Scarpino: This one’s live, and the way you can tell again is this little bar on here that bounces when you talk.
Alright. So, today is September 25, 2018. My name is Philip Scarpino, Professor of History and Co-Primary Investigator with Steve Towne for the IUPUI Oral History project funded by the campus administration. I also serve as Director of Oral History for the Randall L. Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence at Indiana University/Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI).
Also in the room is Leeah Mahon, a first-year Masters’ student in the IUPUI, Public History Program. She is the graduate, public history intern assigned to this IUPUI and Tobias Center oral history projects.
So, today I have the privilege of interviewing Dr. Sherry Queener in a conference room located in the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives. This interview is sponsored and funded by the Administration of IUPUI, and it is co-sponsored by the Randall L. Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence.
This is the second session with Dr. Queener. Biographical information is available with the first session.
So, before we start, I’m going to ask your permission to do the same things that you’ve already agreed to do in writing. That is, I’m going to ask your permission to record this interview, to prepare a verbatim transcript of the interview, to deposit the interview and the verbatim transcript with the IUPUI Special
Collections and Archives and with the Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence, with the understanding that the Directors of those two organizations may make the interview and the transcript available to their patrons. Which may include posting all or part of the audio and/or the transcription to their respective websites.
Queener: I do agree.
Scarpino: Thank you. We’re going to get started. We were talking before I turned the recorders on and you wanted to follow up on something we explored last time that had to with a department chair who wouldn’t interview you initially, in particular, the Chair of Biochemistry. So, I’ll hand that off to you and we’ll go from there.
Queener: Right. The thing that I don’t want to do is leave the impression that there was a sustained anger generated. I thought my best revenge would be succeed well enough that they would wish they hired me. I worked with these people on and off through the years and developed good relationships, and I’ll tell one story that I think also tells their side of things. This was several years after I’d been
around. I’d been working with the Chair of Biochemistry, and he and I approached the west door of the Medical Sciences Building more or less simultaneously one morning on our way to work. We did one of these things what’s so awkward, where you’re both at the door and who’s going to get the door and so forth and so on. Somehow or other, he managed to grab the handle of door and in trying to avoid me, he hit himself in the head with the door.
(LAUGHING) So, he closed the door and he leaned his head against it, and he
said, “This is just so hard. Half the women I know are mad at me if I don’t open the door and the other half are mad at me if I do.” (LAUGHING) I thought that was a pretty good summary of where some of these guys are coming from. They were trying. (LAUGHS)
Scarpino: And he did hit himself in the head.
Queener: And he did hit himself in the head, right.
Scarpino: Last time, we talked about your growing up and education and your research and when you were here at IUPUI and so on and so forth. We want to spend most of today talking about the years you spent at the graduate school. I wanted to start by asking you, you found out about the open position of Associate Dean of the graduate school in a call from your colleague, Dr. Bill Bosron. He told you that Dr. Sheila Cooper was stepping down and that you should apply. Your initial response was probably, “no way.” You’d made it clear that you were really not interested in administration and then you wrote, and I’m quoting you, “Bill pressed gently and reminded me of our leadership workshop,” and you told him
“Well, okay, I’ll look into it.” So, before I actually ask you a question, I want to point out for anybody who uses this that Dr. Sheila Cooper was the first head of the Graduate Office at IUPUI from the time it was founded in 1987 until she retired in 1999, and Dr. Cooper was a historian.
Queener: Correct.
Scarpino: She was actually a British historian, or historian of Britain. Here’s the question:
your colleague reminded you of the leadership workshop that you’d attended and that we talked about last time, so the question is what was it about his reminding you about the leadership workshop that caused you to relent and agree to look into the position of Associate Dean of the Graduate School?
Queener: Well, several things sort of played into that. One is, I have such high respect for Bill Bosron. He had done some administrative work, he’s a man of good
judgement and he knows me pretty well. I had to respect that part of it. The other part of his reminder was about the leadership conference that we were part of and how much fun we had had doing that, talking to Richard Turner, Tony Sherrill from the Religious Studies group, and Bill, Erv Boschmann in Chemistry, and myself, all these areas covered. But we got together and enjoyed the company so well and we worked together so well, it reminded me of how much I liked working outside the area of science, as well as in science. And the third thing it did was remind me about some of the earlier work that I had done in the Graduate School. I’d been on the Graduate School Curriculum Committee in the
‘80s, I was on the Graduate Council in the ‘80s. I saw what was going on in the Graduate School. I actually had learned some of the ins and outs of how a degree is developed, and it struck me that IUPUI was not getting what it should get, and we should be developing more degrees. I realized I had some
knowledge that could be applied. So, all of those things made me say, “Okay, Bill, at least I’ll look at it. I may hate it, I may walk away, but I’ll look at it.”
Scarpino: When we talked a week or so ago, toward the end of that session, we talked about that leadership institute that was run by Katherine Tyler Scott, and a
workshop she held at IUPUI called “Transformational Learning: Defining Yourself as a Leader.” We were toward the end last time and so I didn’t do then what I should’ve done, which was explain who she was. I’m going to do that now because who she was is actually important. Katherine Tyler Scott holds a Masters’ degree in social work from Indiana University – she’s one of us. She’s nationally and internationally recognized in the field of leadership, but her career in leadership began in Indianapolis in Indiana. She chaired the Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce Race Relations History Project, during which time she developed a training curriculum called “Finding Common Ground” for community- wide dissemination. She’s a graduate of the Stanley K. Lacy Executive
Leadership Program here in Indianapolis, and has served as President of the Stanley K. Lacy Board. She also served on the Commission for Downtown and on the boards of the Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce and the Greater Indianapolis Progress Committee. She’s a founding member of the Indianapolis chapter of the Coalition of 100 Black Women. She served as a consultant to the Lilly Endowment and developed and directed the Lilly Endowment Leadership Education Program. Which is a statewide leadership education initiative for professionals who are in the youth service field. She’s a recipient of the
Sagamore of the Wabash. She has published widely on the topic of leadership.
She’s presently, now in the current time, Managing Principal of a firm called Ki ThoughtBridge, which is a company specializing in leadership development.
She’s also currently the Chair of the Board of Directors of the International Leadership Association. This lady is one of the scholars, the leaders in the developing field of scholar leadership and she got her start here, so I thought that I would put that in the record.
Queener: I very much am glad to hear that. I know some of it but had forgotten it. She was extremely impressive and that CV certainly backs that up.
Scarpino: And I will admit, and I’ll even say this with the recorder on, when her name came up last time, it didn’t immediately click with me, but as soon as I saw her picture, I know her. In fact, in a couple of weeks, I’ll be at the International Leadership Association meeting. Katherine Tyler Scott talked about the Steward Model of Leadership. Then you wrote, in a piece that you shared with us, “On Being an Academic Administrator,” that when you reflected on the questions she posed, you concluded, and I’m quoting you, “I want to bring out the best in students and my colleagues, I want to make them more effective, and I want to serve better by making the work environment more supportive.” The question is, would it be fair to say that that workshop you attended was professionally transformative for you?
