GRADUATE FACULTY COUNCIL DOC. NO. 841A Approved November 17, 2003

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1 GRADUATE FACULTY COUNCIL DOC. NO. 841A Approved November 17, 2003 FOLLOW-UP REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON REVIEWS FOR THE REVIEW OF THE MASTER OF SCIENCE AND DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEGREE PROGRAMS IN ANTHROPOLOGY (Date of Review: May 3-5, 2000) The original report, GFC Document No. 841, was approved January 29, Response to Recommendations Recommendation 1: New faculty hires: Increase faculty strength by hiring two cultural anthropologists and a human biologist in order to maintain the programs already in place with adequate staffing. Rationale: The Department s archaeology faculty has managed to come through a massive turning over of faculty in the 1990s in good shape. The faculty in cultural anthropology did not fare as well. The two senior cultural anthropologists (Gray and Brodwin) are faced with a growing number of master s and doctoral students. They are joined by a brand new doctorate (Hansen) who is just starting to establish a record of scholarly publications and who has a joint appointment in Anthropology and History. Thus, the overloading of 7.5 graduate students per faculty (see Study, p. 27) is even worse for the two senior cultural faculty. The Study notes that doctoral students have left the program due to this situation. The hiring of a new Assistant Professor (Applbaum) who has already compiled a strong record of scholarly research and who is an accomplished teacher will help to alleviate this dire situation. Nevertheless, our recommendation is that the Department be authorized to hire two additional cultural anthropologists, preferably at the advanced Assistant Professor level. These new hires must be people with fairly well established records of teaching, publication, and grants so that they can begin chairing MA and Ph.D. committees and taking on other vital responsibilities in both graduate and undergraduate studies within their first two to three years. Based on our meetings with faculty and students in the Department of Anthropology as well as the Study, we recommend that the Department be authorized to hire two new cultural anthropologists. One of these two new hires would be a specialist in ethnicity, transnationalism, and the global city as a research site. The area specialization of this position could be left open, but we believe that a specialist in Mexico or other Latin American countries that have large migratory populations in the U.S. would be ideal for adding new areas of strength to the Department and for connecting with the greater Milwaukee area. The other new cultural position would be for a specialist in contemporary Native American peoples and cultures. This specialization is in high demand at the undergraduate level and would help to articulate the research interests within archaeology and cultural anthropology at the graduate level. A third, less urgent yet important need is for a biological anthropologist who specializes in human biology. Someone who covers such issues as epidemiology, demography, reproductive or health issues, or human genetics would make an excellent bridge between the research and teaching specialties of current biological anthropologists on the faculty (Turner and Anapol) and the archaeologists and cultural anthropologists (particularly Brodwin and Gray).

2 Graduate Faculty Council Doc. No. 841A p. 2 Approved November 17, 2003 Program Response: This recommendation has been partially satisfied. Doctor Hansen left the Department to take full position in History. L&S allowed us to replace her with a full position, now held by assistant professor Ingrid Jordt. Doctor Jordt is a cultural anthropologist with interests in religion, globalization, and SE Asia. A second position was opened and is now held by assistant professor Thomas Malaby. Doctor Malaby is a cultural anthropologist with interests in globalization and the ethnography of Europe. Last year the Department was able to fill its long vacant position in Native American ethnography. Assistant professor Bernard Perley focuses on issues of ethnic identity and language use. Although these individuals were not hired at the advanced assistant professor level as the recommendation suggests, they have taken on advising responsibilities and have significantly improved the imbalance in the workload of the cultural faculty. Doctor Applbaum was recently recommended for tenure and promotion by the Social Sciences Divisional Committee. The cultural faculty is now at a strength required for running MS and PhD programs. The return to that strength has resulted in increased student satisfaction with these programs. The department has made a position for a physical anthropologist its top recruitment priority for the next year. Recommendation 2: Funding: Provide additional financial resources for graduate student support, professional activities (travel funds), teaching materials, capital equipment maintenance & replacement, and routine operational expenses (phones, fax, photocopying). Rationale: The University has earmarked $350,000 for new equipment, and there is a Collegewide initiative to set aside $400 per faculty each year so that computers can be replaced or upgraded at regular, three-year intervals. Also, the College has set a goal of providing ethernet connections in all offices and classrooms. The move to Sabin Hall, new equipment money, and technology fund are all strong indications that the College and University are dedicated to providing the Department of Anthropology with adequate space and facilities to meet current needs. Funds need to be allocated to provide maintenance and periodic replacement of laboratory equipment and instruments so that the future needs of the department will be met as well. Given this strong support for space and facilities, it is somewhat surprising that the Department continues to limp along on an inadequate S & E budget that has remained flat for the entire decade of the 1990s. This budget needs to be increased at the very least to keep up with inflation. The department should have sufficient funds to pay for ordinary operating expenses (e.g., purchase of office supplies, phone services, photocopying). More funds need to be allocated for faculty travel to professional meetings, since these gatherings are the primary locus for sharing research results, making and renewing contacts with collaborators, meeting with prospective graduate students, and other vital business. Additional travel funds should be available for graduate students to help encourage them to present papers in professional meetings. Significant increase in the number of applicants to the graduate program and the quality of the applicants enrolling at UW-Milwaukee will not be possible without increasing the level of support for graduate students. Stipend levels need to be raised on assistantships to at least $15,000 an academic year, tuition remission should be included with every assistantship, and PhD students should be eligible to hold assistantships or fellowships for at least four years.

