Monday, January 10, 2000
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Licensing income, spin-off volume generate more than $3.3 million
Tom Rodgers named interim VP for public service
Two authors win Flannery O’Connor Awards for short fiction
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1999-2000 Lilly Teaching Fellows announced
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Finding the perfect balance

By Beth Roberts

The University of Georgia has been invited by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the American Association for Higher Education to participate in a new project called the Teaching Academy Campus Program. Peter Shedd, professor of legal studies and associate vice president for instruction, and Ron Simpson, professor and acting director of the Institute for Higher Education, attended a meeting about the project this past fall at the University of Michigan. They recently explained the program to Columns.

Columns: What was the purpose of this meeting?
Shedd: What Carnegie asked was for campuses to come together and talk about where they were in the campus program. The campuses that went to Michigan were the University of Michigan, University of Georgia, University of Washington, University of Nebraska, Stanford, Brown, Princeton, Ohio State, Wisconsin, Emory and Carnegie-Mellon. They are the 11 that were at Michigan in November. We spent a day talking about various aspects of our campus program.
The Carnegie people had another meeting a couple of weeks later in Washington, D.C., with another set of 15 campuses. So there are a total of 26 campuses.

Simpson: I think the ones that were in the first meeting--at least a lot of them--had been in the peer review of teaching project [see Columns, Feb. 9, 1998]. These were 12 very carefully selected institutions that began a national conversation leading to the academy idea. A lot of the same people are involved, a group of national leaders and thinkers.

Columns: Following this meeting, what happens next?
Shedd: Carnegie sees three stages. First are campus discussions about the scholarship of teaching and learning. Second is to do what they call an environmental scan of your campus--find out what is there to support the scholarship of teaching and learning and what is getting in the way of it. And then the third step is what they call “going public,” when the campus can share what it has done with the public.

Simpson: One of the interesting things is that this Teaching Academy Campus Program, for many of these major research universities, will almost be the seminal activity for them, to begin focusing institution-wide on teaching. We’ve been blessed here to have the administrative and faculty support to be doing a lot of these things for the past 20 years, so it’s been a bit of a challenge for us to know just where we’ll fit in. We want to be a part of this national activity, we want to be linked to the Carnegie Foundation and these other fine institutions, but we’ve already done a lot of the things that they’re planning for. I don’t want to sound smug--but Georgia has had wonderful support for teaching. So the trick is what this academy can do that goes beyond the mechanisms that are already here and at the same time continues this relationship with a national group that we certainly like to consider our peers.

Shedd: I’d like to twist that in the other direction. I believe that the reason the University of Georgia was invited to this meeting initially is because of the work of the Office of Instructional Support and Development. We are known as a national leader in teaching, and we were invited to be part of the peer review project because of the work of OISD, and we were invited to be a part of this conversation because of that work and the more recent peer review of teaching work.
And so Ron is absolutely right--we have already done a lot of what Lee Shulman [the president of the Carnegie Foundation] says should be done. The question is how the teaching academy can keep us moving. No one that I have talked to is advocating that the University of Georgia become a teaching school, as it was back in the ’40s and ’50s. That is not what this is about.
As we have gone through the past 30 years--since [President] Davison began pulling the university into the research mode--we’ve been trying to figure out the balance between teaching, service and research. We’ll never really figure it out--if we ever hit it just right it’ll only be momentary. But I think that what this conversation is about, supported by Carnegie, and what OISD has done and what the teaching academy will continue to support, is trying to find that balance.

Columns: And what will the teaching academy be?
Shedd: Nine faculty have been working throughout the fall on that question. What’s exciting about our project is that it is faculty-initiated and it’s going to be faculty-driven. It’s not the administration creating this organization--the faculty are going to be determining what the academy is about.
We have not officially signed on to the campus program, but it’s my anticipation that our mechanism for relating to the Carnegie campus program will be the teaching academy.

Simpson: The idea of a teaching academy came out of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. It was a mechanism to recognize those who had distinguished themselves in teaching. Now, teaching academies are becoming whatever works for one campus.
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