Minutes - Feb. 2006

Minutes
Tufts University Council on Graduate Education
February 28, 2006
Fletcher, Medford campus

Minutes of January 20 meeting were approved with minor technical amendments

The draft was received favorably, and was revised to clarify where in the process The University Council on Graduate Education would review and comment on a specific school or departmental proposal.  We suggested specific language that specifies the role and timing of the Council’s participation in the process.

The major item of the meeting was the discussion of a proposal that had been made by Prof. Islam for an Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Fellows Program.  Several questions were raised:

Who is the target audience?

Might it require initiation by two or more faculty?

Should this be for both pre and postdoctoral fellows?

Should the primary goal be to encourage collaboration among faculty, and hence is the original presidential model that led to the forming of WSSS an appropriate model?

Does this effort relate to senior faculty development?

Should it focus on larger programs or smaller scale applications?  Examples of the former included themes like Science, Technology and Policy and Health, Humanities and Social Sciences.

Should it be focused on problem-centered research instead of exploratory research and obtain grants from NSF or EPA mission approach programs?

The discussion went well beyond the notion of postdocs and stimulated a lot of discussion about larger goals for doctoral education and research at Tufts.  In the end it was decided that the postdoctoral approach was clearly useful in forcing us to think about these larger issues, but that it did not seem to be a program concept that we could bring to the Provost and Tufts community at this time.  Prof. Islam was thanked for engaging the committee in this productive discussion.

It was agreed that Prof. Islam and Prof. Moomaw would prepare a draft of potential funding goals and we would invite Brian Lee to come to our next meeting for a discussion.

We agreed to put together some broader goals and invite Jamshed and Brian Lee to our last meeting of the year.  Types of opportunities included WSSS, environment, biotechnology.  The question of how to create new program areas by providing funding through the capital campaign was discussed.

The process for this year’s Provost Fellows was discussed and agreed to.  There will be a total of 10 Fellows at $10,000 over two years as in the past.

Vin Manno reported that he had been contacted by the Education Department concerning comments in previous minutes concerning two programs in the department.  The department member felt that the relative success of the two programs was tied to the degree of interdisciplinary interactions.  There is a need to reengage with A&S.  The department will be invited to prepare a comment and the Council will post it on our website if they wish us to do so.

Two members of the Council will cycle off at the end of this year, and members’ suggestions for their replacements from Sackler and Nutrition should be forwarded to Vin Manno and David Walt.

A discussion of whether it was useful to meet with particular deans or whether to meet with all deans on the subject of doctoral education.  It was decided that meeting with several deans at once was preferable.