3 Graduate Faculty Council Doc. No. 841A p. 3 Approved November 17, 2003 Program Response: This recommendation has been partially satisfied. Three years ago L&S did increase the S&E budget of all departments. This increase was quite helpful at the time, but we have since added three new faculty members without an increase in S&E, so we are back in the position described by the reviewers. Three important programs have increased the level of graduate student support. The Graduate School travel award program has helped many of our students with travel to conferences where they present papers. We have also used the Alumni Support Awards provided by L&S to support graduate students. Finally, the Chancellor s Awards program has been a major new source of support. The first year these awards were available we used to support two out-of-state students from excellent undergraduate programs. Neither would have been able to attend UWM without the support. To support as many students as possible, the department still limits all teaching assistantships to two years. Recommendation 3: Professional training: Expand efforts to prepare graduate students to function as professional anthropologists through more directed training in teaching, preparation of professional papers, research proposals, publications, job talks. Rationale: The Department of Anthropology is currently doing an adequate job of training graduate students to serve as T.A.s during their graduate studies and to become future teachers of the discipline after they graduate. We spoke with T.A.s who mentioned that they had taken a required, two-day orientation for new T.A.s and that there was some one-to-one faculty mentoring of T.A.s. In order to further improve the level of professional training, we urge the Department to develop its own, discipline-specific course or colloquium series on the teaching of anthropology. The recent volume on The Teaching of Anthropology (C. Kottak, ed., McGraw- Hill) would make an excellent text for such a course because it has chapters devoted to the large introductory courses as well as more specialized courses in each of the four sub-disciplines. Perhaps the Department could implement a mentoring system that pairs each new T.A. or graduate instructor with a senior (i.e., tenured) faculty member. The graduate students were uniformly positive about the new course on Professionalization taught by B. Arnold. This course needs to be offered on a regular basis and expanded to include consideration of issues that are specific to each of the four sub-disciplines. In addition, the Buzzwords course provides graduate students with opportunities to present their research to undergraduate anthropology majors. Both the Professionalization and Buzzwords courses are popular with students, and we recommend that both be continued and expanded. At our request, the Department Chair provided us with Compilation o Graduate Students in Anthropology. This list includes a fairly substantial range of awards, honors, presentations, and publications by current graduate students in the Department of Anthropology. In addition, one doctoral student had just been awarded a Fulbright-Hays grant for research in Finland and another had received a fellowship at Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. The Department is thus beginning to compete successfully for more prestigious external grants and fellowships at the pre-doctoral level. We strongly recommend that the Department build on these initial efforts so that a larger proportion of the graduate students apply for and receive funding from outside granting agencies. In addition, the

