Q&A: U's liberal arts dean on road map for the future

At a time when some in the country doubt the value of a liberal arts education, a new dean at the University of Minnesota is determined to keep it relevant.

In a draft of a plan he released this week, John Coleman says the college will give students more career preparation, alumni support and research opportunities to thrive in the labor force.

A committee will report back to Coleman by March with possible steps to take in the next academic year.

The following is an edited transcript of an interview with Coleman.

How will the change affect what students learn in class? Will the material change?

Coleman: Students from day one will be coming in and being introduced to thinking about where will they be four, five years down the road when they are leaving campus. ... This can be as simple as you having better information about exactly what does the class teach you. So that will require us as faculty and staff to be more clear about, "Here are the skills you gain in this class. Here's how you'll gain them. Here's how we think that they relate to possibilities after your life at the university." ... [Also,] we know, for example, that a lot of our students are interested in health care as a possible career area. So we want to be responsive to that by developing more courses in that area.

I see in the plan a lot about the need for career preparation. What are your plans?

Coleman: One is to have more of a fusing of our academic and our career advising, so that when students are getting advising about their majors , they are simultaneously also hearing advising about 'What are the career paths that our alumni have done that have taken that major?' ... [And] we have an amazing group of alumni who want to help us mentor our students. ... They want to be there to help with anything from how to work on a resume to an interview to just how to think about the career path and do some networking. ...

Now I have to say this is something that probably every liberal arts college in the country is saying: 'We need to use our alumni, they want to help us.' ... No other liberal arts college, certainly not at a university of this size, has figured that out. We're going to figure that out. We'll be the model for how this gets done.

How will the plan change the way the college conducts research?

Coleman: I want to be sure that we're ... doing a great job of providing research funding for faculty, for faculty to hire graduate students to help them with their research, [and] to involve undergrads in their research as well. ... A student who goes to the College of Liberal Arts is at one of the great research institutions in the country.

You think that under this plan undergraduates will have more experience and research than they do now?

Coleman: My hope is that they will. And my expectation is that they will have more experience in research under this plan.

How will this affect, ultimately, how students and employers see liberal arts degrees?

Coleman: One of the things that I want students to be confident in -- and for employers to be confident in as well as they look at our students -- is that our students are getting the skills, the analytical perspectives and the subject knowledge that'll make them great employees. That'll make them great contributors to organizations. ... I want our students to be confident when they choose their major that there is a path to success for them. We know that it's there, but I think understandably they're worried given the economy and so on.

Once this is done, how different will the U be from its peers in the way its liberal arts program functions?

Coleman: I think we will have an identity ahead of our peers as being a place where, you know, if you want to study business you can actually go to [the College of Liberal Arts]. If you want to do health care, you can do [the College of Liberal Arts]. That'll be different. I don't think you'll see that at other universities. Maybe they'll catch up to us eventually, and we can tell them how to get there. But we will be the first.

MPR News intern Kia Farhang contributed to this report.