Queener: Yes, yes because vague feelings along this line certainly existed. That’s when I was Graduate Director in the Department of Pharmacology, but to crystalize it all around the stewardship model, that brought so many threads together and gave a forward impetus. So, yeah, I would have to say that leadership conference was transformative.
Scarpino: Again, when you wrote about the workshop that you took on leadership with Katherine Tyler Scott, you said that she challenged you to do the following: to ask what does your history say about what is important to you? You concluded, and I am now quoting from you, “Other than my family, the next greatest
influence on my life is education. My university and graduate school experiences completely remade my life, and for the better.” Here’s the question, how did your university and graduate school experiences completely remake your life?
Queener: Well, you have to know what Oklahoma was like in the 1950s and ‘60s.
(LAUGHTER)
Scarpino: Well, I lived there, in early 1980s.
Queener: I mean, waiting tables in a honky-tonk on Highway 66 was a possibility. There were no guarantees for women. My mother was unique in that she had a career, well, not completely unique, but she was unique in our family in having a strong career. And she had made it clear from, Lord, I don’t know how early, as long as I can remember, that if we did well enough in school and wanted to go to college, she would see that we did. She saw her education as giving her a chance at life that she wouldn’t have had before. She took the GSA test and worked for the Federal Government. It was a job beyond her imagination as a younger child.
She saw and she demonstrated the value of education. When I went to college, well, even before, when I was in high school, I remember that I was sent to an academic contest, actually in history. I got selected to go to a history contest, which I won, by the way, with an essay on guilds. (LAUGHING)
Scarpino: An assay on what?
Queener: Guilds, Medieval guilds. But I remember distinctly to this day, and it still gives me chills, walking through the Union Building of this university campus where the contest took place, and some guy was sitting there with a calculus book open, and here were all these equations, like a different language. I remember thinking oh, my God, there is so much out there, I’ve got to get in this, I’ve got to
understand this, and that’s what drove me in college. I took classes I didn’t need because I was interested. Graduate school was more focused, but education just opened my eyes. And there was not much you could get in Oklahoma, except by getting out and by learning from people who had been out, and that was it.
Scarpino: We do want to talk a lot about your time with the graduate school, and you ultimately did apply for the job…
Queener: I did.
Scarpino: … and I’m going to handoff to Leeah to ask you some questions about that.
Queener: Okay.
Mahon: Like you said, you did apply for the job…
Queener: Right.
Mahon: … and why did you decide to do that?
Queener: I looked around at the people who might be applying for the job and I honestly thought I probably had a better set of credentials. Secondly, I thought, I began to think about ways I could manage the science side. I got a tentative okay from my Chair, we didn’t work out any details, but he said, “You should go look at it.” It was kind of an exploratory, and when I got into the details of what would be going on, I liked what I saw.
Mahon: Okay. You had an interview with the Search and Screen Committee in the Summer of 1999.
Queener: I did.
Mahon: You wrote about how you addressed some reservations that the Committee might have about the impact of being a Dean on your research productivity and so forth. Here’s the question – I’m wondering how you sold your candidacy to the Committee. What vision did you share of what you would attempt to accomplish if they offered you the position of Associate Dean?
Queener: Well, I told them, right up front, that I could work with anyone, that I had, and I believe this is true, that I have a talent for finding the strengths in people. They might have one strength and 10 faults, but if you can make use of that strength, you’re ahead of the game. So, I said, “I can make use of people in a productive way.” I sold them on the idea that I was energetic, based on what I’d done up to that point. I also sold them on the fact that I was a planner because I had a very distinct plan for how I would cut back on what I did in science and, therefore, make room for what I was going to do in the Grad Office. And I tried to address obvious problems head on. The main one that we all were sitting and thinking about, although few were wanting to say it, I was School of Medicine and IUPUI was who I needed to be identified with. I had a plan for becoming identified with IUPUI and sort of not breaking my connection to the School of Medicine, but enhancing it and showing that I was a citizen of the whole university. Those are the things that I pressed, and basically I think they looked at the plan and said,
“Well, this could work.”
Mahon: Okay. So, you were ultimately offered the position of Associate Dean of the Graduate School with a start date of August 1, 1999.
Queener: Correct.
Mahon: Recently, we held a pre-interview with you. At that time, you mentioned that you read Lincoln on Leadership by Donald T. Phillips to help get ready for your new position. Why did you select that book?
Queener: You know, I can’t honestly remember why that book fell in my hands. Probably by accident because every time I went in a bookstore, I always looked at material on Lincoln, and there were a couple other topics I was reading at the time, but Lincoln was one of them. I probably picked that book up in a bookstore and flipped through and said “Oh, wow, this is definitely what I need.” I liked the organization of it. I liked the fact that it was based on what I knew of Lincoln’s true actions, so the history was accurate, and it helped sort of translate him into the modern time. That’s what I ended up using.
Mahon: Okay. When you took the job of Associate Dean in August of 1999, did you see yourself facing any leadership challenges?
Queener: Yes. There are several things that happen when you step into a new leadership position. First of all, you’ve got to think about the personnel. Some of the people that you’re facing are loyal to the previous person. They have expectations of you based upon what the prior person did. You have to immediately establish your own style and immediately erase the past. For example, one of the younger secretaries had had the responsibility of running personal errands for Sheila Cooper. I made it clear that there would be none of that and that no one should be asking anyone to do personal errands. I didn’t make a judgement call, I just said that’s the way I work. I had a personnel problem in the sense that we had a person that Dr. Cooper had been very, very critical of. He was sort of a free spirit and he tended to do things differently than she would have done, but he got the job done. I sat down with him first of all, and I said, “I know you’ve had some problems. I don’t want you to expect me to come in exactly the same place Sheila was. I want you to know that you’ve got a clear slate with me. I’m going to judge you on what you accomplish.” And I set some very clear expectations for him, and to his credit, he jumped in and he accomplished them. He went on and got hired by other people and he did very well. I think personnel problems would be some of the first things. And then I mentioned the problem of being identified with the School of Medicine. That’s a leadership problem. I
immediately made appointments with every dean on campus that I could get in to see, and most of them accommodated me. I walked in and sat down and I told them my vision for the Graduate Office was that we would become a service organization, service center for them. We would help with the development of degree programs, should those be of interest to them, that they had to come from the faculty, but we would help. Then I point-blank asked the question, “what can I do for you?” That was such an interesting question in retrospect because some of the deans immediately had suggestions – “oh, yeah, here’s what you can do.”
Others sat for just a really uncomfortably long time and thought and then they’d come up with something. I had one person who looked at me and said, “In all the years I’ve been Dean, no one has ever asked me that question.” We had a nice conversation about, you know, what it is we could do for them. I tried to set up the idea that we were partners and I think that face-to-face was just absolutely critical.
