Strategic Plan 2009

2009 Moving Forward: Strategic Planning for the College of Behavioral & Social Sciences

Endorsed by the College of Behavioral & Social Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park October 2009

TABLE OF CONTENTS OVERVIEW AND BACKGROUND Introduction Mission & Vision Statement Strengths, Weaknesses & Opportunities

1 1 2

THE STRATEGIC PLAN Part 1: Undergraduate Education Vision Current State of Undergraduate Program Goals & Strategies

7 7 8

Part 2: Graduate Education Vision Current State of Graduate Program Goals & Strategies

13 13 14

Part 3: Research & Scholarship Vision Context Goals & Strategies

19 19 19

Part 4: Partnerships, Outreach & Engagement Vision 23 Goals & Strategies 23

Moving Forward: The College of Behavioral & Social Sciences >>

THE STRATEGIC PLAN FOR THE COLLEGE OF BEHAVIORAL & SOCIAL SCIENCES

In our strategic plan we follow the structure of the campus plan in discussing undergraduate education, graduate education, research and partnership. Strategic indicators and critical enablers discussed separately in the campus plan are integrated into the earlier chapters of the college plan.

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Overview and Background >>

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INTRODUCTION The College’s Rise

• This strategic plan will serve as a blueprint for the growth and development over the next 10 years for the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences (BSOS), recognized both nationally and internationally for excellence in research, instruction and service. The future is bright, and we will build upon our current strengths to move to the next level of distinction.

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Our college has superb faculty engaged in cutting edge research and productive outreach to local, state, federal and global communities.

We have internationally recognized scholarship that provides the bases of scientific and behavioral research for disciplines beyond the college.

The continued increase in rankings in the various disciplines of our college is key to the university’s improvement in national and international rankings.

Our faculty are committed to providing excellence in teaching.

A World-Class Social Sciences College is Vital to the University

Social sciences at Maryland were ranked 18th in the world in the 2007 Shanghai Jiao Tong University study.

The Academic Analytics Faculty Productivity Index ranked Maryland social sciences 10th in the country.

That study singled out a number of our departments and programs: criminology – 1st; cognitive science – 5th; political science – 7th; and geography – 9th.

U.S. News & World Report ranks a number of our programs in the top tier of public institutions: o Criminology – 1st o Hearing and speech sciences Speech pathology – 18th Audiology – 24th o Economics – 22nd overall, 7th among public universities Public finance specialty – 10th International economics specialty – 15th o Sociology – 20th overall, 10th among public universities Sex and gender specialty – 5th Sociology of population – 8th o Political science – 28th overall, 14th among public universities o Psychology – 40th overall, 21st among public universities Counseling psychology – 1st Industrial organization specialty – 5th

The college will play an essential role in campus efforts to improve its national and international rankings. Our peer institutions all have four or more social science disciplines that are in the top five. We contend that it is impossible for our campus to move forward unless our college also advances.

The college faces a number of difficult challenges, particularly in the context of a serious economic recession. Despite the challenges this entails, we are committed to continue our rise as a premier constellation of behavioral and social sciences departments.

Our Strategic Plan: Scope and Structure The College of Behavioral and Social Sciences has an exceptional faculty that has received many national and international honors. As we noted above, our faculty includes a Nobel Prize winner and three members of the National Academy of Sciences, in addition to 10 Distinguished University Professors. Over the last four years 27 percent of the newly named Distinguished Scholar-Teachers were from our college, even though our faculty represents just 12 percent of the total campus faculty.

Our plan includes four intertwined elements: research, undergraduate education, graduate education and engagement with the external community.

MISSION AND VISION STATEMENT The College of Behavioral and Social Sciences is committed to conducting theoretical, experimental, field, and applied scholarship of the highest quality, as recognized by our peers, policy and decision makers and other stakeholders. The college is committed to lead in developing new areas of research that will significantly impact both scholarship and society. Our

A broad range of studies and rankings point to the productivity of our faculty:

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Overview and Background

politics (GVPT), and psychology (PSYC) are four of the five largest undergraduate programs on campus and have a total of more than 4,700 majors. African American studies (AASD), anthropology (ANTH), and hearing and speech sciences (HESP) each have just 6-10 tenured or tenure-track faculty; ECON, GVPT, and PSYC each have 29-35. All of the departments except AASD have graduate programs. In Fall 2009 the college had a total of 5,524 undergraduate majors. Additionally, the college provides five concentrations in the interdisciplinary environmental science and policy (ENSP) major, including: global environmental change (geography); land use (geography); marine and coastal management (geography); politics and policy (government and politics); and society and environmental issues (sociology).

research is of direct service to the campus, local communities, the state and the nation. In the classroom and through direct training and other research opportunities, our undergraduate and graduate students understand, evaluate, and conduct basic and applied research, becoming a new generation of highly qualified and engaged behavioral and social science graduates.

The college’s undergraduate educational programs give our students the knowledge and skills necessary to address the pressing needs of individuals and society in a rapidly evolving world. We will strengthen our commitment to provide a firstclass educational experience for our undergraduates, imparting an education that demands critical thinking and intellectual growth. Our students will have the skills valued by employers immediately upon graduation. We will give our students who wish to pursue graduate work the analytical skills and background they need to be successful in the very best graduate programs.

The college has 40 centers housed in departments and five research centers that report directly to the dean: the Center for Substance Abuse Research (CESAR); the Maryland Population Research Center (MPRC); the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START); the Public Safety Training and Technical Assistance Program (PSTTAP); and the Center for Institutional Reform and the Informal Sector (IRIS). In addition, our college is the administrative home of the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS) program, whose director is a member of the college’s faculty.

The range and quality of graduate training in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences will be a primary factor in the continuing rise of the University of Maryland in national and international rankings. We will be a major source for top tier universities seeking assistant professors and post-doctoral fellows trained in cutting edge, interdisciplinary social and behavioral science, as well as for public and private sector organizations nationwide seeking social and behavioral scientists prepared to address social issues and polices of prime importance to the nation and world.

Momentum A central focus of the college's scholarship is the study of the behavior of individuals and societies and the factors affecting them. This focus allows us to make important contributions to virtually every essential policy issue facing the state, the country and the world. Researchers in our college have been involved in many of the most important contemporary policy debates. For example:

STRENGTHS, WEAKNESSES AND OPPORTUNITIES Strengths Location

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The college is committed to take full advantage of the campus location, within miles of the state capital, the nation’s capital, and a huge variety of public and private research and policy centers. Such proximity offers immense opportunities for both undergraduate and graduate student training and experiential learning and for faculty, whose expanding array of research exploits and intersects with this institutional nexus and information-rich environment.

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Quality and Breadth of Academic Programs The College of Behavioral and Social Sciences includes 10 departments. As Table 1 shows, the departments vary greatly in terms of number of faculty and majors. Criminology and criminology justice (CCJS), economics (ECON), government and

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Professor Raymond Paternoster of the Department of Criminology has played an important role in the ongoing debate in Maryland over the death penalty. Professor Paternoster was the author of the Maryland Death Penalty Study (2003). He has worked directly with Governor O'Malley's death penalty commission and he headed the American Bar Association's Death Penalty Moratorium Research Committee.

Professor Carmen Reinhart's recent papers and a new book examine the current economic crisis in historical perspective. These works are having an impact on current debate about the crisis in the economics profession, in the media and in policy circles that is far greater than that of any other single scholar.

Overview and Background

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Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development, has played a key role in Middle East policy debates for decades. He has served as advisor to the United States Mission to the United Nations (1990-91), as advisor to former Congressman Lee Hamilton, and as a member of the United States delegation to the Trilateral USIsraeli-Palestinian Anti-Incitement Committee, which was mandated by the Wye River Agreements. He also served on the Iraq Study Group as a member of the Strategic Environment Working Group.

