Dale Berger talked 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).

Janet Brody talked 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?”

Drew and McHenry spoke about supervising graduate dissertations. They maintained that students in their respective departments have a choice as to what they want their research topics to be. Drew said that talking to other scholars is more enhancing than attending conferences. He gave the example of his work with Samir Chatterjee on the statistics of international competitiveness. He said that he was currently in the process of making a second edition for a book that he had initially published 10 years ago. McHenry spoke about conferences, and his point was that it is invigorating to attend some conferences where you meet new faces and do not have to listen to the same people make the same comments.

Lorne Olfman spoke about IS labs and directing students to certain topics because it facilitates finding external funding and provides students with support networks.

Teresa Shaw spoke of her work in early Christian religion and culture with an emphasis on gender, and how she has less time to concentrate on her research because of her administrative duties.

Wendy Martin 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.

Teresa Shaw:  Vice Provost. Religion, Associate Professor
Lorne:  Scholl of ISAT.  Half administrator/dean, half faculty member.  Been here for almost 20 years.  His birthday!
Dale Berger:  Psychology.  Been at CGU 37th year
Dean McHenry: Politics and Policy.  Chair of the program.  Been here since 1982.
David Drew: Faculty of Education and several other apartments(?).  Like to point out that at CGU, many faculty members for part of the time they’re here will have an administrative role.  It occurred that every single faculty member has been an admin at one time.  He’s been a dean.
Brody:  Chair of the history department.  Been here almost 10 years.
Lorne:  These three people were major mentors (alongside Paul Gray).  Good friends, really lucky to have everyone as colleagues still today.

Kevin:  I’m in the SISAT.  3rd year grad student.  Pleased to have you all here.
Chris:  Also in SISAT.  2nd year phd student
Tom Horan:  The course is cross-listed as an IS qualitative methods class and also as a Trans-D class.

Kevin:  Let me start with a Blaisedale quote (founding pres of CGU): (paraphrased) Center of college is a great conversation, from which everything else springs.  How would you describe your scholarly interactions within CGU and the other colleges.

Berger:  I’m a methodologist.  I am often contacted by people in other disciplines.  I enjoy that opportunity to interact with other people, with people who are more specialized.
Kevin: So your specialty draws them.
McHenry:  In my department, most of my colleagues are utilizing statistical techniques in their studies and feel that in politics its possible to do this.  Negative nature: I’ve criticized the data sets, and shown them to my understanding how they don’t represent reality, and our conversation goes like this:  I presented a Tuesday talk, and a colleague said if you don’t like it, why don’t you do it yourself(?)  Useful conversation, I feel I’m teaching something, I don’t know if they fully agree.
Drew:  Like Dale, I teach statistics.  I have collaborated with colleagues in my own school.  Collaboration, often have dialogues about what I’m working on, and will have dialogues across campus.  Trans-D has categorized this.  Ironically, just today, I was planning to bring together all the people in Claremont interested in [missed this -_-;; ]  Over the years, I haven’t had that much interaction with people in other colleges.  I work in my administrative capacity and as former Pres. of Harvey Mudd.  I work with a math professor there, but it’s limited.  Why?  Because the colleges, while established on the principle of intercollegial communication, often operate independently as business silos.  Maybe true of undergrad, but as a grad university…[missed the rest]  Also, in education, which isn’t represented in undergrad colleges.
Teresa: Any academic institution:  You get into academia, you pursue the thing you love because of that great conversation, you love research, and scholarly interaction.  But once you get in, its hard, not because of other parts of your job, but because of disciplinary silos, logistics (example: can’t collaborate with other departments because they’re located on the other side of campus and you have to walk all across campus).  What I’ve heard my colleagues talk about, you have to make an effort to make a conversation, it doesn’t flow as naturally as anyone would like.  Maybe its easier when you’re in the same hallway.  You have to structure it through the T-course, through field groups.  People complain regularly that they’re into a subject, but don’t know the other people in the subject.  No forum for that conversation.  It’s only as strong as the people involved.