Mahon: Okay. In theory, it was a half-time position.
Queener: Correct.
Mahon: Did that turn out to be the case?
Queener: Well, yes and no. I came into work at 7:30 every morning and I stayed in the lab, directing my technician, doing whatever needed to be done there, until about 12:30 or 1:00. Then I very faithfully went to the Grad Office around 1:00 every day and I stayed there until 5:00-ish or so, but neither job is really -- it’s more than a full-time job. So, I would often end up coming back to the lab to pick up something or I would have to stay longer in the Grad Office. At one point, I was putting in 55, 60-hour weeks to try to get things up-to-snuff. Half-time in that half of my working time was there, but it was not a 20-hour a week job. (LAUGHS)
Scarpino: When you took over the Grad Office on the IUPUI campus, how was that office structured and staffed?
Queener: It was - it had grown by accretion. So, we were housed over on the fourth floor of the old Union Building, which is now gone. We were strung out down the
hallway.
Scarpino: It was sort of a combination hotel, Union.
Queener: Exactly. We all had private bathrooms and showers, none of which worked, but they were there. (LAUGHING)
Scarpino: I remember that place, yes.
Queener: Right, right. We had a receptionist up front. We had a graduate recorder who sat also in that office. We had Monica Henry – she was just hired in as a staff person. We had Robert Kasberg, who was diversity and recruiting and we had – and they were all on real salaries, Judy Zent ran the entire Graduate Non-degree Program and she was on soft money. Her salary was paid by the application fees for people in the Graduate Non-degree Program. And then me. That was it.
Scarpino: For the benefit of somebody who might look at this in the future, can you briefly explain what a graduate recorder does?
Queener: Yes. This is the person who, when the faculty says this person has met the requirements for the degree, that person looks at the record, checks against the published requirements for that degree, says yes everything looks fine, actually pushes the button that says you do get this degree. It doesn’t really happen at graduation; it happens in the quiet of that office when the lady pushes the button.
Scarpino: And then you mentioned Graduate Non-degree and there, I’m sure, will be people who don’t have any idea what that means.
Queener: Yes. This is an innovative program that I was really delighted – I’d made use of it in several situations. It’s a program by which a student can come onto campus at IUPUI and without being admitted to a graduate program, can actually take many of the classes that a graduate student would take. Now, there’s a limit to how many credits you can take in a Graduate Non-degree and some schools close their programs to Graduate Non-degree, but by and large, people can get their toes in the water. We used it, pushed it as a recruiting device and we pushed it very hard in that way. What I discovered as we went through the development process that a lot of these graduate non-degree students weren’t getting counseling from their programs which I thought would improve the recruiting side of it. So, I began to negotiate with individual schools, and I would come to them and say, “We have 60 graduate non-degree students who were taking classes in your program over the last year. We’d like to turn the revenues of these students over to you in exchange for your agreement that you will offer mentoring and advising.” Some of the schools said, “I don’t want any part of it,”
but many said, “Yeah.” Well, that worked because students had a much more obvious line into graduate programs. What it did for the Graduate Office was, of course, diminish our income. I took that situation to the powers that be and I
said we need to put the director of the Graduate Non-degree Program on hard money because we’re working to improve things for the students which is cutting our revenue. We have to do something about that, and they agreed.
Scarpino: So, you basically used the fees that the non-degree students were paying to grow the graduate programs.
Queener: Yes, yes.
Scarpino: When you took over as Associate Dean in 1999, how would you, in general terms, describe the relationship between the main campus in Bloomington and IUPUI? We’ll get to the Graduate School part of it later, but…
Queener: It all depended on who you talked to. Most programs could talk about individual faculty at Bloomington who were very supportive, some collaborated. I worked with some who were helpful in reviewing things for us and so forth and so on.
So, there were certainly people that valued what we did here. If you went to the Administration, by and large there was opposition to what we did here. They didn’t want any new programs developed here – chairs of departments, deans of schools. They were afraid that we would take resources that they felt should come to them. They were afraid we would compete with their degree programs.
So, it was a real dichotomy. You kind of had to know who you were talking to.
Scarpino: Again, when you took over as Associate Dean August 1, 1999, how would you describe the relationship between IU-Bloomington and IUPUI, in terms of graduate education and developing graduate programs?
Queener: The development of graduate programs had been very gradual and very much in the hands of Bloomington. Every degree program proposal had to go to a Curriculum Committee in Bloomington, that I had sat on for a number of years.
Every new course had to go through that Curriculum Committee. So, if it was on this campus…
Scarpino: Every single graduate course…
Queener: … yes…
Scarpino: … created on this campus.
Queener: … yes, at that time. Yeah, it didn’t last forever, but at that time. It was difficult to get much traction for graduate programs. The faculty at Bloomington did not understand, by and large, what we were doing here. As I say, there were
individuals who did, but if you looked at the entire Curriculum Committee, most of those people had no idea the strength of the programs here. So, what you’d find is that, even for courses, but especially for degree programs, when you tried to propose a new degree program, the very same questions that had been already answered in the review process here, would come up again in Bloomington.
These things would linger for months in the committees as you answered the same questions again and again and again. Then it would all repeat when it got to the Graduate Council, which sat over the Curriculum Committee. One of the first things that I realized had to happen was that those two committees had to
have better information about IUPUI, and what better way to do that than having a fair representation of IUPUI faculty on those committees. I proposed that to the Dean and they agreed, Grad School agreed, said yeah, that makes sense. Dave Daleke and I set up the election. We got representation of so many faculty equals one member of whichever committee it might be, and we set up the election and got better representation. That was one thing that helped.
Scarpino: Dave Daleke?
Queener: Yes. David Daleke is Associate Dean at Bloomington at Graduate School. . . Scarpino: Oh, with the Graduate School. Okay, so I want to see if we can sort out the
Table of Organization of the IU Graduate School enough so that somebody can – I mean, we don’t want to go too far into the weeds here – but when you started in August 1999, you appeared to have two people immediately above you in the Graduate School chain of command. The top, George Walker, Dean of the IU Graduate School and Vice President for Research, who was in Bloomington, and below him, Mark Brenner who was Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education at IUPUI.
Queener: Right.
Scarpino: Mark Brenner would have been your immediate supervisor?
Queener: He was my immediate supervisor, right.
Scarpino: But his appointment was in the IU Graduate School in Bloomington.
Queener: Yes.
Scarpino: He represented Bloomington and not IUPUI.
Queener: Yes.
Scarpino: Okay. When you found yourself in the situation with that reporting line of command, did you ever think that that was kind of confusing?
Queener: I thought it was confusing from day one and set out to make some changes that would help it make more sense. Mark Brenner identified very much with IUPUI.
