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New COAS dean lays out goals

Last December, the Texas A&M System Board of Regents named TAMIU Professor of English Dr. Thomas R. Mitchell as the sole finalist for the position of Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. By January of this year, the board officially confirmed Mitchell. A 10-year veteran of TAMIU, Dr. Mitchell recently sat down with The Bridge.

H: Would you start by telling us your immediate goals for the college?

M: The first goal is to make sure we hire the best faculty we can find. I’ve spent the first few days on the job talking to chairs about faculty searches. Everything begins with getting the best faculty members. It’s really done at the department level, but the dean’s job is to make sure the process works smoothly and effectively. Before we bring somebody in, he or she goes through a pretty elaborate vetting process. We look at the CV (curriculum vitae); we interview; they teach a sample class, and finally, we ask the students what they thought of it.

H: What happens when they get hired? I know faculty development was something you championed during the selection process for this position.

M: We want to make sure we have a fair and rigorous faculty evaluation and tenure process. I also want to create a climate where we all take responsibility for each other. Too often new faculty members don’t get enough mentorship from the senior members, people like me, Jerry Thompson (TAMIU Regent’s Professor of History), and you can go down the list. … It’s important that faculty work well together.

H: What about the faculty already here? We seem to be having a problem with retention. We just lost Dr. (Archibald) Laud-Hammond (former instructor of political science). We’ve lost other great ones. What do you think we can do about faculty retention?

M: Every study I’ve ever seen shows that employee moral is more contingent on feeling that their work is recognized and appreciated. It’s much more important than salary. What you want to do is set up an environment where people feel they can grow, where people want to come to work. As dean, one thing I want to do is to make the case that teaching here can be fulfilling in the sense that you’re making a difference in people’s lives. … We have so many first generation college students. They’re pioneers in their families because they raise the educational bar. And it raises economic status. When you make a difference with your students, you make a difference in their children’s lives and their children’s lives. You feel like you’re doing something.

H: I know from experience that you’ve always been concerned with making sure our students are competitive, with making sure we’re holding them to a standard comparable to bigger institutions. Academically, how do you think we match up compared to-say-a College Station?

M: Undergraduate classes, biology, intro to psychology the core courses-even the three-thousand levels-I would say we’re on a par with College Station, yes. You’d probably get a better education here in freshman and sophomore courses than you would at College Station. You get to know your professors. If you go to College Station and take a first semester science course, you’ll be in a lecture hall of three-hundred people. It’s sink or swim. Now, I realized long ago, you’re teaching more than your subject. You’re teaching students how to be good students. You don’t get that at a UT Austin. You’ll run into some exceptions, but in general, you won’t get that extra attention that you’ll get here. A lot of those big schools put a premium on research. Now, we’re pushing research here, but teaching is still our main focus.

H: How do you see TAMIU’s future as it pertains to research?

M: One thing we’re going to do is increase support for research, particularly in the sciences. We need to get more of our best undergraduate students directly into graduate programs. For the faculty to do research, they depend on graduate assistants. All scientists do. We don’t have a body of graduate assistants in the sciences. So, we talked about identifying outstanding juniors and seniors and getting them to consider a master’s degree. We now have the money to support this.

H: So many of our graduates go right into public school teaching. How do you convince the better graduate students to forgo forty-thousand starting and work as a graduate assistant?

M: I would say to someone, look, you’ve got a lifetime to earn money. What you have on your side right now is youth and time. They don’t have children. They don’t have a mortgage. It’s easy to be poor when you’re young, single, and childless. That’s the time to get your education. You may think that you’ll come back, and you may. I started my doctorate when I was thirty-seven with two children and a mortgage, but it was very difficult, and others around you have to be very supportive. So, it’s a lot easier when you’re young. That’s what I’d tell them. I don’t know if it would persuade them to eat spaghetti four times a week rather than have the money to afford a steak. It’s delayed gratification.

H: Don’t I know it.

(laughter)

M: I would also appeal to their social conscience. One issue that’s always been big with me is the need for our public school teachers to have graduate degrees, particularly the high school teachers. I don’t think you can be as good a history or math teacher or whatever with a bachelor’s degree. With a master’s degree, students get a sense that you have a great surplus of knowledge that you’re tapping into. I also think you develop a great love for your discipline. Graduate degrees stimulate your curiosity about your subject. You end up with a lot more to give. It’s like a well. You want to dig it as deep as possible.

H: Exactly

M: Last I checked, only twelve percent of public school teachers in Laredo are working with above a bachelor’s degree. Very few have graduate degrees, and when you look at the ones who do, most of those are in administration, supervision. Where we really need those graduate degrees are in the high school, the subject-area teachers.

H: And it used to be obvious-that you should be a scholar before you become a teacher. That used to be the expectation.

M: (Geoffrey) Chaucer said it best in one line. In the general prologue of the “Canterbury Tales,” of the Oxford Clerk, Chaucer writes, “and gladly would he learn, and gladly would he teach.” That’s the order. You’ve got to be on fire to learn to be a good teacher.