4 Graduate Faculty Council Doc. No. 841A p. 4 Approved November 17, 2003 Department needs to do more to foster graduate student publications in nationally recognized, peer-reviewed books and journals. Such grant and publication activities at the pre-doctoral level will raise the Department s profile within the discipline, help to attract higher quality graduate applicants from out-of-state, and improve the students chances for employment after graduation. Program Response: The department has increased its efforts in this area. Both the professionalism course and the Buzzwords seminars praised by the reviewers have become routine offerings. Faculty members consistently encourage graduate students to present papers before regional and national conferences. The Graduate School s program of travel funds for graduate student presentations at conferences has helped to increase the number of our students doing so. The department has started to push all PhD students to submit research requests to outside funding agencies. The process of completing a grant application is not only an important step in learning how to become a professional; it is also an excellent way to clarify research questions. The department has developed discipline specific introductions to teaching. These materials are available to all TAs. We have not instituted an orientation separate from the two-day general orientation, however. We do try to match incoming TAs with experienced TAs in our large lecture classes. We have found that faculty members work very closely with their TAs, providing training that is more relevant to the student than a general orientation can be. Recommendation 4: Museum studies: The strong museum studies program sets the UW- Milwaukee Anthropology Department apart from almost all other anthropology graduate programs in the country. The anthropology component of the program should be strengthened by requiring 8 courses beyond the museum studies component for a master s degree. The program should be more heavily advertised as a way of recruiting applicants nationally and internationally. Rationale: In general the Department and the Museum have a mutually beneficial relationship in which the Department attracts graduate applicants interested in museum studies and the Museum produces specialists who also have general anthropological training. Given the extensive turning over of anthropology faculty in the 1990s, it is not surprising that the relations between the Museum and the Department need some reflection. Clearly, the beneficial relations that have historically existed between them can be improved to the advantage of both. For the Department, the question is how to use the Museum s stature and visibility as a way of recruiting and matriculating an increasing quantity and quality of graduate students? This goal should not be too difficult to achieve, given that 85 % of recent graduates of the Museum Studies Program have received employment within their chosen field within one year of their graduation. With the international reputation of the Museum and the difficulty of obtaining academic employment for recent graduates in anthropology, we believe the Department can use the Museum much more effectively as a way of recruiting top-quality applicants to its graduate program. In order for relations between the Museum and the Department to improve, there needs to be a more systematic effort to coordinate departmental activities with the Museum. Public outreach activities, such as those mentioned above, are an excellent vehicle for such integration. However,

5 Graduate Faculty Council Doc. No. 841A p. 5 Approved November 17, 2003 there is a need for improving communication and interaction between Museum staff and Department faculty in the day-to-day running of the Department. For example, when there are important out-of-town visitors or when new or prospective faculty or students are coming to visit the Department, the Museum staff needs to be informed of these visits and efforts need to be made to ensure that the visitors have a chance to meet with Museum staff. Also, there is a lingering belief that M.A. students in the Museum Studies Program engage in technical kinds of thesis projects that are not really important or interesting in a broader anthropological sense. This sort of tracking, whether explicit or implicit, needs to be eliminated in order to achieve optimal integration of the Department and the Museum. Finally, several graduate students pointed out the difficulty of fulfilling the entire set of departmental requirements and the series of Museum Studies requirements. Between these double sets of required courses, the M.A. students are left with little time to take the more specialized anthropology courses that they need prior to conducting thesis projects. We believe that it would be a mistake to reduce either set of requirements and that the proper solution is to inform applicants and entering students in the Museum Studies Program that they will most likely need a third year to complete the course requirements for their degrees. Program Response: The Graduate School s recent codification of requirements for certificate programs means that the department must revise the credit requirements for the certificate in Museum Studies. The certificate currently requires 12 credits in museum courses, 3 credits in museum internship, and 12 credits in non-museum anthropology courses. The new Graduate School rules state that a certificate cannot make up more than 50% of the credits needed toward a degree, so the Department is reviewing the possibility of increasing the number of credits needed for a Masters to 30. A revision of the program is currently under development. The interaction between the Museum staff and the anthropology faculty has increased since the reviewers visit. The Museum staff is on the anthropology faculty reflector. This provides the staff with information on speakers and other events. The Museum staff and the anthropology coordinator meet at least once a month during the academic year. Recommendation 5: Undergraduate curriculum: With more faculty, the department should insure that courses required for the undergraduate major are taught frequently and that majors who need particular courses are given priority in enrolling. Rationale: The number of undergraduate majors is more than adequate for a department with this size faculty. Graduating 35 to 40 majors per year is an outstanding achievement. The decline in number of undergraduate credit hours can be addressed through the hiring of new faculty. New faculty in cultural anthropology must be excellent teachers who can bolster the 100-level series on Peoples and Cultures, especially the American Indian course. Perhaps the Department of Anthropology can search for ways to link the hiring of new faculty members with new requirements in other units of the College and University in order to compensate for the elimination of the Nursing and Health Professions requirement (Self-Study, p. 11). For example,