He may have had another appointment through the campus; I don’t know, but he certainly identified with the campus and he backed me 100% in trying to be more identified with the campus. The first thing that I did was to – in conversations with Sheila Cooper, I’d discovered that Sheila had refused to go to the regular staff meetings that Bill Plater held, and these were once a month…
Scarpino: Bill Plater was the Executive Vice Chancellor.
Queener: He was the Executive Vice Chancellor, right, and he would bring in the heads of all the units that reported to him and it would be a little show and tell. Well, Sheila said that her job was more of a gatekeeper, his job was developing degrees, and so she felt there was a tension there and for that reason, she
shouldn’t go to the staff meetings. I felt just the opposite. I felt that I had to be there to talk about what was happening on the graduate side and get this line of communication going. I had no administrative connection to them, but Bill invited me. So, I asked Mark, and he said, “Absolutely, I think that’s exactly what we should do.” That was something that kind of drove that connection.
Scarpino: Let’s focus down a little bit more. When you started in 1999, how would you describe your working relationship with the Graduate School in Bloomington because, obviously, it was more than just the Dean?
Queener: Right, right. Actually, I think it was pretty good overall. I had had a good working relationship with Leo Solt. . .
Scarpino: Leo Solt was?
Queener: Leo Solt was the Dean prior to George Walker. Leo Solt had been the one who was Dean when I was on the Curriculum Committee and the Graduate Council.
He, in his later months of deanship, was aware that people were kind of circling the wagons and trying to do something to diminish the Graduate School. I remember he quoted Winston Churchill about he did not become Dean to preside over the demise of the Graduate School – paraphrased Winston. I gently
reminded him what happened to the empire. Leo and I had a good relationship.
With George Walker, again, really quite a good relationship. He held staff meetings where we all went to Bloomington. I was on friendly terms with the Associate Deans down there, especially Eugene Kintgen, who was one of the Associate Deans before David Daleke. Gene had been there forever and ever, and he was a guy that I could just call up and say, “Gene, here’s this problem, I bet you’ve run across it, what do you do down there?” And, if there was anyway in the world that we could do it the same way, I tried to. I tried to harmonize our methods. If it was necessary that we do it differently, then we’d talk about the principle behind it, and we’d try to at least maintain the principle if the details were different. Gene was great with that. So, I felt I had a pretty good relationship with those folks.
Scarpino: We talked a little bit today and a lot last time about leadership and leadership style. I’m wondering how you would compare and contrast your leadership style with that of your predecessor, Dr. Sheila Cooper? I mean, in the interest of full disclosure, I knew Sheila quite well, she was my colleague in the History Department, so I’m not asking you to trash anybody.
Queener: No, no, I wouldn’t.
Scarpino: I’m asking you to think about compare and contrast.
Queener: Because she was a good leader. She had a different vision than I had. That was the main difference. I think it was pretty clear that Sheila felt that her main job, her main mission was quality control, and she pursued that. She didn’t drive connections to the campus as strongly as I wanted to, but within her vision, which was to erect, create this Graduate Office that represented the Graduate School, I think she communicated that vision and she basically brought it to life. I had a different vision and I tried to bring my vision to life. But I think she was a good
leader and she was generous beyond belief. She didn’t have to sit down and spend all those hours with me in transition and she was extremely generous in doing it.
Scarpino: Sheila went to the U.K. every summer to do research and she got in the habit of taking a graduate student from the History Department with her. The student – it wasn’t a free ride, but made sure the student got to know the place and got to know the history and got to do some research, and she did not need to do that. I want to talk about goals that you had when you took over as Associate Dean, but before I do that, do you have any follow ups; anything you want to ask? Okay.
I’m going to start with a few general questions – when you took over, what did you see as the strengths of the existing office of the Associate Dean of the Graduate School?
Queener: Of the Graduate Office here?
Scarpino: Yeah, here on campus. I’m sorry, yes.
Queener: I thought that we had some outstanding staff that needed to be given the confidence to grow and do their own thing. The fellow who had been at somewhat cross purposes with Dr. Cooper, when I gave him the vision of
working on diversity programs, he simply soared. He worked long hours. He did a lot of good things. That’s what I was envisioning as what you’d see, growth -- if you established your vision with a person, a good person can take that vision and then apply it and can move on. That’s what I tried to do with all of them. Some were not capable of it. We had some turnover within the first year. I had a person who simply didn’t want to make decisions, wanted me to tell them what to do, and that’s not my vision of a leader. We just didn’t, didn’t jibe, but I helped him find placement in an office where he would be comfortable and we took a different direction. So, yeah, those things.
Scarpino: As you were talking, and thinking back about some of the things we said last time, when we asked you about leadership, some of the things that stood out was the ability to communicate a vision…
Queener: Right.
Scarpino: The ability to encourage the people that work for you to develop confidence in themselves…
Queener: Right.
Scarpino: … and the ability to delegate.
Queener: Right.
Scarpino: Is that putting words in your mouth or is that square with the way you look at leadership?
Queener: I think that’s pretty much the way it is and to realize you’re not going to succeed with everyone and to be honest enough to give thoughtful critiques. I did do
reviews, annual reviews with people and more often, if it was needed, to try to help people stay on track and to also give them a sense of their accomplishment.
One of the things I just demanded that people do is to keep a record of what you’ve accomplished because if you ask somebody cold “what did you do this year?”- “I don’t know.” But if you’ve got this journal, “well, I did this training session, I did this work with so and so,” pretty soon you’ve got a record you can be pretty proud of and it’s just because you took the trouble to write it down.
Now, that’s the scientist in me; they keep a log. (LAUGHING)
Scarpino: I was going to say that sounds like something you made from practicing before you became Associate Dean.
Queener: Exactly.
Scarpino: The first question I asked you is when you took over, what did you see as the strength of the existing office? The second question is when you took over, what did you see as shortcomings or things that needed to be shored up?
Queener: I thought our relationship with the programs – graduate directors, chairs – that needed to be elevated. Most of the graduate directors I knew thought of the Graduate Office as a barrier. To the point that you’d find folks tracking down Bill Plater on campus and saying, “Hey, I want to develop such and such a degree; is that okay?” Bill would say “Oh, sure,” and they’d take that as approval, so they didn’t have to go through the Graduate School. I wanted to build the confidence that people could come to us and say, “We’re thinking about this, we really ought to do this, but what do you think?” That took some doing.
Scarpino: I read that when you took over that there were significant budget challenges in the sense that your budget was mixed in with that of Mark Brenner and his office…
Queener: Correct.
Scarpino: And I’m quoting from something that you wrote, that he, “preferred to make case- by-case decisions on expenditures for the Graduate Office” and you noted, again quoting from you, “We didn’t gain full control of our budget until some years later.” They’d obviously been doing it that way; it wasn’t new. Why did you feel a need to gain full control of your budget?
