Creating a Vibrant Department - (Re)learning Lessons from the Past
By Dave Kung, Director of Policy @dtkung @utdanacenter
Dave Kung
What would an ideal mathematics department look like?
One where lots of students study math for the love of it, including those from groups historically excluded from the math community? A place where everyone works together to support students? One where faculty and students pull in the same direction toward a deeper understanding and appreciation for mathematics? A department that produces academic leaders, first on its own campus and then in graduate school and beyond? A place where everyone, from the students to the staff to the faculty, feels like they are a valued member of a community?
Early in my career, I’d heard about such a mythical mathematical Shangri-La, but instead of being nestled in the mountains of China, it was a stone’s throw from Canada in upstate New York. The stories about the SUNY–Potsdam math department of the 1980s made it sound too good to be true:
Over 20% of Potsdam’s students majored in mathematics, with numbers surpassing all but the largest universities.
The department included a large number of African American math majors, unlike its peer institutions.
Nearly every valedictorian—half of them women—represented the department.
Many students went on to successfully complete graduate degrees in mathematics.
Faculty and students bonded in a cohesive community over a love of the subject.
Incoming students with previously undistinguished records were drawn into the math community and soon started flourishing.
I imagined traveling back in time, hanging out on campus for a few days and meeting Potsdam’s then chair, Dr. Clarence Stephens, to learn the secrets of their successes. I knew that Stephens had been the ninth African American to earn a doctorate in mathematics and that he had moved to Potsdam after a successful career at Morgan State University, a historically Black institution just up the road from me in Maryland. But I also knew that Potsdam’s heyday had passed—and that Marty McFly wasn't going to appear in a DeLorean to whisk me back to the ’80s.
Potsdam’s Forward-Thinking Department
Visiting Potsdam’s “miracle” myself wasn’t going to happen, but I stumbled upon the next best thing: someone who had actually visited this mythical department back in the ’80s. When Rick Luttman spent three days at the SUNY–Potsdam campus, he was so inspired that he wrote a memo detailing what he’d seen after he returned to his campus at Sonoma State in California.
When I first read Rick’s memo, I was amazed. In my work as director of MAA Project NExT and as director of policy at the Dana Center, I work hard to stay on top of the latest research on teaching and learning—research-based innovations like active learning, growth mindset, corequisite supports (replacing remedial courses), and attention to student motivation. This three-page memo from 1987 laid out all of the strategies that Stephens and his colleagues used to create a vibrant and inclusive mathematics department. That memo read like an overview of much more recent ideas. The Potsdam team seemingly had access to that elusive time machine, allowing them to benefit from future decades of educational research.
Too good to believe? Read it yourself. Seriously. I’ll wait.
With a succinct seven strategies, the memo covers the philosophy underlying Potsdam’s success. Looking past the dated surface details (e.g., the typewritten font, exclusively male pronouns, and reverence for “pure” over applied math), prescient truths emerge—things that every department in the country could work on to better support their students.
The memo starts by claiming that “success in mathematics is due much more to hard work than to innate talent.” Carol Dweck and her team of growth mindset researchers could hardly have said it better, though their research program didn’t start until years after Stephens and his colleagues were inculcating their students with a growth mindset.
Potsdam faculty “suspended disbelief” about students’ past records, replacing what we would now call a deficit mindset (focused on what students are missing) with an asset-based one (focused on what strengths they possess). Providing students with opportunities to succeed, and then celebrating those successes, attends to their morale as well as their mathematical knowledge.
Potsdam’s disdain for remedial coursework and high-stakes placement tests long predates research on the effectiveness of corequisite supports and multiple measures placement (the subject of the last Dana Center Connections post), which have drastically improved student outcomes over the last decade.
Thirty years before the National Academies showed that passive lectures were associated with a 55% higher drop/fail rate, the Potsdam faculty already knew to “[a]bandon the traditional lecture format of teaching. It rarely works.” Dr. Stephens and his colleagues were actively engaging students in their classrooms decades before the MAA’s Instructional Practices Guide laid out dozens of different ways to do so.
