Alena Selezneva
Everyone and her brother in higher ed say they’re student-centered. Well, except maybe faculty at R-1s. But that’s fine; they’re doing essential work and training the next generation of researchers who will keep us safe from diseases, nuclear war, the ravages of climate change, the fall of the republic—oh wait, never mind.
But, as with providing internships and experiential learning, even at the many institutions that claim they focus on student success, those efforts can feel like an add-on, often provided by staff who are not in frequent enough contact with those who need the most help.
Plus, there’s the problem of faculty not being trained or, to be honest, all that interested in doing more than teaching and thinking from within their own disciplines. The reward structure, as we all know, even at regional publics and small private colleges, still makes us wannabe mini-mes of our advisers.
When I ask presidents why their faculty needs to produce research at teaching-focused institutions, they say that it’s essential to be able to attract serious academics. It’s what faculty love to do.
I say, “Really?”
“Yes,” they say. “They’ve all written dissertations.”
True, some faculty love research. But many suffered through the dissertation and publish-or-perish process because they want to teach. They are in it for the students. And, given that only about a quarter of the people teaching in higher ed these days are tenured, I’m not so sure you can’t attract qualified people who just want to help students learn. There are tons of them working for less than minimum wage on the contingent tracks.
Which is why, in a world filled with more than enough bad news and reports of program cuts and colleges closures, I can’t stop scream-singing about the University of Minnesota at Rochester.
Pretty much everyone agrees that if someone wanted to start a new university, they would never base it on current models. It would be something different, more nimble and agile, that could respond and contribute to the world of today, not the 19th century. And not ideologically driven.
UMR is an institution rooted in a specific mission: to respond to dire health-care workforce shortages across Minnesota’s rural areas. Regional campuses all say they’re there to serve the region, but many are just miniature versions of flagships. In this case, the university was restricted from offering any programs already established at the Twin Cities campus. That could seem like a problem. Or, like the structure imposed by writing a particular form of poetry, a villanelle or a haiku, the constraint is what can lead to beauty. Specialization is what’s making UMR so successful.
UMR graduated its inaugural class in 2013. Yes, that’s right. This is a new public regional that grew out of the work of citizen advocates and others to bring a university to the city that is home to Mayo Clinic and a hub for biotech and medtech.
Chancellor Lori Carrell has a Ph.D. in human communication, taught in a Yup’ik village in Alaska, worked on the establishment of a campus for women in Oman and founded and directed a research-based teaching and learning center at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. In other words, she’s been around a few quirky blocks. She joined UMR as vice chancellor in 2014 and was appointed to the top job in 2018.
The first class was 57 students. Today enrollment is just over 1,100. They receive no state funding for facilities; everything comes from private and public partnerships. The university is spread across seven different buildings, all mixed-use, with some nice spaces and some in “nooks and crannies.” They turned a DoubleTree Hotel into student housing, and in the bottom floor of the building that houses the chancellor’s office is a shopping mall. There, the chancellor gets her coffee and runs into students, patients at the Mayo Clinic and blue badge–wearing doctors and health-care workers.
Even though there’s no athletics to drain the budget or foster school spirit, they do have a mascot, Rocky the Raptor, whose mantra is “Life is too short to stay grounded. Take flight and see where it takes you.”
Students at UMR are indeed soaring. If I were to start a new university (which, shockingly, no one has yet asked me to do), the first thing I’d do is throw out the idea of majors. And guess what? This place has only multidisciplinary departments, kind of like the way the real world works. Chemists, mathematicians, philosophers and everybody else designed an integrated health sciences curriculum to drive learning toward one set of outcomes, with embedded evidence-based practices like first-year experience, community-engaged learning and undergraduate research.
Working together to generate student success necessitates radical cooperation; for example, calculus concepts are taught just in time to be applied in organic chemistry. Faculty collaborated to come up with sequences that generated significantly higher pass rates in a course sometimes repulsively called a “weed-out” on other campuses. Instead of weeding out, faculty here plant and water every seed by using active learning in all courses (because, as most of us learned a long time ago, lectures are not effective). Yes, this kind of cross-disciplinary curricular cooperation is just common sense, but in higher education it’s also, well, radical.
UMR professors share an identity as educators, regardless of discipline, which is, let’s face it, not a bad idea for other campuses where the primary focus is undergraduate education. When you’re sitting next to so much high-level research and clinical work, you don’t need faculty who can duplicate those efforts. UMR has a system for tenure, but no one gets the goodies for single-author, narrowly disciplinary scholarly work. That kind of research isn’t even on the table.
So, has recruiting faculty to a such a quirky place been a problem? Nope. According to Carrell, hiring has been like plucking gems from a pile of treasure. Most of the faculty come to UMR as their first job; they have not been poisoned enculturated into the old ways. A place with no dead wood or entrenched Angry Eight is appealing to a new generation of professors who are fired up about innovation and want to work collaboratively to get shit done. They come with purpose and mission.
The meat and potatoes of faculty work is student learning and development. Faculty are currently studying the effectiveness of UMR’s multidisciplinary approach and continuously tweaking curricula and pedagogy based on real-time student learning—like, which type of microbiology visualization activity generated the deepest conceptual understanding. Students and faculty grow and learn together, figuring out what works and what doesn’t. The faculty’s research is the students, not producing monographs for scholars in their subfields.
And they come fired up about teaching a particular group of students, two-thirds of whom are from underrepresented backgrounds. About the same percentage go on to advanced study in something. All students have opportunities for internships at Mayo and other health-care and biotech companies. UMR boasts a 68 percent acceptance rate to medical schools, and because of Carrell’s involvement in the College in Three program, they’ve branched out to something called Get Forward Faster, where cooperation with other institutions like the Hazelden Betty Ford Graduate School means that students can, in five years, add on a master’s degree in counseling. With 80 percent of Minnesota counties lacking addiction counseling, getting graduates out faster is good for the student (lower cost over all) and good for the state.
To ensure success, each student has their own success coach assigned for the full journey, serving as academic adviser, life guru and career counselor. Because the space is so contained, students can’t help but see their coaches every day. It’s a high-touch approach; the question of how it scales as enrollment grows is real.
The University of Minnesota at Rochester is an institution with a clear mission. They are building a university around what students actually need, rather than retrofitting student needs into a university that already exists.
