Dean of the Faculty Rena Fraden's
Address to the Faculty
“Field Notes from the Summer” 

I found myself this summer reading books and watching shows that dwelt on catastrophes – Bolaño’s 2666, the story of Abraham Lincoln’s Team of Rivals who accompanied him through the Civil War, a few of my favorite episodes of The Wire, that South African movie about aliens within our midst, District 9, and then, of course, the first year reading, Field Notes from a Catastrophe. I kept dreaming about those poor golden toads sitting on top of that mountain in Costa Rica. One second they’re here, the next – utterly roasted, gone forever. Each story threatened a certain kind of despair, events occurring beyond anyone’s control, so many people and toads and brave Prawns dead. But I also noticed, the general plots of these catastrophic tales were all still in play. Catastrophes threaten, but they may also be averted. I read they’ve found a sixth part to 2666 in Bolaño’s papers. And I hold out hope that a Season 6 of The Wire may still, one day, be written. We are not extinct quite yet. And I believe people are not only heedless and destructive, but also endlessly creative and resilient and brave.

I admit that at the beginning of summer I felt a certain amount of despair; surely we all did. Just when we thought we’d turned a corner into some happier plot, we seemed to be once again facing imminent doom. It goes without saying that we all share a weariness at being told we must sacrifice again. And yet, in the meetings my associate deans and I held this summer with over half of all our faculty, and also with representative administrators and staff, I was moved by the generosity, professionalism, and steadiness with which people addressed the budgetary facts and the choices in front of us. As the summer progressed, I felt increasingly hopeful about real life here on campus, in contrast to the catastrophe tales I was reading and watching. In small groups in my office, faculty were able to respond to each other’s concerns and interests. And in every group there were ideas bubbling forth about how to use our resources to generate savings and create new sources of capital – both intellectual and material. I was deeply encouraged and excited by the ideas floated in the office, and by the ways in which people were, with flair and boldness, imagining ways how we might team up, solve for x, mix parts into a whole. As our views intersected during these meetings, my own shifted and expanded in relation to yours, and I felt a shared vision was taking hold, of a best strategy that would allow us to adapt to changed circumstances.

I told the new faculty at their orientation that they were going to hear a lot about “the core” of Trinity over the next year as we discussed what to preserve and protect of it. The etymology of “core,” I pointed out, was from the french, “coeur,” or heart, which might explain both the ways in which the core is always felt to be utterly inviolate and stationary (we cannot change how our heart feels) and yet the core is also changeable (hearts break, but then may be mended). I have always believed, with a fervent core conviction, that the heart of small residential liberal arts colleges like Trinity is its people: the students we entice to come here, the faculty and staff we recruit, and the interactions between and among us all. As I considered the choices before me at the beginning of the summer, my highest priority was to protect people as much as possible.

When I looked out at convocation and matriculation upon the first year student body as a whole, and then up close to the students I saw at the Pride dinner and then around my seminar table, from the Bronx and Chicago and St. Paul, Minnesota, from India, China, Africa, and France, I feel the world has indeed come to Hartford. This gathering of the world to this campus, where students live and learn together, forging alliances and allegiances beyond their native home and their family, may indeed be the best strategy there is to ward off the pernicious, even catastrophic effects of nationalization. And so, when it came to making choices about our budget, it seemed critical to preserve financial aid, which in turn protects this diverse student body Larry Dow has recruited for us.

I also looked to protect the tenure-track and long-term contract faculty, those who bolster a school’s intellectual reputation, and who can be expected to forge lasting bonds with students and alumni. Faculty commitment to our students, and to the institution itself may not be the only measure by which we will survive, but without it, we surely will not. In my view, my responsibility as Chief Academic Officer is to protect every single tenure-track line we have as a precious commodity that we cannot afford to lose. I have argued, and I will continue to do so for as long as I am Dean, that we ought not to shrink the size of our tenure-track faculty as a way of balancing our budget. That would be a panicked, short-sighted strategy, which would weaken us in the long run. Instead, I will be recommending cuts in compensation and in our short-term hires. These cuts will be hard, but they will not threaten our core values and commitments. On the contrary, they may have the effect of strengthening our ties to each other in ways that will guarantee a present and future worth endowing. These are and will remain my two top priorities: to protect diversity in our student body and to protect our tenure-track faculty.

