Jenna Bratz ’06 works with Professor Elizabeth McMahon on color-consistent automorphisms of Caley Graphs.

DISCRETIONARY TIME

Lafayette faculty devote their “spare time” to opening doors and minds

As one who has spent much of her career on the inside, I always smile at such an assessment but seldom counter with an inventory of everything faculty do. One’s professional life, after all, isn’t just teaching: it’s also scholarship and service. And teaching—at least at Lafayette—isn’t just the classroom. In many disciplines—the sciences, engineering, foreign languages, studio art, and others—there are labs involved as well and, in as many more, there are field trips and one-on-one conferences with students. In all disciplines, there’s grading, particularly time-consuming in writing-intensive classes, which Lafayette offers across the curriculum. And, of course, there’s preparation: at Lafayette, one doesn’t walk into a classroom unprepared; our students are too smart for any of us to be off our guard. If one makes a mistake in a calculation or registers an unpopular opinion, one needs to be able to recover quickly—and turn the incident into a teaching moment. A faculty member’s pedagogical “toolbox” must constantly be replenished as course materials and students evolve.

21ST CENTURY TEACHING
Some years ago, the Trustees declared a particular academic year “The Year of the Classroom,” marking our initiative to turn our stock of ordinary classrooms into “smart” classrooms. But with that initiative came an imperative: faculty needed to know how to use the technology and how to use it to enhance their teaching. Thanks to the workshops hosted by our Instructional Technology group in the library—and, no doubt, lessons from our seven-year-olds—we now have a highly literate faculty who navigate the web and use discipline-specific software with ease. Teaching has, indeed, changed in the 21st century, and we have all worked hard at getting better at it.

Nor have our disciplines remained static—in part because colleagues like us, and we ourselves, regularly stretch their boundaries. If you want your students to scoff at your classes, confine your teaching to what you learned in graduate school and keep using those yellowing notes. But don’t expect their approval. Students take their cue from faculty who know that’s not where our disciplines are anymore. Each year, the journals have published articles that have made us rethink what we thought we knew; each year new ideas, new theories, new people have entered the profession; each year, the challenge to contribute to the dialogue has intensified; and each year, we’ve delivered. Course titles may sound the same, but look at the course content: it’s deeper, more sophisticated, more inclusive these days. With information—and, I hope, wisdom—growing exponentially, we’re always hustling to keep on top of our fields.

Sure it would be easy to put scholarship first. Have a look at the publication record of our faculty: it looks like we do. But the truth is, most of our research and scholarship gets done in the summer months or during leaves, when we’ve a respite from the intensity of the academic year. But from late August to late May, our students are first in the queue. And our students are very much a part of our lives outside the classroom. In this profession, we talk about “discretionary” time, but every time we think we have a minute to think through a problem, jot down a thought, work on a committee assignment, or just exhale, there’s another 20-year-old at our office door. And, yes, that door is always open: at Lafayette, we don’t turn our students away. So much for “discretionary” time.

Notice that I have not even mentioned EXCEL Scholars, independent study students, honors students, academic advising, mentoring, providing counsel on graduate schools and fellowships, writing letters of recommendation, and lending a sympathetic ear— all in the interest of making sure our students, one at a time, reach their potential.

But I write not to outline the landscape of a faculty member’s many commitments but rather to speak of the “volunteer” work that so many of our faculty do beyond all that. You’ll find on these pages just four examples, highlighting a faculty member from each of our four divisions. There are dozens of other examples of faculty who dedicate their “discretionary” time to students: as advisers to student chapters of professional organizations or honor societies; as presences at lunch tables where French, German, or Italian is spoken; as advisers to fraternities or sororities; as coaches for crew, volleyball, club baseball, frisbee; as participants in religious services and interfaith seders; as organizers of lectures, theater productions, choral programs, musical ensembles, gallery exhibits, or cooking sessions; as chaperones for students attending the National Conference for Under-graduate Research each year; as teachers and guides to the students who spend three weeks abroad in our interim session program.