Queener: I don’t think you can manage well if you don’t know what your resources are. If I plan this elaborate program only to discover after the planning that we don’t have the resources to drive it, that’s foolish. That’s wasting staff energy, and worse than that, it’s wasting staff morale. I asked, “Don’t tell me all the money, just tell me some of the money and let us work within those limits and then we’ll come for more if we need it.” And that was kind of the compromise we reached.
Scarpino: Why do you think that you preferred to mingle the budgets?
Queener: Well, there’s the cynical answer, which is that you keep more money, and maybe that’s true; I don’t know. (LAUGHTER) There’s also a less cynical answer, it’s just easier to keep one set of books. But I asked that the Assistant Director in
the Office start keeping sort of a shadow budget so that we could begin to request control of this much money in this kind of category. We were generating our budget that on one fine day maybe we’d actually get control of.
Scarpino: Again, talking about goals when you took over, I read a document that I believe you provided to us on that subject of goals. The document was titled “Review and Assessment Document” and it’s dated April 7, 2000. Less than a year after you took over, and your name is at the head of the document, so I then
concluded that you were the author.
Queener: Right.
Scarpino: The first thing that you did, you did what you called “Goals on Entry to the Position and Actions Taken to Achieve those Goals,” and number one was establish an identity with the Graduate Office.
Queener: Right.
Scarpino: Why was that important or necessary?
Queener: I wanted anybody that saw me walking across campus to think first and foremost there goes the Graduate Office at IUPUI, there goes the representative of
Graduate Programs at IUPUI. I didn’t want Graduate Programs to be as invisible as they had been. I’m not a person that likes the stage necessarily, but it was important that there’d be a face for Graduate Education at IUPUI, and I felt I should be it.
Scarpino: One of the responsibilities of a leader is to be a symbol.
Queener: Yes, yes.
Scarpino: Okay. So, you set out then to establish an identity with yourself as the face of that identity.
Queener: Correct.
Scarpino: You also, in terms of goals, set out to improve working relationship with the Graduate Office with the programs, schools and students. And again, why was that necessary or important?
Queener: What I would see in some of our interactions was that a student might get the runaround. They’d call about something that should be simple, but the person who would know that answer was either not there or busy at something else and they wouldn’t take the call. So, I established the fact that we would answer every question, and that meant we had to have some ability to jump in on people. They couldn’t say, “No; I won’t take that call.” They need to take the call. That was one of the things that we tried to do. In terms of faculty, I tried to make myself accessible. My staff had the instruction that if a faculty person called and needed to talk to me, that if I was in the office, they would track me down, and unless I was in a private meeting, then I would answer that. If I couldn’t answer it, then
get the number and I’d call back, and I would. I think accessibility was the first thing that had to be established.
Scarpino: Again, on the subject of improving working relations with the Graduate Office, I read through the documents you provided and ones that our prior research assistant pulled together for me last year, I noted that you took active roles with the Graduate Student Association…
Queener: Yes.
Scarpino: … Organization and with the Fellowship Committee and served as a contact for faculty, bringing in proposals to the Graduate Affairs Committee. One of the things you said that you did, in the documents that I read, was to improve working relations was to take an active role with the Fellowship Committee.
Could you explain, for the benefit of someone who will look at this thing, what the Fellowship Committee was and is?
Queener: Yes. The Graduate Affairs Committee is the IUPUI committee that oversees graduate programs on this campus.
Scarpino: And that’s a faculty committee.
Queener: That’s a faculty committee. When I first took over, it was a small committee and had mostly administrators, some faculty. I immediately expanded it so that we had representatives of any school who wanted to send a representative. Now, some didn’t, but everybody was included. That, again, was part of the idea of making sure people knew what was going on and had a contact. The Graduate Affairs Committee is sort of the overall committee, and then there are a couple subcommittees under it. One of which is the Fellowship Committee, Fellowship Subcommittee of the Graduate Affairs Committee. That group is responsible for administering the fellowship funds that come through the campus and distributing them appropriately amongst the programs and students. There are a lot of critical decisions to be made. There’s not enough money to go around – never has been, although it’s better now. The idea is that you’ve got to think about ways to leverage what you do have and to try to get more by the use of it, and also to think about programs that are really doing very well and you need to put funds in them because they’re going to build your reputation, and if you can build your reputation, then more funds will come in. That was basically why I thought the Fellowship Committee really, really needed attention.
Scarpino: One could conclude that the main job of the Fellowship Committee was to oversee the spending of the Fellowship budget.
Queener: Correct.
Scarpino: In a little bit, we’re going to talk about how the Fellowship budget was spent, but for now, where did that money come from? What was the source of the funding for the Fellowship Committee’s budget?
Queener: I was never entirely sure before my tenure, but it came through campus resources after I took over.
Scarpino: Was the ultimate source of the money indirect cost on grants?
Queener: I believe it to be the case because the idea was that we, and we said this from early days – the first time I was on the Fellowship Committee was in the ‘80s – we said this money comes to the campus as indirect cost on the research grants…
Scarpino: Right.
Queener: … and therefore, it should go to support graduate programs that have research as a main component. And so that’s how we limited the distribution of the funds.
Scarpino: For the benefit of anyone who listens to this thing and doesn’t understand how the Academy works, in 50 words or less, can you explain what indirect costs are?
Queener: Well, my experience is with National Institutes of Health, but it’s true of many funding agencies. There’s the amount of money that would be designated in that award for the researcher, but there is also recognition that the campus that the researcher is on has a lot that they have to invest in that researcher to make sure that things happen.
Scarpino: Infrastructure, electricity, all of that stuff.
Queener: Exactly, exactly. They add to the amount that comes to the institution what’s called indirect costs, and that varies – it was around 50%. So, if I got $1 million,
$500,000 came -- in addition, $500,000 came to the institution to support what I was doing, and so that’s basically what indirect is.
Scarpino: According to one of the documents that I read, the total Fellowship budget increased from about $1,252,000 in academic year 2000/2001 to $2,318,000 and change in academic year 2011/2012. I’m a human, it’s math, it’s not my
strongpoint, but that’s an increase of about 85%.
Queener: Yes.
Scarpino: Number one, did the increase in the Fellowship budget keep up with the growth of the graduate programs?
Queener: Well, that’s a really good question, Phil. By and large, it did, but there were areas that needed extra funding. Buried in my evaluation of how we were going to spend that $1.2 million that we originally had in the Fellowship budget, I set aside some funds to use to leverage. If a faculty person wrote a grant to support graduate students in whatever field and they needed a match from the campus, the record was people couldn’t find a match, so they didn’t write the grants. I said, “Well, we’ll be the match,” and we were, and we were getting leverage of seven or eight times for that money, which was very, very helpful. And that is one way we helped certain areas, but it was dependent upon the energy in the faculty of finding those possibilities and writing those proposals and then we would do the match. Did we support everybody that was deserving? Probably not, but we tried.
Scarpino: I mentioned the increase from academic year 2000/2001 to academic year 2011/2012 – now, that’s on your watch…
Queener: Right.
