After a month as acting dean of the faculty, Carol Folt may not be ready to announce a new strategy for academics at Dartmouth, but in an interview this week with The Dartmouth, Folt said she and her colleagues are continually planning to achieve a set of priorities.
These general priorities include increasing faculty size and diversity in faculty activity, expanding faculty- and student-directed research and off-campus programs and changing and updating core facilities, Folt said.
According to Folt, the College's upcoming capital campaign, which will be announced next November, will seek to raise money for a 10-percent increase in faculty size to take place over the next five to eight years.
"When adding new faculty we seek to identify critical areas with particular needs for growth, to strengthen the core of the curriculum and to identify targets of special opportunity, which are areas where Dartmouth can truly excel," Folt said about expanding the size of the faculty, a process she said has been going on for several years.
Folt declined to comment specifically about where new professors are needed or to which departments they would be added, saying only that faculty members and departments are always planning for new hires in the future.
As for changes in the curriculum that might take place, Folt indicated the need to balance a focus on new ideas and innovation with an emphasis on liberal arts fundamentals.
"The core material necessary to educate students as thought leaders must be flexible enough to evolve as new knowledge is created and structured enough to ensure a breadth of knowledge in the liberal arts," Folt said.
Folt said she wished the curriculum would be interdisciplinary enough to prepare students as "global citizens with a lot of familiarity to think across disciplines."
During the next two years, Folt will also oversee changing and updating core facilities, including new buildings, which will house the humanities center, math department and life sciences laboratories.
Folt will be charged with planning for the programs that will go in the new buildings. One such challenge will be to create a program in the newly endowed Neukom Center that meets the College's needs in computational science.
Another of Folt's priorities is to increase the opportunities for students to do independent research.
"[Students] want a lot of opportunities not only to learn what is known but to create new knowledge," Folt said.
Although Folt did not name specific programs that would be added or expanded to provide new research opportunities, she expressed her desire to have varied opportunities for students in all grade levels with varying desires for research.
"I'd rather work with faculty and students in diversifying the experience," Folt said, indicating that having recently started as dean of the faculty, she will be working with students and her colleagues to strengthen the College's academic experience and to identify specific places to add research opportunities.
Despite an unwillingness to outline the specifics of her plans for the future of the College's faculty, Folt said she aimed to be an effective voice for her colleagues.
"My goal is to work effectively with the faculty to meet their goal to make Dartmouth the best liberal arts school in the country," Folt said, indicating that maintaining Dartmouth's excellence would depend on attracting and retaining top scholars.
Folt started her two-year term as acting dean of the faculty after Commencement, when former Dean of the Faculty Michael Gazzaniga stepped down after a contentious faculty vote about his leadership.
"I'm looking forward to what the faculty wants to do, and I think the faculty is moving forward also," Folt said when asked if the faculty was still as fractured today as it was during Spring term.
