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Arts and Letters Reaches New Heights With Roche as Dean
It would be a tall order for one sentence to convey the ways Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters has changed since Mark Roche was named I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean 11 years ago. A line from an early Christmas address to the faculty, however, does at least place the length of his tenure in an appropriate context.
“The College is saving a great deal of time and money by shifting most of its correspondence from paper to e-mail,” said Roche, who announced last May that 2007–08 would be his final year as dean.
What a difference a decade makes.
The rapid rise of Web-based technology is somewhat analogous to the College’s own advance in recent years. Both were built on ideas that were maybe once considered too ambitious or far-fetched but eventually became the expected standard, leading to developments few could have foreseen.
“There’s a stronger culture of recognizing what it takes to be great as a university,” Roche says, describing an important difference between the College in Fall 1997 and Spring 2008. And if not quite an information revolution, the body of work compiled by Arts and Letters faculty and staff during that time is remarkable nonetheless.
Over the past decade, for instance, the College has averaged $9 million per year in external research grants; the average was $1.4 million for the previous 10-year period. In addition, Arts and Letters faculty have received 37 fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities since 1999, more than any other university faculty in the country.
Driven by scholarly ingenuity and tremendous on-campus resources, including the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts (ISLA), accomplishments like these, earned on national and international stages, are clearly the most visible. But Roche places equal emphasis on more subtle, internal advancements, such as the willingness departments now have to close a faculty search and open it again the next year if an outstanding candidate cannot be hired.
“There is a recognition, a self-confidence in the College, which one could almost measure, faculty member by faculty member, that we are indeed competing with the very best universities in the country for faculty hires, for graduate student recruits,” he says. “In [some] cases they’re turning down places like Princeton and the University of Chicago and Harvard and Emory, and faculty are leaving higher ranked institutions to come here. And it’s not a surprise anymore. We’re pleased, but it’s not shocking and a surprise.”
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