Scarpino: … and that’s an amazing increase, 85%. What role did you play in lobbying for an increase?
Queener: Well, I was constantly in people’s ear, but the real credit for it goes to the faculty who were developing these wonderful programs who were being -- their
programs were being reviewed and given outstanding ratings. And I would, in those meetings that Bill Plater staffed, I would simply say, “Here’s what’s going on, you know, we brought this in and this is a success, we need more money to do XY and Z.” The pressure was always there because we were in the room when these budgets were discussed; we had to talk about it.
Scarpino: Was it the Chancellor and the Executive Vice Chancellor who decided how much money went into the Fellowship budget?
Queener: Basically.
Scarpino: Being in that room allowed you to lobby even though you didn’t hold up a sign saying I’m lobbying.
Queener: Right.
Scarpino: Alright.
Queener: Right, it was pretty obvious.
Scarpino: So, attending those meetings was a good idea on multiple levels.
Queener: Multiple levels, multiple levels. You got wind of the things coming along that would affect the Grad Programs, you were able to give people warning of things you were up to, and people got to know you and recognize you. And again, you were the Graduate Programs, the face of it, and it made a difference.
Scarpino: I mean, again, in the interest of full disclosure, I’ve been on the Fellowship Committee for a while…
Queener: Right.
Scarpino: … but I don’t know everything and the Fellowship budget, at least in your time, 2000 to 2011 or so, as I understand it was spent in three areas, at least three main areas – University Fellowships, Block Grants and RIF.
Queener: Yes.
Scarpino: You were also supplementing the Fellowship budget between 2000 and 2012 by spending down accumulated reserves that your predecessor had accumulated.
Queener: That’s right. That’s right.
Scarpino: So thanks to the fiscal conservatism of your predecessor, you had money in drawers.
Queener: Well, that’s right; that’s right.
Scarpino: Can you briefly explain what those funding categories were? What are University Fellowships for somebody who doesn’t know?
Queener: University Fellowships go to the individual student. We would set aside a certain amount of money to fund a certain number of PhD students and a certain number of Masters’ students. And there would be a competition campus-wide – you in History send me your best student application and somebody in Science sends me their best – and the Fellowship Committee decides who amongst these people can we afford to support. Always more students that you can afford to support, but certainly you can support your top cream of the crop.
Scarpino: It’s a way to recruit really good students.
Queener: Really good students
Scarpino: And it’s refereed by the Fellowship Committee, which is a faculty committee.
Queener: That’s exactly right, and the whole campus is represented on that. And the emphasis is that it’s the student. And we had occasions where a student applied to more than one program and would get awarded a fellowship for biology and then shift to chemistry. Well, the student carries that fellowship with them and the biology program would always howl in anguish because they had a fellowship and now it walked over to chemistry, but that’s the way that one worked.
(LAUGHING) Then there was the Block Grant, and the Block Grant was intended to be data-driven, people talked about the successes of their program, we had a format that had to be followed. You had to tell us about who you recruited, how they did, what kind of support they got, did they publish, blah, blah, blah,
graduation rates, so forth and so on, and that mostly benefited the strong programs. We realized that that kind of system could starve out some new programs, so we carved out part of that and said, “alright, we’re going to support new programs who won’t have a track record.” A part of it was set aside for that, and it was to help give that boost to a new program that really wouldn’t
necessarily have access to the kind of funding they needed to bring in a critical mass of graduate students. So, that was a Block Grant, and then the RIF…
Scarpino: Block Grant was again refereed by the Fellowship Committee...
Queener: Correct.
Scarpino: … so it’s faculty refereed and it went to programs, not students…
Queener: Programs, not students.
Scarpino: … but it funds graduate education.
Queener: That’s exactly right.
Scarpino: You’re not supposed to buy coffee or rugs or anything like that with it.
Queener: That’s exactly right. It was graduate programs and for graduate students. Then the RIF – Research Investment Fund – and basically it was a tiny little
percentage of indirect costs that got set aside I think maybe before 1998 or ’97, as something that would automatically come to the Fellowship Committee to spend as they please. Well, it never changed from $400,000 for the years I was there and I lobbied year in year out, “Come on guys, the Research funding has gone up like crazy and you’re just still giving us $400,000.” Couldn’t get that done.
Scarpino: But the fact that, on your watch, the Fellowship budget increased from
$1,252,000 plus to $2,318,000 plus and all of that money goes to graduate education, that is significant in the history of graduate education on this campus.
Queener: Absolutely, and I was very pleased with that and I understood that the campus didn’t want to be locked into a percentage that, in theory, that money could come down if they kept control the way it was. But in fact, it did tend to increase and that was very, very good.
Scarpino: Again, we’re talking about goals and we were talking about the document that I cited a few minutes ago. Your third goal was to establish and expand personal knowledge, that’s your personal knowledge, of issues relating to graduate education.
Queener: Right.
Scarpino: How did you train the boss?
Queener: Well, I went to the New Deans Institute that was run by the Council of Graduate Schools, although I was an Associate Dean. My dean sponsored me, they accepted me, which meant that I got to talk to people from all around the country who were doing the same thing I was doing, stepping into a position and starting out. I went to the meeting, national meeting of the Council of Graduate Schools annual meeting every year. There were individual specific meetings about, well, especially in development of graduate certificates, there were national meetings on that topic, I signed up and went. And Mark Brenner endorsed any of these trips as education, and also to increase visibility of IUPUI at those meetings because it was just the IU Dean who had been there and some of the IU
Associate Deans who’d been there in the past. Mark and I went to a lot of these to say, “Hi, IUPUI, that’s who we are.”
Scarpino: Increasing the visibility of IUPUI is, I mean, it’s partly reputation, but it’s also partly recruiting, that people know about you. . .
Queener: Yes, absolutely, absolutely.
Scarpino: Your fourth goal was assess how to increase visibility and strength of the
Graduate Programs. I think you’ve talked some about that, but is there anything you want to add?
Queener: Well, another big issue was the fact that all the degrees on campus come from either IU or Purdue. That meant in any kind of reputational evaluation, IU at Bloomington or Purdue at West Lafayette, got credit for our degrees. We were invisible. The National Research Council was getting ready for its long-delayed evaluation of research doctorates, and Mark Brenner and I saw that this was cooking up, and so he and I…
Scarpino: That was in 2006.
Queener: Yes. And he and I went to Purdue and talked to the Acting Dean, John Contreni, and said, “We want to do something that we don’t think will hurt Purdue at all, but it will be very, very helpful for IUPUI; will you allow it? And that is, will you allow us to count the degrees, the PhD degrees in the School of Science on our campus and then you would double count them? It’s done in other places; we’ve checked with the NRC folks, they have no problem.” And John said, “I don’t see a problem with that.” Well, that was the first time we’d gotten credit for having any PhD degrees. We were invisible. We didn’t even have a line in those evaluations before; now we did, and we had some very high-ranking programs.
