Starting fresh

New titles, new names, new college home

The new college has four chairs among the nine departments who are “new” in one way or another. Heidi Barajas is new to the role and heads a newly created department. Ken Bartlett is new to the role, heading a department that existed in the old college but which has a new name.

Jan McCulloch and Jean Quam are not new to their roles nor are their departments new, but they have moved from a college whose departments were divided into three different colleges and theirs landed in this new College of Education and Human Development. This is a welcome to them all, whatever form their “newness” takes.

Heidi Barajas

Heidi Barajas, chair of the new Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning (PsTL) pictures many possibilities for PsTL in the new College of Education and Human Development: a new major in disability studies, bringing service learning to a wider audience, and a focus on multidisciplinary teaching and research, to name just a few.

The closure of General College and its reformation as PsTL has not come about without pain and a strong sense of loss. Fear that the college’s closure would mean an end to the University’s support of broad access to higher education has not totally died away. But the new chair is positive.

“I’m excited about this on multiple levels,” says Barajas, an associate professor of sociology on the PsTL faculty. “I see many of the issues on students’ success and access that we did in General College now being discussed and spilling out across the University. It was always there, but I don’t know that our voice was listened to—it was considered a highly specialized area with a unique population.”

Barajas predicts that the work of PsTL faculty on developmental education will have a bigger platform in the new college. She is thrilled about more opportunities for collaboration between faculty and that these alliances will happen more easily and organically with everyone housed in the same college.

Collaboration has been important to Barajas throughout her career. After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Utah, she came to the University to get a Ph.D. in sociology. In 1999, Barajas joined the General College faculty at the behest of Terry Collins, then director of academic affairs and later interim dean of both General College and the new College of Education and Human Development.

“I didn’t think I would find a fit anywhere. I am a critical sociologist who also does considerable outreach to communities, and I do service-learning in the classroom. I am a woman of color doing research on race. I thought all those things together wouldn’t work,” she says. “But they wanted everything I did and thought it was a good thing, not a drawback.”

She focuses her research on race, class, and gender issues in public schools. Last year she was part of a research team from the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement, a collegewide center in both the previous and new College of Education and Human Development. They did a five-year project to transform school counselors into academic advocates for students.

“We are in a time of really exciting change because we can decide how that change can happen,” she says. “We are a department now, and we have opportunities to do things in collaboration within the new college that we might not have allowed ourselves to do before. That comes from both sides.”

—Suzy Frisch

Ken Bartlett

Ken Bartlett, the new chair of the Department of Work and Human Resources Education (WHRE), opened this year’s fall department retreat with a slide show of New Zealand sunrises. “Brand New Day,” a pop song by Sting, played in the background. Bartlett explained that New Zealand, where he grew up and attended college, is among the first countries to see the sun rise across the international dateline. “We greet the new day before anyone else in the world,” he said.

A brand new day is a good metaphor for Bartlett’s vision for WHRE. The department has a new name, they belong to a newly reconstituted college, and they are looking forward to leadership from a new dean. “Perfect” is how Bartlett describes the new department name. “It aligns us to the broader field of study on the international stage. We are positioned to assume world leadership around research, teaching, and outreach in the areas of education for and about work.”

Bartlett’s own research is generating useful knowledge for employers. He has discovered that employees who have access to and participate in training and professional development feel more commitment to their employer. Previous research showed how professional development could improve employee productivity. Bartlett’s findings broaden understanding of the benefits of workplace training and development.

Bartlett also is studying alternative models for career and vocational preparation. He has studied training and development policy and practices in nations around the Pacific Rim. In the United States he is researching the relative advantages and disadvantages of technical professionals earning degrees in their field versus completing industry-led certification programs.

Recognizing how emerging providers change competition and opportunities for work and human resources education will be essential in the coming years. “Postsecondary and workplace learning is accepted and supported in the United States,” Bartlett says, but he does not take that status for granted. An increasing number of non-traditional education pathways to careers and career advancement exist. “We need to look at the effectiveness and efficiency with which we do our core work,” he observes.

Bartlett came to the University of Minnesota in 1999 from the University of Illinois, where he completed graduate studies. “I’m excited to be here,” he says about becoming chair after only seven years in the department. With all the recent changes he sees an opportunity for building a new department.

As part of its strategic planning, WHRE will consider new programs for incoming freshmen. Bartlett says, “We can offer a quality education. Freshmen interested in our content will gain great value from our programs. We have a very talented faculty.