The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations have recognized the African American Studies Department as one of the leaders among its peers in the nation and the premier site for scholarship on race, gender and labor.

Culture of Innovation, Collaboration and Partnership Our faculty address problems from a broad range of perspectives and use many different analytical approaches. For example: •

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Some of our faculty use sophisticated scientific equipment in their research. Monita Chatterjee of hearing and speech sciences studies ways to improve the performance of cochlear implants. A number of PSYC, ECON, and HESP faculty use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the neural mechanisms underlying human cognition and language. In a later section we present our plans regarding a new Brain Imagining Center based upon a recently successful National Science Foundation (NSF) bid.

Many of the geography faculty use satellite remote sensing in their research on climate change.

Other faculty rely on qualitative techniques. Tony Whitehead in anthropology and Joseph Richardson in African American studies are ethnographers whose current research interests focus on the social context of re-entry and the reintegration of African American males into the work force, their communities and families following incarceration.

Some of the research in our college requires the painstaking development of new, complex data sets. Sonalde Desai and Reeve Vanneman in sociology, in collaboration with the National Council of Applied Research in Delhi, recently

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completed a multisectoral survey of 40,000 households across India that provides a rich resource for research on the relationship between poverty, gender, inequality and human development. John Haltiwanger in economics played a pivotal role in the U.S. Census Bureau’s efforts to develop longitudinal establishment data bases and longitudinal matched employeremployee data bases.

Many of our faculty work directly with individuals.

The Hearing and Speech Clinic has provided speech, language and hearing services to residents of the State of Maryland since 1949. The department’s Language-Learning EarlyAdvantage Program (LEAP) serves as a research laboratory to investigate the efficacy of intervention strategies for specific language impairment in young children while at the same time providing an individualized communication enrichment preschool program. The Center for Addictions, Personality, and Emotion Research (CAPER) in the Department of Psychology is a translational research center focused on understanding the mechanisms underlying the development and maintenance of addictive behaviors and their co-occurring psychological conditions including mood, anxiety and personality disorders.

Some of our researchers look to our past and our heritage. Mark Leone in anthropology has directed Archaeology in Annapolis since 1981, a project that focuses on the historical archaeology of Annapolis. He has also done extensive field work at the Wye House plantation where Frederick Douglass was a slave. Paul Shackel in anthropology has done extensive work on New Philadelphia, Illinois. New Philadelphia was established by Frank McWorter, a freed slave, in

Overview and Background

most productive faculty. While our college has been able to hire a number of great scholars, they become obvious targets for our peer universities who also want to improve their rankings.

Every year the college faces major challenges in retaining our best scholars.

1836; the town was designated a National Historic Landmark in January, 2009.

Weaknesses Undergraduate Education Program

Facilities The campus strategic plan lays out a bold and ambitious vision for enhancing undergraduate education. The plan says in part that the campus will:

We generate roughly twice as many credit hours and twice as many research dollars per square foot of space as does the campus overall. We are badly in need of additional workspace and enhanced classroom and seminar facilities.

. . . increase academic rigor in instruction; increase the role of tenured/tenure-track faculty in undergraduate teaching and the number of undergraduate classes taught by tenured/tenure-track faculty; reduce undergraduate class size; promote the development of departmental/collegiate honors and other programs that challenge high-achieving students; promote teaching activities that help to establish high standards and set high expectations for students in introductory courses; increase the global scope and content of our programs; recruit and enroll high-achieving undergraduates and improve the diversity of students. . .

Opportunities Research and Scholarship We have set an ambitious goal to improve the rankings of our departments. 1 By 2019: • • •

Our college is the key to realizing this vision. We play such a pivotal role in undergraduate education that it is impossible for the campus to meet its goals unless the college is in a position to realize these same goals. The college has nearly 5,600 majors; to put this in perspective, we have roughly the same number of undergraduates (in all majors) as Brown, Stanford or Duke. The college grants nearly 30 percent of all Maryland undergraduate degrees in most years. And our impact extends well beyond our majors – nearly half of all of the students in our undergraduate classes are from other colleges. If the college wishes to challenge our best students, it has to be an exciting and attractive opportunity for the brightest high school seniors in the state. If we do not offer a rigorous undergraduate curriculum because our college is so large, then the campus cannot reach its goals.

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Two of our departments will be in top 10 (CCJS and GEOG).

Three will be in top 15 (CCJS, ECON and GEOG).

Six will be in top 20 (CCJS, ECON, GEOG, GVPT, HESP and SOCY).

All eight departments that have doctoral programs will be in the top 30.

We recognize that this is an ambitious goal. We also will take steps to increase external research funding. Our FY08 sponsored research expenditures were $42.8 million. This is the third highest on campus, behind computer, mathematics, and physical sciences and engineering. It is very unusual for the social sciences to generate this level of support given that there is far less funding available from external sources than in many other fields. Our sponsored research portfolio was second nationally only to the University of Michigan in terms of external research funding in the social sciences. These measures will also help us in our effort to recruit excellent graduate students and provide them with the training essential to ensure their competitive position as they enter the academic and professional job markets.

With such large demand, we face tremendous challenges. Our average undergraduate class size, 63 students, is the highest of all of the colleges and is nearly double the campus average, thus diminishing the likelihood of class discussions, student presentations, and close faculty-student interaction. Students confront problems accessing behavioral and social science courses in the major they wish to take.

Keeping the State’s Best Students at Maryland We have articulated bold and exciting strategies for improving undergraduate education in the college. We envision a program that includes: smaller classes; new Bachelor of Science

Retention of Excellent Faculty 1

We have not included JPSM in the discussion of rankings. The only comparable program is at the University of Michigan (which is a partner in JPSM).

Our success will depend on our ability to recruit and retain our

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Overview and Background

last 10 years, there are signals that the situation is improving, with the acquisition of the former journalism building. When the School of Journalism moves into its new facility in Spring 2010, work will begin to thoroughly rejuvenate the building they now occupy. We have developed a plan to house several units there, whose primary emphasis lies in international relations. Their proximity will provide us with an opportunity to build upon the synergies associated with their inter-related research projects. As behavioral and social scientists, we are well aware of the importance of physical proximity for fostering synergistic interactions. Multidisciplinary research, especially, requires regular exchange of ideas and approaches. A state-ofthe-art facility, centrally located to the college, offers the chance for our leading researchers to meet, exchange ideas and create new initiatives. We contend that our success in this new facility will make the case for the long-anticipated and long-delayed behavioral and social sciences research building even more compelling today than it was when it was originally proposed 10 years ago.

degrees in government and politics and economics; enhanced Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science degree requirements in psychology; new undergraduate research opportunities; a law and society certificate or pre-law program as either a College Park Honors or College Park Scholars program; an Emerging Behavioral and Social Scientist Program; and a College Honors Program. Students, staff and faculty alike have highly diverse backgrounds and this has generated both an impressive breadth of course and program offerings and a lively level of interest, motivation and skills for successfully pursuing the issues so important in today’s globalized and multi-cultural world. We will ensure the continuation of the college’s excellent record at maintaining diversity in its undergraduate programs. We will be the school of choice for the most talented students from Maryland and surrounding states.

Diversity Our college is among the most diverse academic communities in the United States. Our plan is to take aggressive measures to preserve and enhance the diversity of our curriculum, research and people at every rank, including faculty and staff, and our undergraduate and graduate student bodies.