It was very much to our advantage.
Scarpino: You had a goal of accessing the strengths and weaknesses of the staff in the Graduate Office, but I think we’ve talked about that so I’m going to let that one go. The same document, called “Review and Assessment Document” dated April 7, 2000, there you also list accomplishments, and you wrote that the plan for reorganizing how the Fellowship carryover money will be spent and was -- as a success…
Queener: Right.
Scarpino: … and why was having a plan for reorganizing how the Fellowship carryover money would be spent a success?
Queener: I wanted to leverage those funds in such a way that we didn’t have a burst of spending and then no follow up because that’s the worst thing that can happen to a graduate program. You support all your students year one, and then there’s nothing year two and three and four. I thought it was very important for the health of the programs that we would be helping that we had a sustained support. So, we couldn’t spend it all in the first year. There had to be some thought given to how to spread this out, so it helped the programs prepare for what we hoped was going to be a growth in campus spending, and it turned out that was true. By the time we used up all of that hidden money, the campus support pretty much picked up where we left off. We dropped off a couple of things that weren’t working all that well, but…
Scarpino: The fact that there was Fellowship carryover money meant that under the previous Associate Dean, the Fellowship Committee was not spending the money it had at its disposal.
Queener: It wasn’t, and I don’t mean to blame Sheila here…
Scarpino: No, I’m not asking you to do that, I’m just say that there’s – I’m going in a different – there’s a different philosophy at work here.
Queener: Yeah, yeah. And it was not easy to ferret out. I just ran into Simon Rhodes the other day and he said he had had the same experience in his budget. Suddenly there was $300,000 that he didn’t have before because it was just kind of hidden somewhere. It’s the accounting at the University is so arcane and so hard to track down that you can have money sort of sifting into the cracks until you really ask people to dig into it, and then they can sort it out for you. And that’s what happened with us. We just asked them to keep digging until they could explain what money was actually spendable for us and that’s the number they came up with.
Scarpino: Again, under that success category called, “developing a plan for spending the Fellowship carryover money,” one of the things that happened relatively early on in your watch was to increase the stipend for PhD candidates who were
Fellowships from $11,000 a year to $18,000 a year.
Queener: Correct.
Scarpino: Why did you feel the need to do that?
Queener: I did an analysis of…
Scarpino: And I’m guess that that -- I mean, you didn’t write the checks, but this was your idea.
Queener: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I did an analysis of our peer institutions and what their fellowship amounts were. And then I looked at the elites and then I looked at some others, and we didn’t even beat the others. We certainly didn’t compare to the elites and we were woefully below our peers. I looked for a number that was compatible with what we had available and would bring us to the top of our peer group. I didn’t want to go out of sight, but I did want to be something that, you know, that would not be the determining factor for a student, you’re about the same as some of the peers. And that was just -- it seemed to be sensible. And the Fellowship Committee did vote on that and they were pleased with it.
Scarpino: And I assume that, in addition to things like equity and so on, part of the reason for this was to make the IUPUI programs competitive for good students.
Queener: Exactly, exactly.
Scarpino: Did it work?
Queener: It did. It did. We started bringing in some of the top choices of programs. What we’d seen in the past is people would make offers to their top students and they’d go somewhere else. Well, you knew why – just not competitive. The program might be competitive, but the support wasn’t. So, now people started bringing in top students.
Scarpino: Another thing you did was to increase the number of fellowships for Masters’
candidates.
Queener: Correct.
Scarpino: And why the interest in Masters’ candidates?
Queener: Well, I had come to understand the strength of the Masters’ programs on this campus. There were several that were producing theses that were winning awards various places – that came a little bit later – but I was reading these things as they would come through the office and they were really, really good and I thought that our clientele, the students that we draw from, a Masters’
degree can be exactly what they need and that here we had this quality faculty and the programs that can offer what these students needed, we ought to support more of them and see how they can grow.
Scarpino: And did the decision to increase the number of fellowships for Masters’
candidates – and I’ll point out just for the benefit of anybody who’s using this, the University Fellowships support first year students…
Queener: Right, right.
Scarpino: … in research-based programs.
Queener: Right.
Scarpino: Did that succeed in attracting more qualified applicants to the programs?
Queener: I believe it did, certainly the numbers went up.
Scarpino: Okay. Again, under successes, you stated that you succeeded in starting collaboration with the Medic-B program – and it’s Medic-B for anybody who’s trying to look this up, in Bloomington. What is Medic-B?
Queener: It was a diversity program and so it had many of the same goals as some programs that were here on this campus. They had trouble placing students in research labs. Well, I thought, we’ve got more that enough research capacity and, if we establish a connection, then that will drive a better connection between laboratories between the two campuses and so forth. And so, that’s what we did and it worked.
Scarpino: So, this was a medicine program or a science program?
Queener: A science program, yeah.
Scarpino: And again, you mentioned, under accomplishments, you brought the English as a Second Language Policy forward to the Graduate Affairs Committee, and you’ve already talked about what Graduate Affairs is, but why is that an
accomplishment?
Queener: Again, I was studying the data as hard as I could trying to get a sense of what graduate education was like on campus, and I saw a number of international students dropped out in their first semester-- ever made it to their second semester. So, I talked to some faculty and they said, “Well, these people come in with terrible language skills.” Well, they took the GRE, but in that period of time, certainly in China, there were mechanisms to get around actually taking the GRE.
Scarpino: You didn’t have to actually have to take it yourself, that’s what you’re saying?
Queener: Exactly.
Scarpino: Yes. . .
Queener: A substitute could be hired. People would come in knowing little or no English.
So, I really felt that was a disservice to the students. We also had occasions where the students then just disappear, which I thought could be a legal issue. I spoke to Bill Plater about this and I said, “What would you think about making a requirement that students be tested before they start their program? And if they don’t have language skills adequate to the task, we never really finish the admission process; we put them into a remedial or send them home.” And he was in support of it, and amazingly, we brought kind of a watered-down version of that to the Graduate Affairs Committee and people around the table said, “No, it’s got to be hard-nosed, it’s got to be 100%,” which I was grateful for. I thought I couldn’t push that, so I had come in with something a little softer. But they were happy to back having an absolute requirement that they come in, they’d take that exam, and if they don’t pass it, they have to go into an English language program or go home. If they have intermediate scores and skills, then we could put them in some remedial English classes, but that was an absolute requirement.
Scarpino: In 2000, when this report that I’m quoting from was written, IUPUI admitted many, many, many foreign students. I mean, there were some programs that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for foreign students…
Queener: Correct.
Scarpino: … for whom English was not their first language.
Queener: Yes.
Scarpino: Did that pattern of admission present challenges and/or opportunities for the new Associate Dean?