I hope my point is made. Demands on faculty are legion. But even after accomplishing all that is expected of them in teaching, scholarship, and service, faculty at Lafayette still devote their “spare” time to undergraduates. The first key element of The Lafayette Experience—“student-focused teaching and mentoring by an exceptionally qualified faculty, committed to each student’s success”—could not be better exemplified than in how our faculty use their “discretionary” time.

ENGINEERING No, this isn’t a story about how J. Ronald (“Bud”) Martin, professor of chemical engineering, works with students in the chemical engineering labs. It’s a story of how one engineer has opted to spend his “discretionary” time with students: first as a “host parent” for international students and second as a mentor for baseball. Lafayette’s “Host Parent” program was designed to give students from the many countries represented in our student body (currently 56) an adult presence nearby. The first student Martin and his wife, Linda, hosted was from Jamaica. As “host parents,” the two took their student out to dinner several times each year, invited him to their house for holiday meals, gave him rides to the mall, took him to the bus station when he was headed for the airport, and helped him move in and out of his Lafayette room. When their student graduated, his parents stayed with the Martins, and for several months after his graduation, their student lived with them—until he was able to get a driver’s license and his own apartment. As mentor for the baseball team, Martin is available to discuss academic problems. In his conversations with coaches, he offers a faculty point of view and, in turn, learns to understand the viewpoints of coaches and players. At home games, Martin is often in the dugout, and after the game he chats with parents. Each year, he joins the team for an overnight road trip, riding the bus with the players and eating meals with them. “It’s a great way to let students know that at Lafayette, we don’t segment students’ intellectual lives from their social, cocurricular, and extracurricular lives: it’s all part of The Lafayette Experience.”

HUMANITIES Robert Cohn, Berman Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Religious Studies and coordinator of our Jewish studies program, has initiated a “spare time” event, which he and a small group of students enjoy. For seven years, he has held a weekly Hebrew text reading session with two or three students who have indicated interest. Together, they have read and translated texts from the Bible, the Mishnah, and the Siddur (prayer book), as well as some medieval and modern commentaries, also in Hebrew. He and the students talk about Hebrew language and grammar but also about literary and theological issues in the texts. Cohn’s sessions follow the traditional principle of Jewish learning in pairs and the traditional practice of talmud torah lishmah, the study of Torah for its own sake. As Cohn puts it, “What I enjoy is just that: learning with students who want to learn not for a grade but just for the sheer enjoyment of learning.”

NATURAL SCIENCES Those who attended Alumni Reunion College in June will recall the mathematical card tricks that Derek Smith, assistant professor of mathematics, performed, much to their amazement. In fact, Smith has more tricks up his sleeve, and he shares them with students in weekly Game Hours, WITS (“What I did This Summer,” a series of informal lunch-time student talks), and the Lafayette Problem Group. With the assistance of Gary Gordon, professor of mathematics, and others in the mathematics department, Smith convenes the group nearly every week to learn general methods of mathematical problem solving. Early in the fall semester, the group receives problems of varying difficulty, so students at all levels of ability may participate. Later, the problems get tougher; recently, the group made such progress on several particularly difficult problems that Smith believes their work may lead to publication. Smith notes that Lafayette’s team performance on the national Putnam exam has been in the top 15 percent of participating schools for four of the past five years and that students from a variety of majors—many from the Problem Solving Group—take the exam.

SOCIAL SCIENCES Readers of this magazine know about the Fed Challenge. But James DeVault, associate professor of economics and business, and Edward Gamber, professor of economics and business, live it: for the past three years, they have met weekly with the student Fed Challenge team. In each of these sessions, they’ve looked at the data students have gathered, listened to their analysis of the Fed’s recent monetary policy decisions, helped them shape their own recommendations, and commented on rehearsals of their presentation. Last year, Lafayette’s Fed Challenge team won the regional competition in Baltimore: a panel of judges deemed them superior on their knowledge, research, organization and creativity, and ability to answer questions. In the national competition the team finished third, bested only by Northwestern and Rutgers. “Why do we do it?” DeVault asks. “It is, after all, the equivalent of yet another course.” But he quickly answers his own question: “Because it’s tremendously rewarding— and fun.”

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