Engagement with the External Community Approximately 80 percent of our alumni remain in or return to the Washington, D.C. area after graduation. The college will accelerate its effort to strengthen ties to this important and growing community, and more generally, to take better advantage of our strategic location.

Facilities Although we have received very little additional space over the

Table 1: Fall 2009 Majors and Tenure/Tenure-Track Faculty College of Behavioral & Social Sciences

Undergraduate Majors Graduate Majors Total Majors

BSOS*

AASP

ANTH

CCJS

ECON

GEOG

GVPT

HESP

JPSM

PSYC

SOCY

5524

30

138

1233

1208

154†

1034‡

175

0

1120

406◊

871

0

36

80

133

76

144

100

40

82

79

6395

30

174

1313

1341

198

1130

275

40

1202

476

Tenure/Tenure 174 6 10 13 35 12 33 8 3 29 24 Track Faculty * The college's majors include 26 undergraduate undecided students, 52 NACS graduate students and 49 geospatial information sciences graduate students. * The college faculty data includes the START Center. † Data includes geography majors, geographic information science majors, and environmental science and policy majors (concentrations: global environmental change; land use; and marine and coastal management). ‡ Data includes government and politics majors and environmental science and policy majors (concentration: politics and policy). ◊ Data includes sociology majors and environmental science and policy majors (concentration: society and environmental issues).

Source: IRPA, student data updated Fall 2009 and employee data updated January 2008.

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to meet the needs of employers and the demands of graduate schools. We will provide incentives to encourage faculty contributions to undergraduate education. We will implement lessons derived from outcome assessments and student evaluations. We will employ new information technologies as tools to improve the learning experience of students and enhance faculty and advising efficiency. We will ensure the continuation of the college’s excellent record of diversity in its undergraduate programs.

Part 1: Undergraduate Education >> VISION The aim of our college’s undergraduate program is to impart to our students the knowledge and skills necessary to address the pressing needs of individuals and society in a rapidly evolving world. We do this by providing our undergraduates with an education that demands critical thinking and intellectual growth. We provide our students with a solid grounding in the fundamentals before introducing them to the latest techniques, knowledge and modes of analysis central to the diverse disciplines of the behavioral and social sciences.

THE CURRENT STATE OF THE COLLEGE OF BEHAVIORAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAM Strengths One of the college’s leading strengths is our distinguished, dedicated and world-renowned faculty body. Even in the face of very large student numbers, these faculty are eager to bring their research experience to the classroom. They are successful in obtaining top graduate school and professional placements for their students. Undergraduates who choose to major in our college in their first year are highly talented: in Fall 2009 they had an average SAT of 1292 and a high school grade point average of 3.94. Every year our college graduates large numbers of students with very high grade point averages. We give a high quality education to our very best students, but we can do better.

Our vision for the future is to pursue the ambitious goals laid out in the campus strategic plan for enhancing undergraduate education. With appropriate resources, by 2019 the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences will ensure that the depth, breadth and overall quality of its undergraduate programs will be a model for the campus. These programs will be the primary reason the brightest students from across this nation and from around the world pursue undergraduate degrees in the behavioral and social sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park. We will be the school of choice for the most talented students from Maryland and surrounding states.

The university’s close proximity to Washington, D.C. offers students unparalleled opportunities in international, federal, nonprofit and for profit organizations. These opportunities are further enhanced by the increasing number of behavioral and social science research centers that incorporate undergraduate students into their research and policy-oriented activities. This complements the well-established contributions of living and learning programs such as CIVICUS and the College Park Scholars International Studies Program. One consequence of encouraging such a community of faculty and students has been a very active Dean’s Student Advisory Council, comprising highly energized, informed and engaged students. The council provides an opportunity for students to gain first-hand experience in tackling important issues affecting the undergraduate experience in the college.

Our best graduates will be trained so well that they will thrive on arrival at the best graduate programs in the world. They will be competitive for the best positions in government and in the private sector. All students will possess valuable skills to offer to employers immediately upon graduation. We will continue to provide to the State of Maryland, and to the broader labor market, talented graduates who can function effectively in today's knowledge-based economy. Our graduates will become responsible and informed community leaders who possess the skills necessary to address the complex issues of a rapidly evolving, diverse and international community. By fostering the development of our students’ human capital, our college will be a major contributor to the social, political and economic development of the state.

The college has made an unwavering commitment to rigor and excellence in all it undertakes, whether or not extra resources flow to our college. We will remain steadfast in pursuing the campus goals of reducing class sizes and increasing faculty-tostudent ratios. If extra resources do not flow, this will mean increasing the quality of our programs through a reduction in their size. Whatever the size of our programs, we will continue to pursue quality by enhancing and upgrading our curriculum

The directors of undergraduate programs and academic advisors do an outstanding job given the pressures of student numbers. The college has high retention and graduation rates among both first-year admits and majors who enter the college as juniors.

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Part 1: Undergraduate Education

provide students with concrete career advice, coaching, mentoring and networking.

Students, staff and faculty alike have highly diverse backgrounds and this has generated both an impressive breadth of course and program offerings and a lively level of interest, motivation and skills for successfully pursuing the issues so important in today’s globalized and multicultural world.

GOALS AND STRATEGIES Goal 1: Greater emphasis on closer interactions between our college’s faculty and students.

Weaknesses Strategies The student-to-tenure-track faculty ratio in our college is the second highest on campus, a consequence of low funding relative to student demand for the college’s teaching. As a consequence, predominantly large classes diminish the quality of interactions between faculty and students at all levels. Too many classes are taught by temporary adjuncts or graduate students. These factors can undermine academic rigor, deny students the opportunity to engage in specialized research assignments and deprive them of mentoring from established faculty, lessening the possibility of obtaining influential recommendation letters.

A.

Reduce average class sizes. In the classroom, the chief inhibiting factor to close interactions is class size. By the year 2019, the college aims to lower its average class size to the campus average of 36 students (down from the current 63). All upper level courses will be capped at 25 students.

By Fall 2010, the college will implement a plan to reduce the gap between college and campus class size averages by an amount each year that is appropriate given the above goal.

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Limit size of 400-level classes. The current strategy is to begin reducing the average 400-level class size by restricting the majority of such courses to majors only.

C.

Restrict double majors. The college will restrict the number of double majors by imposing minimum levels of academic performance.

It is significant that there is a campus goal to attract the best students, yet most students majoring in the behavioral and social sciences suffer from a bi-modal distribution of student quality, with large numbers of high quality students and even larger numbers of less well-qualified. The latter disproportionately consist of external transfer students and those rejected from limited enrollment programs outside the college. This bi-modal distribution makes teaching very difficult in junior and senior courses.

D.

Increase presence of tenured and tenure-track faculty in the classroom. Master teachers will be added, where appropriate, to help reduce class sizes. Each faculty member in the college will be required to teach at least one undergraduate course each academic year. By Fall 2010 the college will recommend to the campus the specific number of students to whom the college can provide a quality education given different projections of the flow of resources.

Within resource constraints, the college will continue to pursue existing opportunities for increasing efficiency and raising quality. Ongoing curriculum and program reviews herald productive enhancements; high quality faculty create opportunities for undergraduate students to work at the cutting edge of social science research; our location gives plentiful internship opportunities for students to gain experience in behavioral and social science applications; our subject matter naturally leads to enhanced study abroad programs to promote greater appreciation of global social science issues; our college includes disciplines that naturally lead to interdisciplinary studies inside and outside the college; and we are generating more opportunities for interactions with college alumni to

Outside the classroom the chief factor limiting faculty-student interaction is the sheer number of students per faculty who seek special attention. The above elements of the college’s strategy will immediately reduce the number of students per faculty member and provide students with greater opportunities to interact on an individual basis. By 2019, no student will complain about a lack of interaction with faculty leading to difficulties in obtaining letters of recommendation.