Queener: It did. There were programs, such as Physics and Mathematics, that were strongly against any English language requirement. They voted against it but were outvoted and the campus policy went forward. I kept arguing that they should present that as a strength of the program – we will test you and see that you get the language skills you need to succeed. They didn’t see it that way, and I had some very interesting arguments, especially with the Mathematics faculty, one of whom said, “Well, if you’re going to test for English, you should test for
mathematics skills too on entry.” And I thought about that and I said, “That’s a good idea; why don’t you take that project on.” I never saw the project.
Scarpino: You listed as an accomplishment working -- established working style with Graduate Office staff, and I think you’ve talked about that at some length. You also provided us with another document dated 2002, which looked to me like it was the text of PowerPoint slides, that you must have done a PowerPoint and then just printed out the text.
Queener: I did a lot of those, yeah.
Scarpino: It states your original goals for 1999, which we’ve talked about, and goes on to update your accomplishments through the end of 2001. And you listed five accomplishments, which I think are worth getting into the record because we can get them all in one place, and so I’m going to mention these and then we’re going to talk about some of them. The accomplishments you listed in this document dated 2002 were that you clarified accounting for Fellowship funds, and it turned out that that freed up $1.2 million, which that took a lot of clarifying, and we talked about that. . .
Queener: Right.
Scarpino: . . .Number two, you created a plan for reallocation of Fellowship carryover funds that we’ve also talked about. You refocused the Graduate Office on service that you have talked about, and you reorganized the Graduate Affairs Committee with Mark Brenner, Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education at IUPUI, who was in charge of that. And then the final was that you improved recruiting, especially in minority recruiting, and you put Robert Kasberg in charge of that. . . Queener: Correct, correct.
Scarpino: I want to talk a little bit about the last two – reorganized Graduate Affairs Committee and working with Mark Brenner, who was Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education at IUPUI, we talked about who he was already. What were you doing and how did you -- because you don’t run the Graduate Affairs Committee, you weren’t the boss, so how did you manage to get it reorganized?
Queener: Actually, Mark let me run it.
Scarpino: Oh, alright, okay. . .
Queener: He chaired it, but he pretty much let me handle the agenda and bring things forward. He was actually a generous boss. He had his hands full on the Research side and he was happy to let me do my thing with the Graduate Education side. The main thing that I saw that was a problem was that we did not have representation by the right people. We didn’t have a lot of the Graduate Program directors, we didn’t have a lot of the Admissions Officers, faculty
Admissions people from various programs, and we didn’t have all schools represented. I thought it was very important that we get representation from every school that had an active Graduate Program. And so I invited the Deans to
nominate people and they could change from year-to-year if they chose, but it was basically to get everybody with some skin in the game. And having a vote, having the discussion so that they heard what the priorities were, having all these things happen in a more transparent way was actually my idea, and I think it worked by and large. People did attend that Committee, which is, when you think about it – you want to go spend an hour and a half talking about Graduate stuff, oh, golly, maybe not – but we had enough meaty topics that people did come and it was important that we had the discussion.
Scarpino: The fifth point that I wanted to touch on a little bit was improved recruiting, especially minority, and you put Robert Kasberg in your office in charge of that.
Queener: Right.
Scarpino: How did you go about improving the minority recruiting and do you think you were successful?
Queener: We had minimal success, but some. First of all, we identified it as a priority, which made the Program sort of perk up and listen. We had some funding that was available. We encouraged some faculty to write some rather big grants – T32s, T35s, I don’t remember what the exact titles are, but these are training grants through NIH and other places specifically for minority students. We helped those faculty get the information they needed to write a successful grant proposal. We worked with them on a proposal. We offered to sit on the Board of Directors with those different projects. So, overall, through the years, yes, I think we were successful, but not all through the Graduate Office. We supported a lot of what faculty did and we made it a priority, and I think that was helpful too.
Scarpino: We’ve talked about reallocating funds and Block Grants and things. (pause) When you talked about the refocusing of Graduate Affairs and you talked about your role and what Mark Brenner encouraged you to do and so on, one of the things that I saw, when I read about that, was the adoption of new procedures for program reviews…
Queener: Yes.
Scarpino: … in the Fall of 1999. Now, in the Fall of 1999, you’re the boss; I mean, you’re the Associate Dean, so I assume that you’re talking about the Program of External Reviews of Programs on the campus where outside reviewers come in and they’re joined by some IUPUI faculty and administrators and then they undergo a formal review every five years or so.
Queener: Right.
Scarpino: What were these new procedures and why were they needed?
Queener: Well, this is all kind of hard to explain because there were many different things going on at the same time. Program Evaluation was Trudy Banta’s bailiwick.
Scarpino: She was Vice Chancellor?
Queener: Vice Chancellor, right, for Institutional Planning and so forth. She ran really wonderful evaluation programs for undergraduate degrees, and it pushed -- it pushed having the same principles so that she had something to measure against, and just all kinds of things embedded in it, and she was internationally known for that work. Well, we didn’t have anything for the Graduate side. The School…
Scarpino: So up until the fall of 1999, Graduate Programs were not included in those reviews?
Queener: They were supposed to be reviewed by the Graduate School, but it hadn’t happened in forever.
Scarpino: Okay, okay.
Queener: There was one program review of the Department of Pathology in 1987 and I chaired that, and that was brought about because there were some
administrative issues. So, that was kind of what happened; if your administrator got in real trouble, then there was a review, but routine reviews didn’t happen.
Over the years, and it didn’t all happen in ’99, over the years, we talked about ways to evaluate degrees; existing degrees. I helped, along with Bill Bosron and some other folks, I helped Trudy Banta get a set of Principles of Graduate Education so you had something to measure against, and that became a routine part of the evaluation of Graduate Programs. Now, that, I don’t remember the exact date when that started being used.
Scarpino: And we still use them -- the Principles of Graduate Education.
Queener: We do, yeah, we do, and it was just a set of general things, so you had a
framework to try to look at the success or health of a program. At the same time, we were developing ways to evaluate a proposal for a Graduate degree. It was very much ad hoc in 1999, and through the years, these things went through committees and people judged according to their own experiences and there really wasn’t a strong sense of how it was done. Well, in 2006, when the new Dean, John Slattery, came in to the Graduate School, he had a vision for a very rigorous evaluation of a new program proposal, and it included external
reviewers from a peer or aspirational peer institution, a different campus of IU, and then several from the campus itself, and this would be a written review. It seemed to me to make all kinds of sense. So, I immediately embraced it.
Interestingly enough, Bloomington refused. The home campus did not institute the Dean’s proposal, but we did. And based upon the fact that we were doing this state-of-the-art kind of review for new proposals, Dean Slattery allowed us to have better control of program development because we were giving a state-of- the-art review right up front. So, the Graduate Affairs Committee was
empowered to act for the Graduate School and then that streamlined the process.
Scarpino: The new procedures for program reviews really -- one was reviews of existing programs, and the other was reviews of proposed programs.
Queener: Correct, correct.
