focus of study with graduate students this keeps them from venturing into fields that the faculty members are unable or unwilling to be advising. Many agreed that University put no constraints on the interactions, but the limitation comes from the lack of time to pursue them. Janet and Wendy both agreed that the lab context is very helpful in some fields and they were wondering how that might be implemented for their fields.
David and Dean spoke about supervising graduate dissertations as one of their major initiatives 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 enhancing than attending conferences, while Dean found the conferences particularly invigorating to attend where you meet new faces and do not have to listen to the same people make the same comments. Some faculty spend so much time on administrative duties that they have gotten away from research as cited by Teresa.
Wendy spoke about how competitive the nature of their work is and how researchers need to work together and help out one another. She later discussed how 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.
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).
