David Morgan's essay in the Oct. 5 issue of The Miami Student begins and ends well enough. Sadly, the body of piece does not follow suit. Morgan correctly identifies Miami's obligation to provide us with the best college experience, but then goes on to chastise faculty for being selfish and lazy, evidently without noticing the incongruity. As I begin my senior year at Miami, I am particularly excited about living and working in Cincinnati's Over-The-Rhine neighborhood and looking forward to my upcoming trip to New Orleans to present a paper at the National Conference of The American Anthropological Association. I am presenting some of my findings from nine months of fieldwork in Northern India. This research was made possible by two research grants, including one from the National Science Foundation (NSF). It should be noted that both of these projects and the funding that made them possible are directly related to faculty assigned research appointments (ARA). In particular, the field school in Northern India where I first networked with my consultants started as a result of a faculty member's research in the area during an ARA. In addition, the funding I received from NSF was part of the Research Experience For Undergraduates Program, which was funded as an addendum to another faculty member's year-long ARA. ARAs are not a way for faculty to escape students for an exotic vacation. Rather, the work supported by ARAs directly impact the quality of a Miami education.
My success as a student and as a scholar are the result of a lot of coffee, pen ink, chalk and hours upon hours spent in the offices and classrooms of tenure track Miami faculty. I'll give Mr. Morgan the benefit of the doubt, for I'm not familiar with the English department. Perhaps they are an anomaly and department faculty really do sit around in their offices on Facebook all day. If such is the case, I'd like to extend Mr. Morgan an invitation to visit the Department of Anthropology, my department, where faculty balance teaching responsibilities with scholarship activities, professional development and somehow manage to find time (often in the early morning, the evening and weekends) to mentor me and provide guidance in my own research. The truth is the quality of education at Miami is a direct result of the number and caliber of tenure-track faculty and the size of the classes they teach, not how pretty the buildings that house them are. Mr. Morgan is correct that students should be more informed and more involved, but if students are really concerned about their education and the future of a liberal education at Miami, they will demand not new capital improvement projects but rather that the administration set budget priorities according to Miami's mission statement and honor its commitment to a liberal education. This puts new administrative positions, new assessment tools and capital improvement projects near the bottom and a vital, robust and disciplinarily diverse faculty at the top. Perhaps faculty are not, as Mr. Moore suggested, selfish, but rather are fighting for the students' interests, fighting to preserve the intellectual climate that allows a Miami liberal arts education to be transformative.
Nathan Mark Devore
deveorenm@muohio.edu
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