Message From the Dean
Dean Kenneth A. Gould
I hope you all had a restful and/or productive winter break, whichever you needed most. As you might expect, the past seven months have been a fascinating experience for me, with lots of opportunities to work with our faculty, staff, students, and administrators to further realize the great potential of Brooklyn College. I'm genuinely excited about the future of our School of Humanities and Social Sciences, which is strong and growing and serves as the vibrant intellectual hub of Brooklyn College. Some of the things we've been working on in the Dean's Office have included increasing transparency, expanding faculty diversity, institutionally integrating our interdisciplinary programs, promoting department level fundraising, and facilitating public engagement.
There is good reason to believe that the future of intellectual inquiry in higher education is in interdisciplinary team-based problem solving, rooted in rigorous disciplinary training. Interdisciplinarity fosters collaborative engagement among faculty, students, and communities, and facilitates team building in the co-creation of knowledge. To that end, I've worked with the President's Task Force on Interdisciplinary Programs to improve information flows to and from our program directors, increase the availability of resources to our interdisciplinary programs, and provide avenues for the programs to participate in governance.
Public higher education has an obligation to serve not just our students, but the communities which we and they are a part of. The HSS Dean's Office is supporting and facilitating increased public engagement with community partners, and wider participation in the intellectual life of the community and larger society. We have established a workshop series on public engagement for faculty, and are building an experts page for the HSS website to facilitate contact between our faculty, the media and community groups. All HSS faculty interested in public engagement and promotion of their intellectual and creative products are strongly encourage to participate. We've also begun organizing a public forum series, The Brooklyn College Conversation, to engage our faculty, public figures and the community in discussion of the pressing issues facing us locally, nationally, and globally.
We have an interesting and busy semester ahead. Take advantage of the collaborative opportunities coming up; the workshops on public intellectualism, the Mendelsohn lecture on U.S.-Russian relations, the Wolfe Institute for the Humanities events, the programming from our Haitian Studies Institute, the workshops created by our impressive library colleagues, and more. For more information about these events and initiatives, send us an e-mail.
Have a terrific semester!
Thanks,
Ken