Chronic low levels of funding negatively affect other elements of quality. The number of academic advisors per major is small, instructional facilities are often outdated and poorly maintained, and there is an absence of communal meeting places for students, a particular problem for the four largest academic major departments.

Goal 2: Renewed commitment to academic rigor.

A focus on student numbers impedes a commitment to quality.

The college must renew its commitment to the highest

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Part 1: Undergraduate Education

offerings and to produce a strategy for incorporating and monitoring academic rigor in all major courses. Superior academic excellence will be the standard, and faculty will be expected to demonstrate excellence in classroom performance.

academic standards. In order to recruit and retain the most talented students, it is imperative that our undergraduate programs become known for demanding academic rigor. When rigor is the norm, we will enhance the prospects for our graduates to attend premier graduate and professional schools and to enter the professional workforce at a high entry level.

Goal 3: Increase the yield of top high school students admitted to the university as majors in the behavioral and social sciences.

Strategies A.

Create new high-end degree modules. As resources become available to hire additional faculty, the Departments of Government and Politics and Economics will offer new rigorous Bachelor of Science program concentrations to attract and educate the very best students, and psychology will strengthen its Bachelor of Science program to enhance rigor.

B.

Launch a new honors college. As more outstanding faculty are hired, the college will offer a honors college to recruit and educate the best and brightest incoming students in the behavioral and social sciences. Grounded in the idea of a liberal education, this new program will serve as a weighty complement to the current disciplinary-specific education of undergraduates.

C.

Develop new program in law-related studies. As new resources are available we will develop a new program to meet the needs of our students who plan to go to law school. Several alternative formats: the new program might take the form of a pre-law certificate or a new College Park Scholars or honors program. The program will include courses from several departments including ECON, GVPT, and CCJS, and courses from outside the college, such as history and philosophy. The program will also include internship opportunities; the extensive college alumni network in Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Annapolis will be an invaluable asset to the proposed new program.

D.

E.

Strategies

Elevate expectations in current curricula. As faculty-student ratios fall, problem sets, writing exercises, research assignments and oral presentations will be the norm for all upper-level courses. Behavioral and social science classes will allow for formative faculty feedback to the student.

Intellectual discourse between faculty and students will be enhanced by offering more courses that do not exceed 20 students. Such courses will be a natural link between the regular curriculum and structured research opportunities that will lead to independent research projects for our undergraduate students.

Elevate program expectations. The college will require each academic unit to re-evaluate its current major course

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A.

Hire an undergraduate recruitment officer. The increases in quality just outlined will naturally enhance the college’s ability to attract the best and the brightest applicants to the university. However, we must leverage this opportunity. Many of the colleges and schools on campus have a full-time staff person whose sole responsibility is undergraduate recruitment. With current staff levels insufficient compared to current and projected demands, this is the model our college will adopt once additional resources are available. A recruitment staff person would meet an important need and allow the college to effectively offer programs that could enhance the recruitment of talented students to the campus. This recruitment officer would develop recruitment materials, create enrichment programs and coordinate recruitment activities for the college.

B.

Expand Young Scholars Curriculum. Many talented prospective students are not exposed to the wide variety of research activities in which behavioral and social science faculty engage. The college will offer a variety of new courses through the Young Scholars Program to expose middle and high school students to our various disciplines and exciting research.

C.

Enhanced recruitment to emphasize diversity. Many talented students of color from Maryland leave the state in order to attend college. The college will develop enrichment programs specifically for these middle and high school students to increase the attractiveness of the behavioral and social science disciplines and to guide their academic preparation for admission to the university and study in our college.

D.

Provide merit scholarships for the best and the brightest of the college’s entering class. This will be part of the responsibility of the new undergraduate recruitment officer. The college does not have full scholarships for incoming freshman or transfer students that some of the other schools and colleges on campus have. The college will charge its

Part 1: Undergraduate Education

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especially encourage these faculty members to work with the Center for Teaching Excellence. Incentives for faculty who do improve their evaluations after taking advantage of training opportunities will be provided.

High end: Faculty members who have the best course evaluations will be encouraged to develop mentoring relationships with junior faculty. Incentives will be proposed, whether honorary or monetary, as a reward for faculty members for these mentoring relationships.

Each department will be tasked with developing specific strategies to improve quality of instruction. This can be accomplished by standing committees already in existence in each department and will utilize the results of the learning outcomes assessments and course evaluation.

development office to identify donors who will endow full scholarships for our college’s freshman and transfer students.

Goal 4: Improve support for and management of the college’s instructional program so that our students are provided with the tools and guidance needed for an excellent undergraduate education.

Goal 5: Enhance the advising system, enabling students to make informed decisions on major, course selection and preparation for education or employment after graduation.

Strategies Strategies A.

Increased technology-enhanced instruction. An excellent undergraduate education is predicated on instructors having access to the best technologies. Our college will renew efforts to enhance resource flows for such purposes.

The Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE), the Office of Information Technology (OIT) and the Office of Academic Computing Services (OACS) will be used to help faculty develop teaching strategies that are based on current research and on the latest technology. Creating a culture where excellent teaching is the norm will benefit undergraduates enrolled in our courses. Providing incentives to faculty to improve instruction will help to implement this strategy.

B.

Exploit learning outcome assessment information. The college will use learning outcomes assessments to monitor which courses enhance student learning. As data become available that indicate student success in achieving outcomes, this information will be shared with faculty to encourage course revisions if appropriate.

C.

Use course evaluation data.

• Low end: The college will implement stronger approaches to improve the performance of faculty members who are found to have course evaluations significantly below expectations. Department chairs will

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A.

Reduce advisor-student ratio. A 2003 National Academic Advising Association study reports that an average advising caseload at four year colleges nationwide is 153 students per full-time advisor. The college's average caseload is 271 students per advisor. In the larger departments, caseloads are upwards of 400. The college will reduce the advisorstudent ratio.

B.

Enhance the advising efficiency. Efficiency is enhanced by better advising. Through increases in the availability of advisers, students can make better informed decisions about major requirements, course selection, and professional and graduate program preparation. Informed students graduate in a timely manner and do better in starting their careers or entering graduate schools.

Moreover, in the past few years, advising has become more reliant on evolving technology. Training for advisors in how to utilize new technologies will increase efficiency to a greater extent.

C.

Expand scope of advisor responsibilities. Our advisers will expand the scope of their responsibilities. As students look forward to life after graduation, we need to help them develop their career plans by developing programs that address individual career development objectives. For students who are thinking about applying to the university,

Part 1: Undergraduate Education

it is important for advisors in our college to develop relationships with colleagues in the Maryland community colleges, which send a large number of their students to our campus. By imparting a better understanding of the demands of the university, implementing assistance with the transition to our campus, and facilitating the transfer of courses, our college would produce better success for our transfer students. Relationships between specific behavioral and social science majors and Maryland community colleges will encourage the seamless transition of students to our college. This will address a large concern mentioned in other sections of this document—the varying quality of transfer students who come to the university.

D.

Increase student opportunities. Advisers will develop stronger relations with departmental honors and program directors to provide graduate school preparation workshops, to organize procedures that help students to access summer research internships and to create opportunities for students to identify individual research opportunities with faculty.

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our college is characterized by a notable degree of heterogeneity across and in some cases, even within departments. Some programs resemble those found in the life sciences, physical sciences and engineering programs, while others resemble arts and humanities programs. Still others utilize interdisciplinary training models that push the frontiers of collaborative, cutting edge training and science across University of Maryland, College Park colleges and schools (such as NACS) and even beyond the university (such as JPSM), and still others develop skills required to deliver services and/or meld research and clinical practice skills (e.g., psychology and hearing and speech sciences).

