VCAA Newletter

Dear Colleagues,

During our trip to France a couple of weeks ago, my wife and I witnessed firsthand the national strike in France. It was not the first time I experienced what some may call a French national pastime, striking against the government. Many years ago during my Fulbright year in France as an American language assistant in a lycee, the postal workers went on strike the day after I posted my dissertation. Needless to say, my dissertation did not reach my advisors until several weeks later. This time it was fascinating to experience the solidarity between the students and the unions. In Toulon, where we were, the demonstrations were orderly, calm, yet full of fervor. The rhythmic chant of the slogans intoxicated the passers-by. For a while we were enveloped by the strikers in our dash to reach the other side of the street.

Although the trip to France provided a much needed respite from my administrative duties, I was there principally to visit the University of Toulon with whom we have had several exchanges of faculty and students. Since access to the university campus was blocked during the entire week we were there, I met with university administrators over lunch or dinner in quaint restaurants. We also had the happy occasion to visit and dine with one of our own students who is spending this semester studying in Toulon. Happily, she has made remarkable progress and can easily follow and participate actively in conversations. Kudos to her French professors here at IU South Bend who prepared her well for her immersion experience.

Over the last five years, several students from Toulon have studied at IU South Bend and we have had several of their professors here for research. This summer we host once again a Toulon professor who will teach in our summer session. Several of our faculty have also taught month-long seminars at the University of Toulon. In May, Professor Joe Chaney leaves to teach there.

All of these activities are purposeful steps toward enhancement of international education that mirror the objectives of our Strategic Plan, our general education curriculum, the American Democracy Project and Mission Differentiation. It is through singular initiatives such as these that IU South Bend will achieve its distinctiveness among Indiana University regional campuses. Within the last several weeks I have been actively working with faculty to strengthen international educational opportunities. Though it is still a work in progress, we envision a closer collaboration and partnership with International Student Services that will provide seamless educational and outreach services for our international students and for our study abroad programs. To do this effectively will require shared resources between academic affairs and student affairs.

On Wednesday afternoon I attended a monthly lunch series on the Life Sciences sponsored by a local law firm. The topic, “Cooperative Research on the University Level to Support Indiana’s Economy,” featured speakers from IU, Purdue and Notre Dame. Although IU South Bend does not do research at the magnitude of these institutions, we nonetheless do receive competitive grants in basic science research that aid in the economic development of our region. Two of our physics professors recently received exciting news of major grant support. Ilan Levine received $280,000 over three years from the National Science Foundation to continue his study of dark matter. Ilan’s grant proposal received a rating of “excellent.” One of the reviewers remarked: “The proposed research will give undergraduate students an excellent opportunity to work on an important project with international impact. It will expose them to real competitive research in an experiment at the forefront of particle astrophysics.” The other professor, Henry Scott, received approximately $35,000 from the Petroleum Foundation to continue his cutting-edge research over the next two years.

These efforts and those by our faculty researcher profiled in this month’s newsletter indicate the high quality of competitive research being done at IU South Bend. The Life Sciences luncheon was a re-affirmation that IU South Bend is fulfilling a significant and meaningful role in Indiana’s visionary goal of becoming one of the premier Life Sciences centers in the nation.

Dr. Gail McGuire, Associate Professor of Sociology, and the current IUSB Teaching Award recipient, is an exceptional researcher. The common thread that runs through all of Gail’s published work is the documentation and explanation of gender and race stratification. In the early years of her career, she studied the formal dimensions of workplace stratification, such as race and sex differences in employees’ jobs. As her career developed, however, she realized that little was known about the informal side of organizational life--where employees build alliances, trade favors, and manage their reputations. She has focused her research on informal networks, or the web of relationships in which workers exchange resources and services, because research shows that such networks help workers obtain jobs, advance in their careers, gain skills, and establish legitimacy.

Most recently, she has returned to her early interest in mentor-protégé relationships. In “The Intersection of Gender, Race, and Mentoring: Relational Demography And Developmental Relationships at Work,” she and her co-author examined how the race and gender composition of 1,331 mentor-protégé pairs affect three types of help that protégés receive from their mentors. By showing that the effects of gender on mentor help are different for white and Black workers and that the effects of race on mentor help are different for men and women, their analyses highlight the contextual nature of gender and race in work organizations. Their research has practical implications for creating gender and racial equity at work.

Regional Campus Research Programs (Formerly Intercampus Research Fund Programs)
As a result of the IUSB Academic Senate Resolution and much negotiation done by Salina Shrofel the Office of Research is please to announce three new Regional Campus Research Programs. More information on all of these programs can be found at http://www.iusb.edu/~sbres/randd/rcrp.html or you can contact Erika Zynda (4181) or ezynda@iusb.edu.

Dean of Education
I am pleased to announce that Dr. Michael Horvath has accepted our offer to be the next dean of the School of Education. Dr. Horvath is currently dean of the School of Education at Southern Missouri State University. He brings many years of experience in the field of education as dean, scholar and as a leader in teacher preparation statewide, regionally and nationally. He will be joining us as dean on July 1, 2006. Dr. Horvath’s e-mail address is horvath-m@MSSU.EDU. Please join me in extending a warm IUSB welcome to Dean Horvath and his wife, Juliana.

UCET NEWS
The staff at UCET have been busy working closely with the Distance Learning Advisory Board and faculty members to help determine the best ways of using information technology to enhance the process of teaching and learning on our campus. Watch for upcoming workshops at UCET on academic integrity, course design and evaluation, diversity of learners, emerging technology, and help with transition from original Oncourse to Oncourse CL. Original Oncourse will be available through Spring 2007, but faculty are urged to get a practice site in Oncourse CL now. Contact Sujie Man (sman@iusb.edu) at UCET for further information about Oncourse.

Assessment
The Assessment Committee would like to congratulate the recipients of the Spring 2006 round of assessment grants. The Nursing Program received two grants, a grant to develop a set of HESI exam questions, and another to test the HESI exam against another standardized test for nursing graduates. The Computer Science program will be bringing in an outside consultant to facilitate its accreditation with the prestigious ABET body. The School of Education received a grant to further develop surveys for alumni of, employers of and LAS faculty teaching school of education graduates. $6,150 was awarded during this round of grants. The Assessment Committee plans to accept another round of grant applications in the Fall of 2006.

Kudos

Elizabeth Bennion is the principal investigator on a grant received by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) for $215,000 from The Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University. The monies were re-granted from a Pew Charitable Trust award to GW. . This project helps to put IU at the forefront of our peer institutions in advancing the political engagement of our students. Our goal is to register 50,000 young voters from across 80 AASCU institutions by the fall elections. The project also has a significant research component.

My congratulations to Elizabeth. We will communicate with many of you as the project gets underway.

Fred Naffziger continues to receive national attention regarding his published articles about the legal issues in the ongoing Catholic Church bankruptcy actions. During a recent presentation in California, Professor Naffziger was approached by a Maryland attorney and a judge from the Southwest both commenting on the impact of his work.

Congratulations to Sue Anderson! Sue has been accepted into the PhD program in Nursing at the University of Arizona! She will begin her studies this August.

Steve Duleh, an IUSB Biology student, was offered a National Institutes for Health scholarship in Biomedical Research at Cambridge University as well as a National Science Foundation Fellowship at the University of California-Berkley. Mr. Duleh has accepted the NSF fellowship at UC-Berkley.