Kevin: Talking about current research.... we’ll get into that later.  On conversation, one of the things we’ve seen is a division between Qual (Qaulitative) and Quant (Quantitative)…
McHenry:  We’ve never ever had a requirement that Qual is a requirement.  For a number of years, we’d have a Perestroika(?) movement, where Quant is counterbalanced with Qual.  We’d go out and do studies… we can do regression, but I’d need to talk to people, use qualitative tools.  There’s that sort of tension, in our program.
Wendy Martin:  Came a little late, I was at the other Trans-D course.  Now that I’ve had 1.5 years as T-course director.  There is a real divide on campus between Qual and Quant… Or more like non-qual and non-quant.  It shouldn’t be either-or, it should be both-and (?).  Both spheres suffer from not taking the other sphere into account.  Humanities suffer a lot because we’ve given up the realm of numbers.  Not that we have to excel, you can’t understand things as well unless you can embrace the numbers.  It is clarifying when you get the concept.  Makes me want to go to my colleagues and makes me want to say we need to be more literate in numbers.  The quantitative fields need to understand conceptual analysis better, rhetorical patterns, deep history, patterns that are not numerical.  Both sectors are suffering mightily.
David Drew:  I’d like to underscore that.  I teach quant, I believe you need both in research.  There are some people here in my class who’ll recall me saying this:  You need both, I think it’s usually a meaningless debate, there’s two ways to access knowledge.  Look at my dissertations, I insist they use both qual and quant.  Some of the most intriguing studies is when people venture far from their fields, when they give qual insights into mostly quant studies.

Kevin:  Is the conversation taking part here between quant and qual, between the different schools.  When I was first starting in SISAT, Paul Gray said, ‘when someone asks him what he does at the institute of advanced studies, I say we talk to each other about what we don’t understand.’  You need a definition, could be qual, could be quant.
Brodie: In the past, there was much more chance for these kind of crossover conversations.  I knew a friend of mine at Pitzer who passed away recently, who had for many many years, every Friday at his home in Claremont, he’d have a “???? and chowder society”.  Everyone who wanted to come would have wine and talk about his or her current research project or ideas.  Mostly talking about ideas, having a conversation.  But we don’t live here anymore.  It was a requirement that you had to live in Claremont.  It fostered great community.  In the undergrad colleges, there was a greater emphasis on teaching, not research.  It’s harder to find the time to talk to people.  It’s there in Claremont, it’s such a treasure trove, if you can get the time to get-together, but so many can’t.  Someone had this idea: We all wanted to get to know the faculty better, we should just change offices a while.  Office swap (a joke, but it was still intriguing).  We thought of lunches, we’d meet at Hagelburgers and just talk.  Stimulating, exciting conversations with other people, but none of us have the time.