Part 2: Graduate Education >> VISION Our goal is excellence in graduate education, broadly construed. To this end, the college will endeavor to balance the needs of our highly ranked research doctoral programs and our highly ranked graduate programs that prepare working professionals (such as hearing and speech sciences, survey methods, criminology and clinical psychology).

Placement

THE CURRENT STATE OF THE COLLEGE OF BEHAVIORAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES GRADUATE PROGRAMS

Many of the college’s doctoral programs have placement records that compare very favorably with peer universities such as UNC-Chapel Hill, Berkeley and Michigan. For example, a 2007 article in the Journal of Criminal Justice Education concludes that Maryland’s Criminology and Criminal Justice programs produced more “academic stars” than any other program in the country. In the last two years, economics placed students at Cornell University (two students; 18th in the most recent U.S. News & World Report rankings of economics programs), New York University (12th in the U.S. News & World Report rankings), Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management (4th in the U.S. News & World Report rankings of business schools), and the London School of Economics (widely regarded as the leading economics department outside the United States).

Overview of Graduate Training in Our College The College of Behavioral and Social Sciences comprises 10 departments focused on understanding the antecedents, consequences and regulators of behavior regardless of level of focus (neural, individual, group, organizational or societal).

Unlike other universities, in which these departments are usually housed in different colleges (e.g., College of Arts and Sciences or College of Business), the University of Maryland recognizes that many of the problems the world faces today and will face in the future are the result of the increasingly dense network of interactions between and among individuals, institutions and societies who are physically separated but politically, economically, socially, culturally and environmentally connected. Our college is optimally situated to do research on these problems due to the associations fostered among the separate disciplines by the college. It is through synergistic efforts that creative ideas can be generated to solve these new and complex problems.

Full-time and Part-Time Students The campus strategic plan argues that as a rule, all doctoral students should be full-time students. We offer two observations on this issue. First, for most of our college’s programs that is already the case. In economics, psychology, sociology, and NACS at least 90 percent of the doctoral students are full-time; in all but one of the rest, between 80 and 90 percent of the students are full-time.

All of the college’s departments offer graduate training, with the exception of the African American Studies Department. The graduate education programs in our college are designed to prepare students for research, policy and service careers in the behavioral and social sciences. Our departments provide training at the master’s and doctoral levels and for those interested in both applied training and research training.

Although the focus and tenor of this section will reflect the emphasis we place on doctoral education, it is important to note that master’s level education is important in many of our disciplines.

Second, there is a strong case that it would be unwise to try to reduce the number of part-time students much further. Dr. Mote often describes our proximity to the federal government, international organizations, and “think tanks” as “our unfair advantage.” Our location implies we should have at least some part-time students in our doctoral programs: •

While the goals and structure of most of our programs resemble those of other leading social science colleges and departments,

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Some of our economics doctoral students will have opportunities to complete their dissertations while working at the International Monetary Fund or the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

Part 2: Graduate Education

•

•

• •

•

candidates who will enhance the diversity in our graduate programs. These special cases are reviewed by the dean’s office and are funded only with the dean’s approval.

Geography has had part-time graduate students from NASA, USGS, NOAA and NGA who pursued their Ph.D.s while conducting much of their research as federal employees.

The U.S. Census Bureau might decide to allow one of its employees to pursue a Ph.D. in JPSM while continuing to work part-time.

HESP Ph.D. students can gain excellent research experience while working at NIH. A very strong government and politics student might choose to begin dissertation research while taking a temporary position on Capitol Hill.

The Smithsonian might want one of its people to pursue a Ph.D. part-time in anthropology.

Block Grant Fellowships Block grants for fellowships offered through the graduate school are an invaluable tool in our efforts to recruit and educate exceptional graduate students. It would be impossible for our graduate programs to compete with leading public universities like Michigan, Berkeley and UCLA, let alone private universities like Harvard, Princeton and Stanford without these funds.

We are, however, very concerned about the distribution of block grant fellowship funds across campus. The first row of Table 2 shows the history of block grant fellowships in our college over the last six years. As that table shows, the block grant funds we received from the graduate school fell from $979,900 in 2004 to $645,700 predicted for Fall 2009. This represents a drop of 34 percent; in real terms, our college’s block grant fellowship funds have been cut nearly in half since 2004.

We will thus allow flexibility to be used to attract or retain the intellectual leaders we are seeking to train. Allowing some room for those who are taking advantage of our location can lead to interesting and productive cross-pollination.

Diversity We are proud of our record of accomplishments in fostering diversity in our doctoral programs. According to NSF data, Maryland ranks 3rd in the country in the number of Ph.D.s granted to African Americans in the behavioral and social sciences since 1998. Over the same period, Maryland ranked 8th in the number of Ph.D.s to all underrepresented minorities in the behavioral and social sciences since 1998.

Our college has used its own funds to offset part of this decrease. Last year we gave our programs $211,000 to augment the $673,500 from the graduate school. This is a clear sign of our college’s commitment to excellence in our graduate programs. It is not at all clear that we will be able to maintain this level of support in light of pending budget cuts.

We lost block grant fellowship funds because the campus shifted from an allocation model that focused on the strength of individual graduate programs to a model that – for all intents and purposes – allocates funds based on program size (40 percent of the allocation is based on number of doctoral students and 40 percent is based on the number of doctoral degrees awarded). As might be expected, our college finds it ironic that the campus felt strongly that the best way to allocate graduate student resources was based on size of program, but has largely rejected that model at the undergraduate level.

The college participates in an alliance with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Florida, the University of Miami and Howard University to broaden the participation of under-represented doctoral recipients in social, behavioral and economic doctoral programs. We are generously supported through the National Science Foundation Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate program, support made only to those universities that have a demonstrated track record in training diverse students. These funds allow us to augment our efforts to attract students to our programs through our summer training program, support our own undergraduate and doctoral students through travel and research activities, provide research enhancement experiences to our doctoral students, and support our departments as they develop their own strategies and activities.

GOALS AND STRATEGIES Goal 1: Our faculty remain our primary asset with regard to graduate education. Therefore, our first goal is to improve the capacity of our already impressive faculty so that they may provide a top-notch education to our graduate students. We will accomplish this by building collaboration among the departments, the dean’s office, and the university to allocate resources to increase faculty numbers and quality, and

The college recognizes the need to provide attractive funding packages in order to attract the best and brightest to our graduate programs. The college sets aside additional funds each year for departments to access when there are special targets of opportunity to attract exceptional doctoral training

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Part 2: Graduate Education

therefore their ability to provide quality mentoring relationships with graduate students.

Strategies A.

Leverage the resources of the college and university through centers, partnerships, collaborations and other incentives so that faculty can simultaneously strengthen their research portfolios while providing excellent research experiences and mentoring to graduate students. Funds for redistribution will be allocated through a mechanism that documents how the quality of faculty research and the quality of graduate education are both enhanced.

B.

Increase the number of our faculty working on the cutting edge of science in their discipline. These faculty are the best models for the education of graduate students, and we will work with the provost to identify our faculty needs and seek assistance in recruiting and retaining these faculty.

faculty or others inexperienced with educating and training graduate students.

Goal 2: Successful graduate training programs rely on outstanding research activities and facilities in which to immerse their students. Our goal is to intensify the linkages between faculty research and graduate education, and to enhance graduate educational opportunities through the existing research centers and those centers and initiatives proposed in the research section of this strategic plan.

D.

