From the Provost and Dean of the College

Neil Weissman

The Center for Educational Policy Research selected Associate Professor of Physics Hans Pfister’s Workshop Physics (Introductory Physics in the Bulletin) class as a nationwide example of excellence in physics education. The course, created by our physics department, eschews traditional lectures in favor of inquiry-based cooperative learning. A panel of experts chose the course as an “exemplary practice,” the highest designation, from among 139 submissions.

While intrinsically important, this honor also demonstrates a key point about Dickinson’s approach to facilities. Visitors to the physics wing of Tome Hall will find no lecture rooms. Instead, classes are held in laboratories specially designed (and also award-winning) to fit the workshop technique. Tome was constructed, therefore, not only to provide new and expanded quarters for physics but also to match innovations in teaching.

This principle—facilities improvement driven by pedagogical imagination and scholarship—guides current construction on campus. Let me offer two examples.

The largest project under way, and the largest in Dickinson’s history, is our new science complex. Like Tome, the building plans are primarily the product of our faculty’s educational vision. Dickinson’s rapidly growing cutting-edge, interdisciplinary majors in biochemistry & molecular biology and neuroscience will be housed here. In order to facilitate this 21st-century approach to science, the traditional disciplines of biology, chemistry and psychology will occupy the new buildings—but not in separate, departmental wings. Instead, the faculty will be, as our architects put it, “confetti-ed” throughout to facilitate collaboration. There also will be an emphasis on laboratories—a reflection of our commitment to active learning and student-faculty research.

Smaller in scale but equally imaginative is the renovation of Denny Hall’s first floor and neighboring garage into new laboratories in archaeology and anthropology. The renovation, funded through grants from the W.M. Keck and Booth Ferris foundations, resonates with Dickinson’s commitments to active education and crossing disciplinary boundaries. Biological anthropology provides an important bridge between the sciences and social sciences. Archaeology reaches further still, joining insights from all three divisions of the curriculum—humanities (classics, the arts), social sciences (anthropology, history) and natural sciences (geology). Both labs give students hands-on practice and prepare them for fieldwork abroad at such sites as Mycenae and Tanzania.

Beyond the examples mentioned in this issue of In Focus, facilities improvements abound at Dickinson. I leave you with one lesson about them all. As you view new and renovated structures, appreciate the aesthetics, design and sheer new space. But understand, too, that behind the visuals lies programmatic imagination—a commitment by our faculty members, administrators and students to fulfill a dynamic educational vision.

Sincerely,

Neil Weissman
Provost and Dean