Articles by Valerio Ferme

After a year as Associate Dean for the Arts and Humanities, what are my thoughts? How did I manage my first year? For one, I came in the job with much enthusiasm and the desire to advocate for the Arts and Humanities. That enthusiasm remains, but mitigated by the basic reality of the job, and by the complexity of the interactions that govern the day-to-day operations of a large organization where different agendas compete with one another.

There has been much talk in the past few months about Inclusive Excellence (IE) on campus. This label (if I might call it so) has become widely used on campuses across the country to discuss diversity and how campuses, colleges, and departments pursue excellence according to their own diverse standards, while ensuring that this pursuit includes people from all sectors of society.

Time flies when you are having fun, the saying goes… or when you work as a dean. I cannot believe how much time has passed since my last post, and I am somewhat embarrassed by the delay. Admittedly, the feeling I am experiencing is that of the student who misses a couple of classes, then starts missing them altogether because she is embarrassed that she has missed a few and the teacher might not like her anymore.

Last week I gave my presentation for the CU on the Weekend series on Why the Humanities Matter. The title was: Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, and the Birth of Humanism: Why Civic Engagement and Personal Growth Never go Out of Style (a mouthful of a title, but I have never been good at summarizing the title of lectures).

Like 8,000 others, I attended Jane Goodall’s Gamow Memorial Lecture Series two nights ago. Her status is legendary and well deserved. Through the almost two hours of her lecture, she held the crowd’s attention by talking about her past growing up poor in London, loving animals, having a dream of one day going to Africa, reaching her destination, making an impression on the right people, and then skyrocketing to fame with her observations about chimpanzees.

Reading around a bit, I discovered that most people feel that associate deans (“deanlets” in the current jargon) are beholden to the dean of their colleges and, therefore, do not or should not have a vision of their own. This might be true in the general sense, since the administrative elements of a college should be working together to achieve overarching goals that benefit the college as a whole.

Over the weekend, I shared the blog entry I wrote last Friday with my siblings. Here is what two of them (out of the 8!) wrote back. The perspectives, and their fields of study and work are quite interesting:

Today, I was interviewed by Hannah Leigh Myers, a friendly newscaster at KGNU, about the CU on the Weekend program I put together for this fall season with a group of colleagues. One of the questions that came up prior to going on the air (which Hannah Leigh then decided to ask during the interview) is “why do the Arts and Humanities matter in the 21st century?

A couple of weeks ago I decided that it wanted to start a blog as the new Associate Dean for the Arts and Humanities. I wasn’t sure what the blog might look like, or what topics I might address in it (the issue of how much self-censorship and self-presentation might be part of the blog was foremost in my mind), but I wanted to talk about the sometimes interesting, sometimes mundane experiences that a newly-minted administrator encounters in his days (weeks, months) “in the office.”