We will develop a college-wide research forum for our graduate students in which graduate programs will be encouraged to contribute and participate. For disciplinespecific reasons, departments will develop (or continue) their own programs. The goals of such a forum will be to expose graduate students to the wide range of research conducted in our college, foster collaborations (interdisciplinary and discipline specific), and serve as a venue for students to present their research and receive formative and constructive feedback.

E.

We will work with the Office of the Vice President for Research to disseminate information about research opportunities for graduate students on campus and in the metropolitan area.

Strategies A.

B.

C.

We will strengthen the culture of graduate student mentoring as a priority among the faculty by creating incentives and removing work-load barriers.

Goal 3: Our goal is to enable students to take advantage of every opportunity to develop the skills necessary to become excellent independent researchers and professionals.

Existing research centers and newly planned initiatives (see the research section of our strategic plan) will identify activities that may provide unique graduate educational opportunities. Participation in graduate education will be part of the overall review of centers and new research initiatives and will be a factor in judging the performance of the centers and initiatives.

Strategies A.

We will develop documents, handbooks and other resources to be distributed among faculty to make them more aware of best practices in graduate training in the social and behavioral sciences and more aware of opportunities and resources for graduate training on campus and nationally. Proposed handbooks include one for directors of graduate studies and another for junior

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We will make the provision of an effective mix of funding for our graduate students a priority. This mix of funding will include the provision of fellowships, research assistantships and teaching assistantships at various points throughout their studies. Given the heterogeneity of our training programs, it will not be the wisest course to fund all students in the same manner (e.g., the campus strategic plan goal of fully funded full-time students for the duration of their educational program). We will rely on the departments and specific graduate programs to explore and determine the best, most appropriate mix of funding for their students. (Please see the earlier section on block

Part 2: Graduate Education

grant funding for a discussion of the challenge of providing adequate funding for our students.)

B.

We will use funds reallocated to our college from the provost and from the graduate school’s block grant fellowship program to move us toward our goal of providing competitive levels of funding for our graduate students. We will continue to use college funds to supplement our block grant fellowship funding.

C.

We will increase the number of students competing for and receiving graduate fellowships from the graduate school and external sources by undertaking an aggressive campaign to educate our students and faculty about available support mechanisms and by providing guidance and mentorship on the development of strong applications. We will work with the Office of the Vice President for Research and the graduate school to identify sources of external funding for students in the social and behavioral sciences and we will provide that information to our graduate students in an effective, accessible manner.

D.

E.

We will seek to identify and successfully compete for a larger number of graduate training grants. We will accomplish this by encouraging our research centers and new research initiatives to build training collaborations (especially interdisciplinary) aimed at strengthening graduate education.

B.

Each department will articulate a process for mentoring graduate students in their discipline. Programs will utilize exit interviews with graduate students to identify successful mentors and mentoring processes and apply this information as needed to improve the graduate educational experience in their department. The dean’s office will work with units to secure resources necessary to improve mentoring activities.

C.

The college will work with departments to develop interdisciplinary as well as discipline-specific training to foster students’ abilities in grant writing, professional manuscript preparation, conference presentation skills and teaching. Outcomes of these efforts will be measured by the number of professional achievements (conference presentations, research publications) seen during the course of students’ academic programs.

D.

Currently, our severe facility and space constraints make it impossible for many departments to provide adequate and up-to-date research and work/study spaces for all their graduate students. When the university and our college address the serious space and facility shortcomings in our departments, proposals for improvements will also include providing adequate research and work/study space for graduate students.

Goal 5: Recruit, retain and graduate the highest caliber students who reflect our national diversity.

We will establish a college-level fund to provide dissertation support, support for pilot studies, summer training and research fellowships, and travel to professional conferences.

Strategies A.

Each program will undertake a review of its graduate application pool, acceptance, enrollment and retention data, progress to degree data, and graduation data on a yearly basis to scan for best practices, identify barriers and identify areas in need of improvement. Our college has already developed a report for this purpose (GASPPS: Graduate Application, Support, Progress, and Placement Survey).

B.

We will work with each graduate program to develop a recruitment, enrollment, retention and placement plan for diverse students that draws from the review described in goal five, strategy “A.” These recruitment and retention plans will be presented to members of the college’s directors of graduate studies group for peer feedback and for identification of best practices that might be adopted by other programs in the college. Each recruitment and retention plan must describe concrete plans for recruiting a diverse graduate student body and plans for reducing any

Goal 4: Work with our departments to adopt the best practices and essential elements for excellence in graduate education within their specific disciplines.

Strategies A.

Each department will review and adjust curricula to reflect changes in knowledge and technical skills required of successful program graduates, and we will hold departments accountable through the a dean’s office review of departments. When external reviews of programs identify programmatic needs or additional resources that could move programs significantly further in their respective rankings, the dean’s office will work with programs to allocate or advocate for the necessary resources.

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Part 2: Graduate Education

observed disparities across markers of progress, accomplishment and placement.

C.

D.

E.

Goal 6: Our goal is to place our graduates in top tier universities as faculty or post-doctoral fellows, or in important research positions in international and federal agencies, private industry or other highly visible organizations.

The dean’s office will contribute to recruitment and retention resources provided by the graduate school’s block grant fellowship fund to increase the amount of funds available for fellowships or other training support enhancements. These resources will be allocated in a way that aligns the graduate funding with the university’s and the college’s strategic plan for graduate programs.

Strategies

Each department will identify potential undergraduate feeder programs for its discipline, including those that enroll significant numbers of under-represented populations, and will develop plans to actively recruit these students.

A.

As just stated, each program will develop a plan for monitoring and evaluating placement unique to its own curricular goals and discipline. We will pay special attention to ensure that disparities in placement of our diverse students do not occur.

B.

Departments will work with their alumni to mentor, network and facilitate placement of their current students and recent graduates.

Each program will review its Web site to improve the ability of prospective graduate students to explore graduate education opportunities and learn about the programs in each department.

Table 2: Source of Block Grant Fellowship Funding for College of Behavioral & Social Sciences Students:

Graduate School BSOS Total

Fall 2004 $979,874 $83,446 $1,063,320

Fall 2005 $710,000 $175,197 $885,197

Fall 2006 $670,000 $174,665 $844,665

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Fall 2007 $680,600 $183,245 $863,845

Fall 2008 $673,500 $211,048 $884,548

Fall 2009 $645,700 $195,140 $840,840

CONTEXT

Part 3: Research and Scholarship >>

Much of our research benefits from substantial external funding and currently such funding places us 2nd in the nation.

Furthermore, many of the opportunities discussed below are capable of attracting very substantial external resources.

Success for all types of research requires resources to attract the best faculty and to provide them with appropriate levels of support. Perhaps the greatest constraint in developing our research activities is the fact that our departments are strikingly and disproportionately understaffed to fulfill their teaching mission, and this situation places undue burdens on the deployment of faculty time for research.

VISION Our goal is always to achieve excellence in scholarship, and to create and teach great behavioral and social science. Behavioral and social scientists study human phenomena at every level of analysis, from the micro-processes within the human mind, to the actions and decisions of individual agents, to the processes that structure social, cultural, economic and political systems.

Integration across these broad levels of analysis is essential for scientific progress and for understanding and addressing pressing social issues such as economic and political instability, societal and individual health, growing racial, ethnic, and gender diversity, crime and terrorism, drug addiction, human responses to global change, and threats to social justice. In addressing these issues, behavioral and social scientists extend their reach to other disciplines and connect with the environmental, computational and life sciences.

GOALS AND STRATEGIES Goal 1: The college will work substantially to improve opportunities to perform research and expand its research activities.