Kevin:  Would you say that the research demands are intruding on the life of the mind?  The publishing aspect?  Especially the undergrad colleges, they have certain publishing requirements…
Lorne:  The trend is reducing teaching loads for undergrad faculty.  I don’t think life of the mind is conversation whatever, and it takes place… we’re all researchers, we have that stimulation.  It does get shut out from time constraints… We have the luxury of having doctoral students.  Very few faculty anywhere have such a luxury of diverse doctoral students.  Inexperienced in some ways, brilliant in others.  Interact with a different group of people… Inside our school, we’re constantly having conversation, varies form administrative things, to intellectual pursuits.  You’ve got conferences symposiums, workshops.  I don’t see any constraints on that imposed by CGU other than time people have to put into administration, but that adds more to time you have to spend being a CGU faculty member.
Wendy Martin:  At a previous place… we were able to do the administrative business in 55 minutes, once a month.  Here, its committee intensive, and that eats up so much time.  Not matched for such a small college like this.  Something that people don’t see from the outside… governance system, how many hours a week do you spend in meetings.  I came here and was in shock for years.  I told them there’s too many meetings in this institution, but since then there have been even more meetings, even more workshops, etc.
Lorne: That’ll teach you to speak up!
Teresa Shaw:  In the regular life of the faculty member, there’s all the opportunities to continue the conversation, especially with doctoral students, especially with the level of work required.  There’s ideas generated, and through the assignments and so on, it flows into each other.  On the other hand, any kind of broader conversation, trans-D, across the silence, does suffer, and it’s a little bit more of a challenge.
Berger:  We in-fact do know people from other disciplines.  I’m on multiple committees with people form other disciplines.  We do have more interaction than at other institutions.
Kevin:  Is it really ‘life of the mind’?
Martin:  I don’t get to talk with Dale about his work.
David Drew:  ‘Life of the mind’ is the exact opposite of faculty.
Brodie:  Comparison to 1600’s, 100 people in 6 or 7 hats, conversation, led to witchcraft… [I didn’t catch any of this at all -_-;;; ]
Martin:  At the previous place, the salary was the same, the only points of contention were the promotion points.  When you remove that from a community, it takes a certain level of paranoia and competitiveness away.  There’s still territoriality, but it opens the field.  I’d go to the water fountain, meet someone from Biology or Chem. and talk to them about work.  And carpools.  I learned a lot.  Not so much here.  Those ritual places we need for social reasons might help.  But if you ask most academics, they’ll say the workload is so heavy they can’t have wonderful conversations as they’d like.
Teresa Shaw:  Maybe it’s a contemporary problem, but what you read in higher ed is that faculty members are becoming more free agents and identify less with the institution.
MeHenry:  If it happened been for an African studies program(?) that brought faculty together… that contrasts with here, where I notice that as the years go by people come here I don’t know, but as time goes by you get to know a higher proportion of the faculty.  We serve on committees, we get to talk, we see each other…
David Drew:  I spent most my academic career here, Harvard, UCLA, it exists there too.  I’ve written about higher education.  I’ve observed and wrote about the fact that when I was doing a study and visited the Uni. of Arkansas, I met 4 people studying the neurobio of the brain, and they didn’t know each other.  Whatever probability we’re discussing are not unique or more severe to this Uni.
Brodie:  I think the hope here is very strong.  The hope that we can create something and get together is sustaining.  We have immense flexibility.  We can do it, there are no obstacles but our energy and lack of time, a huge difference from most schools.
Lorne:  The trans-D course set has evolved from an opportunity for faculty to work with each other, for students to experience faculty across boundaries.  Very few institutions can pull off what we’re doing.  The ‘hope springs eternal’ is important.  Any kind of sustained intellectual conversation that I’ve had outside my own school has come from working on proposals: federal funding.  That has created some very powerful intellectual sharing beyond even writing the proposal.  And it’s back to what Teresa said:  Two examples of structures that facilitate that process(?), mapping back to what you said; it’s possible here.  A lot of places simply don’t have that opportunity.
Wendy Martin:  For grants, of course you’ll find faculty going that route.  You need to think about restructuring the reward system. I think the Trans-D effort will have that effect.  Not overnight, but as people become more familiar with others’ mode of thought…

Kevin:  When you come up with an idea for research, do you come up with it and say “I can give this to a grad student” or is there a power struggle?  Need for tenure?  How is that conversation between students and other faculty.

