Kathleen Donahue
Staff Writer
“AT NOTRE DAME, we must enhance undergraduate education by making research an important and expanding aspect of the undergraduate experience.” With these words, President John Jenkins, C.S.C., addressed the faculty this past September by promoting undergraduate research as a means to a superior educational experience. In order to encourage Notre Dame’s shift towards becoming a more research based university, the university created a new Assistant Director for Undergraduate Research position, expanded the honors programs in the Colleges of Arts and Letters and Science, invested $25 million into one-time funding research initiatives, and heavily increased its focus on the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program.
While the undergraduate educational experience is one reason for promoting undergraduate research, the modest number of Notre Dame undergraduates pursuing doctorates after graduation is a powerful driving force behind the change. According to the Office of Institutional Research (OIR), a little over four percent of Notre Dame undergraduates went on to earn doctorates from 1980 to 1989. This statistic compares to the twelve percent at Princeton University or the seven percent at Duke University.
“Although correlation does not prove causation, it is reasonable to suppose that if a higher percentage of our undergraduates participate in research with a strong faculty mentor, then more will go on to earn a PhD,” President Jenkins remarked in his faculty address.
According to the OIR, a statistic taken in 1998 shows that only four percent of Notre Dame graduates obtained a doctorate within ten years of graduation. The most recent University Fact Book of 2007 shows that the number has not fluctuated; four percent of graduates still earn a doctorate within ten years of graduation.
The lack of improvement in this percentage is not reflective of the change in the number of undergraduate students participating in research. “Certainly a very visible change was the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, which existed at the time of the Boyer report, but it had on average eleven students each year. Last year we had one hundred and twenty five students,” said Mark Roche, Dean of the College of Arts and Letters.
The new found emphasis on undergraduate research began with the 1998 release of the Boyer Commission Report “Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blue Print for America’s Research Universities.” An extremely influential document in colleges across the country, the Boyer Report advocates an emphasis on research-based learning starting in the freshman year as the new standard of undergraduate education.
This focus on research, however, raises the question of how it is to be spelled out in the various Colleges and Schools of the University, and whether there are differences in research in the varying disciplines of the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences.
The Boyer Report was commissioned by eleven authors involved in administration, biology, chemistry and other similar fields. Only one author on the commission represented the humanities. Perhaps for this reason, the report makes no distinction between undergraduate research in the sciences and humanities. The report states that “In a research university, students should be taught by those who discover, create, and apply, as well as transmit, insights about subjects in which the teacher is expert.”
Notre Dame Anthropology professor Agustin Fuentes highlights how research at the undergraduate level truly means engaging in scholarship and scholarly activity. “So whether it’s poetry, physics experiments, watching monkeys in a zoo, or doing an analysis of Aquinas, all of those things are part of scholarship,” Professor Fuentes said.
He also acknowledged, however, that "it’s sometimes harder to get the humanities on board because much of their research is not traditionally seen as facilitating involvement at the undergraduate level.” Some differences between the sciences and humanities are in the types of methodology, but research takes place in both areas.
According to Professor Phillip Sloan, former Chair of the Program of Liberal Studies, such specialized research in the sciences starting the freshman year is highly appropriate to scientific disciplines. This is where the humanities and sciences differ. “My research is in a highly technical area,” Sloan said, “and I may expose a few seniors to this research, but I don’t think that there is necessarily any direct connection of my research topics to the early education of undergraduates.”
Instead of professors engaging undergraduates in their particular niche of humanities research, Professor Sloan sees the need for “a broad liberal education as a foundation for higher specialization.” This is contrary to the Boyer Report’s vision that “In the humanities, undergraduates should have the opportunity to work in primary materials, perhaps linked to their professor’s research projects.”
Professor Sloan considers pushing the graduate model down into the first year of studies to be a “very pernicious development.” In doing so, he believes we will lose the effort to develop well rounded Catholic individuals educated in the humanities who can then go on to specialization in different fields.
The focus on a holistic education is also voiced by Kenneth Sayre, a professor in the Philosophy Department for over 40 years. In a 1999 open letter to Notre Dame’s Board of Trustees, Professor Sayre wrote, echoing the encyclical Fides et Ratio, that Notre Dame should encourage an approach to scholarship guided by “a unified and organic vision of knowledge.”
He noted the stark differences between scientific research and research in the humanities. In science, research means contributing to ongoing knowledge through laboratory experiments, while in the humanities this gets interpreted as “writing papers on the cutting edge of the various disciplines.” The number of publications one has constitutes one’s success as a researcher.
“The result in the humanities is that people who want to make a name in research move as quickly as they can to the so-called cutting edge where most of the ongoing conversation is taking place,” Professor Sayre said. “[Yet] the cutting edge is constantly changing. It’s a faddish thing that varies from decade to decade and sometimes from year to year.”
In the humanities, this means that researchers rush to the current ‘new frontier’ as quickly as they can. The problem, according to Professor Sayre, is that “they don’t spend nearly as much time as needed to gain a basic mastery of the discipline.”
As he sees it, the model appropriate for the humanities is not research, but scholarship. And Professor Sayre thinks the humanities are being left behind in the rush to the cutting edge of research which is promoted in a research based university.
Contrary to research’s questionability as a benefit in the humanities, undergraduate scientific research is widely accepted as a positive way to promote the Boyer Report’s idea of undergraduate inquiry based learning.
Dr. Michelle Whaley of the Department of Biology is the director of a biology summer research program called REU. She holds that the benefits of undergraduates doing scientific research are that it “challenges them to think at deeper levels and to make connections that maybe are not as easy to make in a classroom setting,” Dr. Whaley said. “[Moreover,] they actually have to apply their knowledge in a hands on situation.”
As for when to start undergraduates researching in a professor’s lab, Dr. Whaley thinks that this varies from student to student. A select number of students can start freshman year, but the majority can certainly start second semester sophomore year and junior year.
Introducing research into the freshman year in the humanities presents a different problem than it does in the sciences. Professor Sloan commented that “I would not want either my students or my own children to be engaging in specialized research in the place of exploring fundamental questions and formative texts in their initial undergraduate studies in philosophy, theology, history, or literature. Research in these subjects can come later.”
This later research to which Professor Sloan and others refer could come in many forms such as a senior thesis, capstone class, or internship experience. There are countless opportunities emerging on campus for undergraduates to pursue research as they get into upper level classes.
One such opportunity is an undergraduate review of politics, Beyond Politics. This new journal accepts submissions of longer research essays from undergraduates seeking to become published in fields related to political science.
Much of the push for research comes from the Provost’s office under leadership by Assistant Provost Dennis Jacobs. After scheduling for an interview, Dr. Jacobs's office informed The Rover that he would not be available for comment.
Contact Kathleen at kdonahu1@nd.edu.
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