My meetings with faculty this summer have helped me define what I believe will be the best strategy for moving forward with fewer resources. In our meetings, we looked at a long list of possible cuts and a likely subset of cuts emerged. These cuts, especially in our adjunct work force, will certainly have an effect on all programs and departments: they will mean that quad leaves will not be replaced, some classes will not be taught, and they will certainly have an impact on General Education. Faculty urged me to use our existing faculty governance structures to address the consequences of cuts and I concurred that the CC and EPC were the right committees to take up these tasks. There are two motions, thus, before you today. The first is a reaffirmation of the Stewart Amendment, not to reduce the size of the faculty without a faculty vote, a motion I endorse. As I’ve argued repeatedly to the trustees, the President, and to you, preserving the number of tenure-track lines and even, if we can, to grow them in this capital campaign, would bolster our distinctiveness and help us thrive. The second motion from the EPC has nothing to do with a reduction of faculty, but rather asks permission to launch a discussion of department and program responses to a changed environment, and specifically to think across the college how best to husband the resources we will have at our disposal. Again, let me be clear: I do not believe we have to eliminate any tenure-track faculty to balance our budget, nor do we have to eliminate any programs or departments. But given the cuts in adjuncts and my inability to replace quad leaves, I know that all of our programs and departments will be strained.

So to reiterate: there are two time-lines before us and two very different goals. The first deadline is 10 weeks from now, the end of November, when the budget that the PBC prepares every year will be presented to the President and then the trustees. The goal this year is to figure out how to reduce our budget by about 12m dollars. I believe this can be done without eliminating any tenure-track faculty or long-term faculty or programs. The second deadline is the spring of 2010 and our goal will be to begin to figure out a coherent and college-wide comprehensive plan for how we ought to adapt to a smaller budget. The model we prepared in our office about cutting small departments and programs was just that: a model. It told us that if we were to shut down departments with few majors, we would eviscerate the college. Diversity of offerings is crucial at a first-rate college, a principle I endorse. And so we decided against this way of balancing the budget. When we decided instead to cut our number of adjuncts, we saw that this would have an immediate effect on all departments and programs. So the question before us now is:  how are we all going to cope and how should our resources be allocated?  We will be asking every department to tell us what plans they have for coping with less staff. And, with your permission, we will call for college-wide oversight and discussion through our faculty governance structure to help consider the effects of the cuts on our curriculum. I hope that both the EPC and the CC could work together in examining our academic program: the cost and viability of all parts of General Education, a possible reduction of course requirements for graduation, and based on departmental reactions to the cuts, discussions about how best to promote programmatic collaborations.

Change is a constant; but we, unlike the golden toad, have more means than they did to shape the circumstances in which we find ourselves. It is true that we are good at cataloguing disaster and noting its effects. But we are far more visionary than that. What we do best is to imagine new worlds, new ways of being, new ways of seeing. We are already pressing forward on various plans: Xiangming Chen is convening a group of faculty and staff to think about summer institutes on urban/global topics that might be both intellectually exciting and revenue producing.  We are beginning to model increasing the number of students who come to Trinity by a modest amount and sending more students abroad, a strategy which will have the dual effect of making good on our global aspirations at the same time it can help to close our budget gap. Many of you have pushed us to think harder about sustainable measures. I believe that our discussions next year in departments, committees, and large forums could be transformative. When I think about of what is most distinctive about Trinity, I think of the ways faculty and students are committed to worldly engagement. Certainly in the last half century, Trinity’s students, faculty, and alumni have expanded their engagement in the city of Hartford and beyond, not shirking, but rather seeking out, the challenges thrown at us by our contemporary, catastrophically inclined world.  There are many gateways to Trinity, but one which embraces us all is, I believe, a gateway to engagement with change: the new student houses on Vernon Street for those passionate about making art or going green, student summer projects developing better emergency systems and a way for cars to spot traffic jams up head – these are all expressions of a deep worldly engagement, in which faculty help students understand our past, and then through art or science or any other liberal mode of inquiry make the world more hospitable for us all.

At the bigger Trinity gatherings of the last couple of weeks -- the dinner with the new Pride students from around the world;  my Labor Day Party where your children, 12 months later and six inches bigger, joyously jumped on our hammock, and danced to the music; the first faculty meeting where I greeted old and new colleagues – I have felt, more than I ever have since I’ve come to Trinity, an invigorating hopefulness, the triumph of beginning again, a renewal of the seasons, a sense, most of all, that we are all in it together. After a summer of gathering notes and accumulating ideas an d having conversations, I have come to believe now, in this fall of 2009, that we do indeed have the means – in material and also intellectual capital -- to ensure a Trinity that is vital, dynamic, distinctive, and engaged, a Trinity that can and will become a stronger, better version of what it already is, that will not only just survive, but thrive into the future. I will do everything I can to support you, the faculty, in the work you undertake in the coming years. I have faith that you will be able to imagine and create new ways to strengthen Trinity’s core commitment to the study of the liberal arts and most especially that you will deepen and multiply Trinity’s abiding and impressive engagement with our precious, fragile, and glorious world. 

Rena Fraden
Dean of the Faculty