David Drew:  If I come up with an idea for research, I don’t impose it on phd students.  I let the student… I help the student decide/learn what they want their dissertation about.  I don’t know if I ever said “this is what you’re doing your dissertation on.”  I wanna add a dimension though:  One of the reasons CGU is so exiting, because we’re small, we can be choosy.  Most of the faculty we hire are already trans-D.  Most of the faculty, are not unidimensoinal.  Briefly, looking at Tom and Wendy:  Wendy is in English and English Lit., but she also teaches jazz.  Tom has taught courses in 2 or 3 disciplines, not including trans-D, but he’s writing a novel(!!!).  And Peter Drucker wrote books on management, he wrote novels, and he also taught Japanese art.
Berger:  Coming back to the idea of how research is done, in psychology, ideas will be floating around freely, and I think faculty are encouraged to publish with grad students.  In some places, publishes need to be sole authorship, but we encourage faculty to publish with students.  “Let’s all work together and get something done.”
Lorne:  Two things our school has done that’s the opposite of what you’d expect:  1: We’re consistently, in terms of doctoral supervision, we let them come up with ideas and supervise.  No, we’re going to have very stringent research themes and we will have our students acclimated with that early in their career(?).  We’re halfway there.  Rationale: Well, it was to facilitate getting external funding, to concentrate on what we wanna do.  We’ve tried to fit into the standard IS rubric, and we’ve said to ourselves, we don’t have to publish in the key IS journals, no, we’ll publish in journals that like the things we like, conferences we find interesting:  Medical informatics meetings where two years ago no IS students would go.  We wanna do things exciting and stimulating for our students rather than stay inside a tight silo.  Our conversation is consistently about how to be a team, in any way that we can.  And we intentionally brought together people with that attitude.   I’ve found in the last five years with this model, it’s been extremely stimulating intellectually, even though my output hasn’t increased that much.   But overall I’ve seen this blooming of the intellectual capacity of the school.
McHenry:  We give students a range of what they want to do their dissertation on.  Problems: Interests are much more diverse than the expertise of the faculty.  A variety of faculty who have joined us in providing that expertise(?).  Wider rage of choices(?).
Wendy Martin:  Humanities tend to be highly individualistic, territorialist.  My daughter is in Neuro.  You apply to a lab, but you can only apply to one.  Very strict.  I said to her, “Wow, this is really amazing.” “But you have to remember that once you’re in that lab, you’re all doing the same work, not fighting with each other. You come up with new research, and can’t shoot anyone down. You all need empirical evidence. You’re building once thing after another.” Humanities is very subjective, on the other hand and people are always trying to shoot each other down without empirical evidence(?)
Teresa Shaw:  Humanities should figure out how to have lab.  It’s about the community and cooperation that has to happen within a lab.  With doctoral students, it has to do with time to degree.  Working on your dissertation is a really wonderful thing.  A very isolated activity, that adds time to degree.  To figure out ways humanities students can interact at that level at that advanced stage is a challenge.  It takes real effort, not a structure for bringing students and faculty together on a regular basis as there is in the sciences.

Kevin:  I read an interesting book (missed the title) about colleges that change lives:  It’s really the small places where you have a conversation.  Talk about different ideas.  Really, those students come together to be a unit, bound together.  St. Johns was interesting.  There, they actually have one of the highest acceptance rates in math.  Math Phd’s.  A lot of it has to do with that community aspect.  We could learn from those kinds of things.  Maybe we can talk about that lab aspect.  What are the specific examples of the nature of your work, how does this learning community work, what does it do?
David Drew:  There’s a genre of literature about academia.
Wendy Martin:  Books written about the academic novel.  I will say this, the trans-d courses are built about collaborative research, teams to work on common problems.
Brodie:  …[missed it… something about gender]…
McHenry:  A good class will develop that way: Every time you go in as an instructor… discussion. At breaks, they break off into groups and talk.  It forms a very important long lasting connection that’s to the benefit of education.
Brodie:  When the trans-d courses started, the hope was that students would get to know each other and form learning communities.  That it would help with qualifying exams or theses or dissertation groups so that the methodologies might be similar on totally different topics.  A great promise of a trans-d approach.  I hope that can be sustained.
Wendy Martin:  Grants available for [missed it ]…  We’re too small to compete.  I saw how they did it, they all got together, went to conventions(?), hire a room, invite people there, create a community, a little football huddle.  I’ve tried to bring as much as I can…  If you think about it, you could do so much more if you help someone and its reciprocal(?).

Kevin:  Why do I hire person, not that(?). Because I know this person.  If our students are known, you get hired.
Lorne:  Electronic part of it: More to conversation than just the face-to-face.
Teresa Shaw:  The work of the university can both impede and enhance.
[This is where my computer ran out of batteries, so I got no notes after this] 

     1. What does the Claremont Conversation mean to you?  How would you describe your 'scholarly' interaction within CGU and the other colleges?

     2. Please describe the scholarly "life of the mind" at CGU?

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