by Susan Griffith

Some well-established, but under-funded programs in Case Western Reserve University's College of Arts and Sciences got a boost with $3.2 million from President Edward M. Hundert's presidential initiative fund.

The initiative funds, first announced during the president's inauguration, are part of his mission to raise the visibility of humanities at CWRU.

Sandra Russ, the interim dean at the College of Arts and Sciences, solicited proposals in March from the college's faculty and worked closely with the executive committee of the college and the associate deans to consider more than 50 submissions.

"We recommended proposals that had the highest impact," Russ said.
Five proposals received the final approval from the president for funding over the next year to four years and include initiatives from the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, music department, theater and dance department, interdisciplinary programs and a new undergraduate student project fund.

Baker-Nord to develop faculty
When the call was issued for initiative proposals, six chairs in the humanities joined forces with the directors of the Baker-Nord Center for the humanities to design a four-year program aimed at building multi-disciplinary and scholarly collaborations that open new possibilities for addressing widely relevant issues in the arts and humanities.

Approved by President Hundert in May, this new program creates a four, yearlong Baker-Nord Seminars organized around themes of interest to a broad range of humanities scholars.

The Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities received nearly $1.8 million to administer this initiative. It becomes a new addition to Baker-Nord's programs.

"The centerpiece of our new programming will be the creation of four, yearlong seminars, each organized around a theme relevant to scholars in a variety of disciplines," say Tim Beal, who took over the Baker-Nord reins from the center's founding director Thomas Bishop, professor of English. Marie Lathers, chair of the department of modern languages and literatures, is the center's new associate director. They also proposed development programs for faculty and graduate students to infuse support for research in the humanities.

Each Baker-Nord Seminar will involve up to 14 individuals-two visiting senior scholars, as many as four senior faculty fellows and up to eight faculty seminar fellows. The CWRU faculty will compete through an application process for these fellowships. The application process is under development for the program, which will begin either in the spring or fall of 2004, says Beal.

In the second area of funding, Baker-Nord will oversee a total of 12 (three per year), $20,000 dissertation completion fellowship for doctoral students in the arts, humanities and social sciences; new Baker-Nord thematic colloquia involving faculty and area institutions; 10 annual research travel grants of up to $2,000 each; and support for as many as two small humanities conferences each year.

He sees these efforts "invigorating the intellectual community at CWRU and encouraging faculty research and productivity by facilitating interdisciplinary discussions and building collaborations across the disciplines."

"Many believe that the most interesting things are happening in research in those spaces where scholars from different disciplines find new ways of interacting with each other around shared questions and problems," states Beal. "We're looking for ways to create those kinds of synergetic spaces."

Music for campus
Georgia Cowart, chair of the music department, says the fund will enhance student and community life across campus through support for various undergraduate musical ensembles comprised of music majors and non-majors as well as students from the Cleveland Institute of Music.

"There is a sense of excitement about music that I have rarely seen on a college campus," says Cowart.

She cited as an example of this enthusiasm generated by last spring's CWRU University Circle Orchestra concert under the direction of Kathleen Horvath that attracted 1,700 people to Severance Hall, and the large audiences for the department's wind ensembles and other student ensembles.

Other student groups affected by the funding include CWRU Symphonic Winds, the University Circle Wind Ensemble and a new auditioned chorus for majors and non-majors, which will be led by Robert Dunn, associate professor of music.

The funds also provide for a lecture series, "Music and Culture," which will explore the boundaries between music and the arts, the sciences, politics and other aspects of the culture in which music is created and performed. The new lecture series, aimed at an audience drawn from the university and Cleveland community, will have its inaugural event in September with a talk by Lewis Lockwood, professor emeritus of music history at Harvard University.

The Chapel, Court & Countryside early music series, under the artistic direction of Ross Duffin, was resurrected through the initiatives only a few weeks after the decision had been made to halt the program because of budget constraints. Letters from disappointed subscribers and a petition from faculty across the College of Arts and Sciences led to the revival of the series as the final portion of the initiative funding for music.

Cowart says the initiative funds "reflect the different missions of the music department in that we want to strengthen our reputation at the national and international levels of music scholarship, while also continuing to transform the culture of this university through our part in a campus-wide program to strengthen the arts and humanities."

A new light on productions
The department of theater and dance has sorely needed support staff for a number of years and several pieces of equipment to enhance campus productions at Eldred Theater and the Mather Dance Center, according to the department's chair Ron Wilson.

"The personnel demands for performance programs are quite high. Unfortunately, as the programs have grown, the number of support staff has remained the same. We have been just getting by with a skeleton crew for a very long time," say Wilson.

For the next year, he will have funds to hire a costume shop manager, assistant technical director and an administrative assistant for Eldred Hall, while the Mather Dance Center has funds for two part-time production and administrative staff members.

Theater and dance, by their very nature, are primarily physical disciplines that utilize experiential learning, but a new hydraulic lift, lighting instruments, theater speakers, flooring, black curtains and teasers will not only visually enhance productions but in some instances make them safer to produce, states Wilson.

The theatrical arts classes will get some new teaching tools.

The dance program will purchase model muscle/joints for demonstrating the impact of movement on the body for kinesiology classes and for use in the Dance Wellness Program. The program also will purchase some new digital and video editing equipment to move forward with concepts of using technology in dance. Mather also will have the opportunity to receive new lighting and audio systems with surround sound.

Students in the set design class for theater majors will have as many as five new computers with advanced software to draft project ideas for the stage.

"These initiative funds allow us to have more quality, not only in our productions but in the classroom as well," says Wilson.

Students to travel
Up to 10 undergraduates in Arts and Sciences will have the opportunity to engage in student projects that might require travel outside the university or abroad for research, internships or professional meetings. A new undergraduate student project fund was established to broaden student experiences at CWRU and have students share information gained with the CWRU faculty.

"This initiative provides students with opportunities to conduct projects that are of special interest to them and enhance their education over the next year," says Stephen Haynesworth, associate dean of Arts and Sciences.

Details about how students can apply for project funds will be forthcoming.

Enhancing interdisciplinary programs
A core of dedicated scholars at CWRU have worked hard to establish such excellent interdisciplinary programs as Asian studies, childhood studies, international studies, Judaic studies, evolutionary biology, the history and philosophy of science and more, says Jill Korbin, associate dean of Arts and Sciences.

She adds that these dedicated faculty members have gone above and beyond their regular faculty responsibilities to form these programs that are driven by their keen intellectual interests and a real dedication to transmitting cutting-edge knowledge to CWRU students.

"These programs have been excellent on minimal support, but now have the opportunity to grow to a new level," explains Korbin.

Through a competitive process that the college will establish, various programs will be able to apply for support over the next three years to enhance an existing program or establish a new interdisciplinary program.

"With this funding, the College encourages interdisciplinary programs at CWRU to look at others around the country and think about what they can do to enhance their own programs with this one-time funding opportunity," says Korbin.

Return to the online edition of the 7-24-03 Campus News.

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