Strategies

Members of the college will develop many new research initiatives, several of which are inherently interdisciplinary.

Several of the college’s most successful initiatives in the last decade have been multidisciplinary efforts bringing together outstanding faculty from different departments to create new mixes of colleagues that generate new ideas and research strategies through cross-fertilization. The Maryland Population Research Center, for example, combines a broad range of social sciences. The Joint Program in Survey Methodology focuses on creating expertise in a research method common to all behavioral and social disciplines.

A.

Improved balance between research and teaching expectations.

• Increase faculty in those units with very high numbers of majors.

• Seek increases in graduate students and support staff.

• Improve rewards for faculty who are successful as scholar-teachers.

B.

Improve infrastructure.

• Increased space – need to develop focused plans for the use of the behavioral and social sciences research building.

• Need for new specialized facilities, notably a Brain Imaging Center.

• Carry out strategic assessment of improvements in existing physical infrastructure and paying particular attention to refurbishment of specialized laboratory facilities, especially in psychology.

• Seek opportunities for extra university funding for facilities improvement (e.g., from NSF).

• Carry out a strategic assessment of computing needs in the college and develop an implementation plan to satisfy them.

C.

New activities must promote the diversity goals of the college.

Members of the college will always work to bring the benefits of their world-class research to graduate and undergraduate programs both in the classroom and in the laboratory, leading to published papers and student participation in conferences.

Increased resources should be allocated to improve research opportunities for both undergraduates and graduates.

In developing our research programs we will continue to forge linkages with local, state, national and international partnerships. The last in particular is a major strength of the college: our faculty have active research collaborations in numerous countries throughout the world.

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Part 3: Research and Scholarship

•

Enhance the university’s national reputation as a leader in producing scholars among under-represented minorities.

Goal 2: The college will foster enhanced research activities within academic departments and centers.

Strategies A.

Maintain and improve the strengths of existing academic departments.

• Any new resources the college receives must be used to strengthen individual departments. New resources therefore have to be devoted to maintaining and strengthening core research activities of departments and units.

• Each unit will develop plans allowing them to claim national or international pre-eminence in at least one subfield.

• •

E. B.

Improve recognition of departmental contributions.

• Ensure that faculty contributions through research units are monitored and recorded.

New policies are being adopted in the college to ensure and promote mutual benefits to departments and interdisciplinary centers.

• Benefits to departments are in part financial (e.g., DRIF return) but at least as important is that departments are properly recognized for the research that their tenured faculty perform in extra departmental centers.

C.

Hire and retain outstanding faculty.

• Every unit must develop a strategic hiring plan in keeping with their own strategic plans.

• Reduce teaching loads for faculty who are active in research, especially for more junior faculty, to encourage grant preparation and research development.

• Reward faculty who are actively engaged in research with incentives such as travel money, research support, resident assistant support and reduced teaching loads.

• Work to improve diversity, taking into account the under-representation of minorities.

D.

Improve staff support for grant preparation departmentally and at the college level.

The college recognizes that small units in particular will benefit from improved support for grant preparation at the college level and steps are being taken to remedy this.

Allocate college funding more strategically to foster future research activities.

• More strategic focusing of college and unit resources to act as a stimulus for new activities, encouraging both disciplinary research and cross-unit interdisciplinary research that benefits departments.

• In developing new activities it will be necessary to demonstrate either that these are essential for the success of the behavioral and social sciences on campus or that this new activity will be uniquely successful.

• New initiatives must demonstrate that they will achieve national or international prominence.

• New initiatives must make good use of and build on existing faculty strengths.

Goal 3: The college will implement strategies to foster the creation of major new interdisciplinary research activities.

Strategies A.

Improve support for seeking external grant and contract funding.

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Expansion of multidisciplinary activities.

• Seed funding of research across departmental boundaries.

• New resources will also be used to support new, often interdisciplinary initiatives. In deciding which of these initiatives should be supported the college will use the following criteria to prioritize them. a) New

Part 3: Research and Scholarship

interdisciplinary activities must demonstrably strengthen units within the college, for example through the recruitment of outstanding scholars to those departments and by enhancing research opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students in departmental programs. b) Centers outside of units should only be encouraged when they facilitate interdisciplinary research that would be impossible to achieve within individual academic units and when they strengthen individual departments and units. c) In setting up new centers, careful attention must be paid to their future financial sustainability. New centers must be capable of raising significant resources in the short to medium term. Centers should help with the acquisition of grants, for example, through provision of high level disciplinary and interdisciplinary grant support. Successful centers typically continue to receive some state funding in the longer terms.

B.

•

Three new interdisciplinary centers will be established in the next one to two years.

• Brain Imaging Center. Based on the successful NSF bid for an fMRI, an interdisciplinary Brain Imagining Center will be established. A strength on which the center can build is college and campus-wide expertise in cognitive science and neuroscience, active research programs in these domains, and research infrastructure that now supports an impressive level of research productivity.

Neuroimaging techniques are being rapidly developed for the study of central questions in behavioral and social sciences, including racial prejudice, criminal behavior and psychopathy, cross cultural differences and similarities in human functioning, and political attitudes, to name just some of the relevant topics.

• Center for International Studies. We propose to create the Center for International Studies to serve as an umbrella organization for the international research in our college. The center will coordinate, encourage, develop, support, and provide oversight for the programs and activities of institutional units, interface with institutions both in this country and abroad, support teaching and research, and be a visible face for international

•

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activities at the university. It will also provide a clearing house for these programs and assist with the logistics of travel and living abroad.

Center for Human Dimensions of Global Change. The proposed Center for Human Dimensions of Global Change will have as its primary focus research from a social sciences perspective on how the earth’s environment is being altered by human activities and how humans will deal with these dramatic changes. The center would focus on the impacts of climate and land use change on human systems, on human vulnerability, resilience adaptation and mitigation to global change as they relate to key areas such as sustainable food, fiber and water supply, health and global change and patterns of resource consumption. The center would explicitly carry out research on socioeconomic factors such as the relationships between institutions, governance and the environment, the impact of the current demographic explosion on human and environmental systems, the impacts and sustainability of urban growth, especially in developing countries, and the importance of human welfare, livelihoods and social equity.

Other future centers. Future centers and other interdisciplinary efforts will be developed in the future using the criteria outlined above.

C.

Encourage interdisciplinary research.

• Seek opportunities for joint appointments between units within and among colleges.

• Promote interdisciplinary communication among productive faculty interested in forging larger centers, and administrative support for preparation of large scale funding.

• Promote post-doctoral programs to enhance research agenda of departments and centers.

D.

Review periodically all college-level centers.

• Introduce oversight committees or boards to monitor and strengthen each center's mission, function and budget.

GOALS AND STRATEGIES

Part 4: Partnerships, Outreach and Engagement >>

Goal 1: The college will successfully complete the Great Expectations campaign and will then build a fundraising program capable of generating increased giving in support of the college’s priorities.

VISION

Strategies

A central focus of the college is the study of the behavior of individuals and societies and the factors affecting them, including climate change, economic globalization, international political relations, domestic and international terrorism, population and demographic shifts, ethnic and racial identity and culture, to name only a few. Our research extends from the smallest neuron to global networks and connectivity. Given such far reaching implications, developing a sophisticated external relations program charged with facilitating collaboration and generating support to sustain our momentum will be a high priority during the next 10 years.

The college’s external relations team will facilitate collaborations and support for the college. Our alumni are our largest audience. There are currently more than 51,000 behavioral and social science alums, with more than 80 percent living in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia. The diversity of our alumni reflects the diversity of the college.

