SMALL DEPARTMENTS: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

The geology department at Lawrence University has entirely recreated itself in the past eight years, with three new faculty members, a new curriculum, and new facilities. Although the magnitude and rapidity of these changes have posed challenges, the opportunity to build the department almost entirely from scratch has allowed us to design a program that acknowledges the profound changes that have occurred within the geosciences in the past few decades. The major challenge that we faced was how to offer a curriculum that reflects the diversity of the geosciences with a relatively small faculty. We addressed this issue by identifying our priorities, strengths, potentials, and limitations, and building the strongest possible curriculum given these resources and constraints.

As new faculty members were hired, we deliberately sought out versatile, flexible candidates whose training embraced several subdisciplines. The primary interests of the three current faculty members are 1) mid- to deep crustal ‘hard rock’ geology, 2) physical surficial processes, and 3) the geochemistry of near-surface rocks and waters. This combination allows us to span a large intellectual space, but it would be difficult to offer all of the traditional courses in the geology canon. As we discussed the skills and concepts we considered for geology students and assessed the expertise of our faculty, we concluded that for us the most efficient curricular framework would emphasize Earth processes (rather than entities) and connections with cognate sciences. This shift in focus has allowed us also to serve the interdisciplinary environmental studies curriculum in an integral way.

While our wholesale personnel changes allowed us unusual flexibility in redesigning our program, we feel that departments at other institutions - large and small - could benefit from a similar self-assessment. As the scope of the geosciences grows and the boundaries between disciplines become less sharp, there is no longer any possibility of ‘comprehensive coverage’ in the undergraduate curriculum. We do not consider our curriculum a universally applicable template. But we do believe that the strongest geoscience programs will emerge in departments that know their strengths and build curricula from these intellectual centers of gravity.