“We need to build on our proud history of providing world-class vocational and technical education. With our new name and the other changes occurring in the college and University we embrace our history, while we move on. This is a brand new day.”

—Robert J. Utke

Jan McCulloch

For Jan McCulloch, chair of the Department of Family Social Science, the road to higher education was not a direct one. She started out as a vocational home economics teacher, moving often with her husband, a career military pilot. For a few years, they left the military to run a dairy farm. “We milked 120 cows a day, grew all of our own food, and it was a really interesting, enlightening experience,” says McCulloch.

Shortly after, life changed drastically when, while living in Germany after rejoining the military, McCulloch’s husband died of a heart attack. At 36, with a young son, McCulloch headed back to school, ending up with a Ph.D. and a position on the faculty at the University of Kentucky.

“I was in my mid-40s before I had a real job in higher education, yet I don’t think I’m different from a lot of women of my era—you figure it out as you go and take advantage of opportunities as they arrive.”

McCulloch describes herself as “a true egghead” who likes to consider the broader questions of aging, focusing on factors that impact the health of the rural elderly. For 20 years, she has studied many factors in rural life that impact health outcomes in later life, such as lower levels of formal education, fewer number of job opportunities, greater job risks because of dangers associated with farming, and geographical isolation from health services.

“At the same time, there is this ethos of great independence—of being able to manage with what you have—making it less likely for rural elders to seek healthcare,” she explains. “Many tell me they want to die on the tractor.”

McCulloch’s recent work looks at depression. Many older Americans, not just in rural areas, have been hesitant to identify and accept the diagnosis of depression. “In our study of older farmers, they didn’t even want to answer questions about depression. They said it didn’t have anything to do with farming,” says McCulloch. “Yet the proportion of depression among farmers matched the prevalence rate for the overall elder population.”

McCulloch sees her career as very balanced between service to professional organizations, teaching, and research. Currently, she is vice chair of the Metropolitan Area Agency on Aging, an organization that works to improve the quality of services for older adults.

About the department’s new home in the new College of Education and Human Development, McCulloch says, “It has been a real loss to see our nationally-ranked College of Human Ecology come to an end—all my degrees are from colleges like that.” At the same time, there is a real excitement about opportunities for new collaborations. “The new arrangement opens up unlimited possibilities for multidisciplinary work,” she says, “and we’re all excited to see the promise of that work unfold.”

—Mary Beth Leone-Getten

Jean Quam

Jean Quam, director of the School of Social Work, has spent 25 years studying marginalized elderly—old women, the chronically mentally ill, and older sexual minorities.

Born and raised in North Dakota, Quam spent several years as a social worker before completing a Ph.D. in social welfare at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1981. She was recruited to teach at Minnesota that same year and became an early pioneer in the study of older lesbian and gay adults, often struggling for funding in a little-studied, sometimes controversial area.

Through years of research, Quam has discovered that “older gays and lesbians are concerned about mostly the same issues as everyone else—having enough money, a good place to live, health, and people they care about around them as they get older. Those who have really embraced their sexual orientation often have an easier time with aging than the rest of the population because they have already dealt with significant change through the ‘coming out’ experience,” Quam says.

In 1991, Quam became both a full professor and director of the School of Social Work. That same year, Quam and her partner adopted their first child, an infant son named Jaime, from Peru, followed in 1994 by son Sam, now 12, adopted as an infant from Paraguay.

Quam seems most proud of the ways in which her work has been put into action to improve lives. Early in her career at the University, Quam and a group of faculty partnered with Hennepin County to design a new residential care model for older adults who had been mentally ill their whole lives, since none of the job-skills/independent living programs fit the needs of retirement-age people. In addition, she has led efforts to get more trained social workers into rural areas of the state.

In 2001, Quam was one of 10 faculty and staff to receive the University’s Breaking the Silence award, after filing a discrimination complaint that led to equitable domestic partner benefits for GLBT faculty, staff, and students at the University.

“I value the absolute importance of relationships—in my research, with my colleagues, in my life,” says Quam. “My door is always open, and I work hard to create a work environment that is family friendly.”

As for the School of Social Work’s transition to the new college, Quam knows one of the biggest challenges is the size and complexity of the college. “It takes an extraordinary amount of effort to keep faculty together when they are physically in different locations—but there is a lot we can do with technology and incentives to motivate faculty to work together and to teach together across disciplines.

“We can build wonderful connections that cover the full lifespan around child welfare, connecting communities and families to schools, adoption issues… It will be exciting to see the range of new ideas and projects we develop together.”