The initiatives below are designed to bridge gaps between our students, faculty, programs and projects, our alumni family, and practitioners in the Washington, D.C. region. They are intended to broaden educational offerings and opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students in public policy and applied research arenas. They are also intended to strengthen and diversify the reach of the faculty by creating new opportunities for university scholars to expand their research, broaden their student contact, and to bring policy makers and skilled professionals to College Park. In sum, these efforts should spark a mutually beneficial relationship that raises the level and profile of our college’s programs.

The campus strategic plan notes: “as word gets out, the pride of our loyal alumni will grow even stronger, and the numbers of those who maintain their ties will increase.” We predict that as our alumni and friends learn more of our story, and devote their time and energy into the college, they will be increasingly willing to invest in our future.

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A.

We will establish a qualified major gifts program, with an extensive list of qualified major gift prospects.

• We will create a formalized stewardship program connecting donors with their scholarship recipient(s)/faculty chair/award winner and provide the donors with an annual report on the accomplishments their contributions have allowed us to achieve.

B.

The college’s board of visitors and alumni chapter board will be comprised of active and engaged volunteers. The subcommittees formed to craft the strategic plan will continue, charged now with implementation of these plans. Additional subcommittees for development, nominations and an executive committee will be recruited.

C.

Working to complement the alumni relations program, the college will design a series of events, lectures, dinners and VIP invitations to campus functions exclusively for our college’s donors. The events will highlight college accomplishments achieved through donor investment, with a goal of garnering additional support.

D.

The development office will raise funds to support a range of initiatives: • Endowed chairs and professorships.

• Enhancement of the former journalism building.

• Undergraduate and graduate scholarships.

• Establish a network to promote undergraduate internships and international experiences.

E.

The development office, in collaboration with the Maryland Fund for Excellence, will provide annual fundraising support for departments and centers, providing analysis of the results and recommendations for future outreach.

Part 4: Partnerships, Outreach and Engagement

Goal 2: The college will strengthen its marketing and communications program to raise public awareness of the accomplishments in the college, departments and centers, as well as by individual faculty members.

• Strategies A.

The college’s communications, alumni relations and development staff are charged with proactively utilizing the dean, his senior staff and volunteer boards to help promote accomplishments and activities in the college.

The following actions will be part of that effort: • Promote attendance (and where applicable, participation) at high-visibility events.

• Host regular on-campus luncheons with a small group of students and alumni. These are opportunities for informational exchanges.

• Engage in regular communication with alumni, parents, donors and friends.

• Involve the dean’s senior staff in outreach efforts with students, alumni, parents and friends. Align the staff’s expertise and natural involvement with the appropriate audience.

The staff may choose to meet with individuals or as a small group.

• Encourage members of the board of visitors and alumni chapter board to host lunches, make phone calls, write letters, serve as mentors, engage fellow alums and the like.

The board of visitors and alumni chapter board members are encouraged to attend (and participate, where applicable) highvisibility events.

B.

Utilize alumni and volunteers in our marketing and outreach.

C.

Coordinate marketing efforts with the university’s marketing office and alumni association.

• Take advantage of alumni association events to target our college’s graduates. The college’s alumni relations and development unit will identify ways for the college to have a prominent presence at these events.

• The college’s communications unit will identify opportunities to integrate our marketing efforts with those of the university’s marketing office. For example, this unit will profile the work of faculty members whose research is noteworthy and

who are doing work on “hot button” issues.

Finding high-visibility opportunities to market our students, faculty, programs and centers are also essential.

Establish a speaker’s bureau for the college, a list of “stars” from each unit; proactively market the list to the media and other key constituents, including the university’s marketing office.

Goal 3: The alumni relations team will promote activities that create a sense of life-long reciprocal relationships with alumni, strengthening programs to expand the college’s family, friends, and alumni, and use their ties to the University of Maryland and the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences.

Strategies

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A.

Recruit an active alumni chapter board.

B.

All components of the alumni relations program will act as a resource for the development program. Alumni relations officers and volunteers will be trained to speak to development priorities and to identify and refer potential prospects to development officers.

C.

In an effort to better represent the diversity of the college and alumni interests, we aim to increase the number of collaborations with our college colleagues across campus and with the alumni association and central development offices. Equally, we hope to better market activities outside of the college to our alumni and friends.

D.

Echoing strategy “A” of goal four in the external relations, development and communications section of the campus strategic plan (p. 41), we aim to inspire greater involvement among our current student population, cultivating a "…pride in the university [and college], life-long allegiance and involvement, and a commitment to sustaining Maryland's excellence through volunteer service and philanthropy."

• Expand the college's mentorship program.

• Create a checklist of requirements for internships for both the alumni offering opportunities and the students looking to benefit from the experience. Asking alumni for internships will become a routine part of college outreach.

• Include students in all alumni events.

Part 4: Partnerships, Outreach and Engagement

•

•

•

Strengthen the ties between the alumni office and the advising offices to help facilitate all of these plans.

D.

Enhance outreach activities.

• Assist undergraduates and graduate students seeking placement in federal agencies or on Capitol Hill (for either credit or compensation).

• Establish a speaker’s bureau to bring alumni to campus.

• Coordinate with embassies/diplomatic programs to facilitate student/faculty participation and to enrich cultural understanding.

E.

Strengthen our linkages with locally based federal agencies’ research activities including NIH, EPA, NASA, USGS and EPA. • Engage more outstanding researchers from federal agencies in our research and teaching programs.

• Encourage, where possible, joint applications for funding.

Goal 4: Take better advantage of our location.

Strategies A.

Increase our student presence in Washington, D.C. and help to develop a stronger network of established internships.

B.

Increase the college presence in Washington, D.C. • Identify and reach out to all University of Maryland graduates involved in the national and international policy arena, including public policy experts, public relations executives, lobbyists, lawyers, association executives, elected officials and the media to establish a broader resource base. Do not limit to behavioral and social science alumni.

• Establish a college institute to be housed in an existing policy/education institute, which is located in Washington, D.C.; seek public/private partnerships to sponsor conferences in Washington, D.C. • Pursue academic presence/affiliation with public policy institutes (e.g., Brookings, CFR, AEI, etc.) for faculty enhancement as adjunct professors.

• Actively work with all branches of the federal government to encourage use of college affiliated research in policy development and national debate.

C.

college and practitioners in Washington, D.C., both by bringing the University of Maryland to Washington, D.C. and by bringing Washington, D.C. to the university.

Create a dedicated portfolio of opportunities for intersections between our students, faculty, programs and facilities with practitioners in Washington, D.C. Establish endowed chairs in all of our departments to attract faculty who can compete on a world stage and whose expertise is sought by policymakers.

Goal 5: Teaching, scholarship, and outreach activities at the college will reflect the reality of global interdependence.

Students and researchers will be prepared to live, work and thrive in the current and future world environment.

Strategies

Bridge the gap between Maryland and practitioners: leadership, curriculum and faculty.

• Evaluate faculty capabilities and interests to encourage stronger linkages between the

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A.

Establish a reporting mechanism for international travel.

When a professor's schedule permits, the college should utilize faculty travel abroad to host gatherings of local alumni and corporate friends.

B.

Forge partnerships with foreign/United States business alliances such as the U.S. India Business Alliance and utilize their models of best practices for exchanges and delegations, and collaborate to send students and faculty

Part 4: Partnerships, Outreach and Engagement

abroad, welcome business delegations to College Park, and provide recruiting and employment opportunities.

C.

Further develop our partnership with the Ralph Bunche Society to provide international leadership skills to minority students.

D.

In conjunction with the call to better utilize our location within the beltway, we will create a series of collaborative lectures and events hosted at local embassies aimed at an audience composed of alumni and local international communities.

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