6 Graduate Faculty Council Doc. No. 841A p. 6 Approved November 17, 2003 if there is a new interdisciplinary certificate on aging or global economy, weave these topics into the descriptions and advertising copies of new positions. **The Department is in the process of implementing a capstone requirement for all graduating seniors. This course consists of a general history of anthropological thought. We strongly recommend that the Department continue to develop this course and look for ways to integrate a concern for the history of anthropology into the undergraduate curriculum. If each of the subdisciplinary courses introduces students to major historical figures and theories, then they will be adequately prepared to take full advantage of a semester-long course on the history of anthropological thought. For those undergraduates who decide to continue their anthropological studies at the graduate level, the capstone requirement will provide a competitive advantage over the rest of the applicants, who seldom receive adequate training in the history of the discipline prior to entering graduate studies. Finally, we recommend that the Department examine the advisement process for undergraduate majors to make sure that all requirements are being fulfilled in a timely manner. Whether justified or not, undergraduate majors are somewhat confused by the structure of requirements and how best to complete them within four years. Perhaps the Department can devise a method that forces undergraduate majors to go through a departmental advisement each semester (e.g., a signature from a departmental advisor is required before the College advisors will validate the student s registration). Program Response: Several of the recommendations in this area have been met. New hires have resulted in more undergraduate classes being offered. The hiring of Dr. Perley means that the American Indian Peoples and Cultures course will be offered in regular rotation. The capstone course is in place and is offered each spring semester. The department has not moved on changing the advising process for undergraduates. The lack of action is due to the implementation of PeopleSoft on campus. When the system is stable, we will consider how to assure undergraduate majors meet with their advisors at least once a semester. Recommendation 6: The Milwaukee Idea: Make internships and service-learning an even more prominent part of the undergraduate program; particularly as this fits nicely in the Milwaukee idea initiatives. Rationale: We believe that the Department can and should become a more active player in the University s implementation of the Milwaukee Idea. Current faculty members are well suited for meeting this objective. Cheryl Ajirotutu s joint project with the Milwaukee Public Schools and Anne Hansen s research in the Hmong minority community are excellent illustrations of how the Department has already built the foundations for public outreach. In addition, the Department s extensive connections with the Milwaukee Public Museum and its local archaeological projects offer tremendous potential for communicating anthropological knowledge and interpretation to a wider public.

7 Graduate Faculty Council Doc. No. 841A p. 7 Approved November 17, 2003 The only note of caution we would add is that the Departments participation in such public outreach be proportionate to what current faculty members can provide without eroding their other research and teaching obligations. Where possible, service activities in relation to the Milwaukee Idea must be integrated with the training of students, both graduate and undergraduate, as well as the professional grant and publication activities of faculty. An outstanding example of such coordinated planning is Cheryl Ajirotutu s application to the National Science Foundation for a grant to create an ethnographic field school. This plan, if successful, will integrate student training in ethnographic field methodology with the documentation and analysis of cultural and other social diversity in the Milwaukee area. The Department s ability to participate in the Milwaukee Idea can only increase with the addition of cultural anthropologists as continuing, tenure-track faculty members as outlined above. Program Response: The department has continued to participate in the Milwaukee Idea. Dr. Ajirotutu has run two summer field schools in Senegal, and is planning to conduct a third this summer. All students in the museum studies program are required to intern in a museum before they can graduate. The department has also forged close ties with Urban Anthropology, Inc. Through this relationship, we have student interns collecting data on various communities in Milwaukee. Another example of a Milwaukee Idea project is Dr. Washabaugh s collaboration on virtual museums with students at Riverside High School. As suggested by the reviewers, faculty members have not allowed their participation in the Milwaukee Idea to erode their attention to research and teaching. Additional Information: The department continues to gain national and international attention. Dr Turner was recently appointed by the American Anthropological Association to serve on a highly visible task force investigating the Darkness and Noon affair. Dr. Turner is in the process of setting up a primate field study in South Africa that will provide research opportunities for students. Several graduate students have come to UWM to receive training in forensic anthropology from Dr. Anapol. Dr. Arnold s work in Celtic archaeology gained international attention, and we now have several graduate students working in this area. Dr. Gray was recently elected the incoming President of the Central States Anthropological Society. Dr. Brodwin work in bioethics has gained some attention, and NSF support. The department will gain even more exposure over the next three years, as it hosts a series of national and regional conferences in Milwaukee. The national meeting of the Society for American Archaeology meets here in April 2003, followed by the Midwestern Archaeological Conference in October The Central States meetings are scheduled for April 2004 and the national meetings of the American Society for Physical Anthropology will be in Milwaukee in April Program Response Prepared By: J. Patrick Gray, Chair and Graduate Program Representative, Department of Anthropology, January 22, 2003

8 Graduate Faculty Council Doc. No. 841A p. 8 Approved November 17, 2003 Recommendation of the Committee on Reviews The COR finds the department s response to be satisfactory and recommends that the next review of the M.S. and Ph.D. programs in Anthropology be scheduled according to the regular review cycle.