In terms of what they focused on in their classes, the Potsdam faculty knew to avoid “racing through a long syllabus that students are largely not going to absorb anyway and leaving them panting and breathless and overwhelmed and discouraged after the final exam.” Unfortunately, most college calculus courses still force students through an impossibly long list of topics, with negative impacts on students’ attitudes in all but the most innovative of classrooms.
If I’m being honest, many of the students I’ve taught came away with a view of math as a long list of techniques. How much more motivated would they have been had I centered “the philosophy… the essential idea”? As Ken Bain documented two decades after Luttman’s visit, the best college teachers structure their courses around a small number of core concepts or questions. How many of our college math courses begin with a motivating overview of the main point of the course, avoiding the jargon that students don’t yet understand?
Luttman’s memo on SUNY–Potsdam closes with what I see as the most important point. The culture of a high-functioning mathematics department depends on building an atmosphere “of total support for the student. …There must be a loving, supportive, almost familial atmosphere in the department, a sense of community, of mutual support, everyone helping everyone else… There is no place for competitiveness, except to the extent that every faculty and student in the institution are on the same team.” The importance of attending to the strong human desire to be part of a supportive community underpins much more modern advice, from Rochelle Gutierrez’s rehumanizing mathematics to Francis Su’s human flourishing.
The No Criticism Zone
When I was a new faculty member (and a new NExTer) , I learned one particular strategy for improving a departmental climate. At the time, I thought the idea originated at Sonoma State; later I learned that it started at Potsdam (though it’s not discussed in Luttman’s memo). The idea is surprisingly simple and was transformative for us at St. Mary’s College of Maryland: The No Criticism Zone.
The faculty agreed to never, under any circumstances, gripe, complain, or openly criticize students or student work in any place where any student might hear it. No astonishment at a baseless exam answer. No breathless frustration at the off-the-wall response in class. No griping—at least not in public.
When Jean Bee Chen introduced us to the No Criticism Zone, I loved the idea and brought it back to my department. I figured it would improve the atmosphere because students who heard our grumbling might think we were talking about them or their friends, and they’d be more positive without that experience. Only after living with that pledge for a few years did I understand its real power.
When we had to duck into an office and close the door to complain about students, we did it less often. And when we spent less time griping about our students’ shortcomings, we thought differently about our students. This simple rule—one that we all agreed to every year and that eventually included our undergraduate assistants—helped move us away from a deficit view of students and toward an asset perspective. By changing how we thought about students, we helped replicate the loving, supportive atmosphere at Potsdam. It’s the closest thing I’ve found to a silver bullet for creating a supportive, inclusive environment.
What’s Holding Us Back?
Rick Luttman first shared his memo with me in 2015, and since then, I’ve framed one of the breakout sessions for NExTers around his description of the SUNY–Potsdam miracle. Many years of discussing these ideas with excited young faculty have prompted me to, borrowing a phrase from K–12 mathematics education, notice and wonder.
Nothing in the memo specifically mentions race or gender. Could treating all students with the care and respect that they deserve close the achievement gaps persistent in most institutions? What does that say about the treatment that students from minoritized groups currently receive?
The strategies successful at Potsdam, described so succinctly in the memo, have been known for more than three decades. And they haven’t been kept secret; similar descriptions appeared in a 1987 American Math Monthly article and in Dr. Stephens' MAA Service Award citation. So why haven’t more departments adopted these strategies? What’s holding us back from creating more supportive, inclusive environments? Or as my therapist might rephrase it, what hidden purposes do our current, unsupportive, exclusionary actions serve?
I encourage you to share Luttman’s memo with your friends, your colleagues, and your department. This remarkable document gives us all a roadmap for taking that ideal department from the category of myth, miracle, or historical anomaly, to reality, creating a more vibrant, inclusive environment for everyone around us.
Dave Kung leads the policy work at the Charles A. Dana Center, which includes in-depth policy analysis and the development of tools and briefs for systems, regions, and states. He also serves as director of MAA Project NExT, a professional development program serving math faculty early in their careers. His breakout session for NExTers, “Creating a Vibrant and Inclusive Community” is framed around Luttman’s memo.