IHUM Self-Study Report

As mandated by the Area One legislation for Introduction to the Humanities approved by the Faculty Senate in May 1997, the IHUM Program undertook a self-study, beginning in the fall of 2001 and continuing through winter 2003. The purpose of the self-study, as presented in the legislation, is to evaluate the success of IHUM courses and IHUM's administrative structures in meeting the objectives and specifications of the legislation.

Our students live in an increasingly polarized and inhumane world: on the one hand, technological innovation continues to promise, and to deliver, changes in the way that they think, study, do business, conduct their lives. On the other hand, one need look at just one sector of this technological realm, the media, for images of extreme violence that permeate our culture, as well as for confirmation of the facts of global warfare, genocide, poverty, and human suffering on an unparalleled scale.

The students who arrive in our classrooms as freshmen are increasingly out of touch with the humanities in the largest sense, and yet it is precisely a strong foundation in the humanities and the values implicit in them, respect for insight, appreciation of perspective, taste for complexity, awareness of the breadth of human experience, that they need.

The challenge facing the IHUM Program, and Stanford more generally in the coming years, is truly to engage students in humanistic learning. We mean this in the broadest possible way. In a sense, what we ask of a successful humanities program is a very traditional thing: support for the liberal values of freedom, human rights, respect for individuals. We do not think that a traditional humanities program will address today's issues, though, and so we are certainly not intending to suggest that we should return to a canon of the great western thinkers, which led in part to the formation of the liberal west. We think, and our faculty and fellows seem to agree, that a humanities program today should update and globalize that Eurocentric notion of liberalism (and the canon that accompanies it).

However, we are also not suggesting that we should substitute a multicultural canon for the Eurocentric one; the noble experiment of Cultures, Ideas, and Values can no longer be resurrected. Our faculty and fellows are, in the main, opposed to an approach to diversity that would simply require dropping into syllabi sample works by authors of color. We do think that the current Area One Program has the right focus for equipping students to live in a multicultural world: teaching analytic skills, critical abilities, habits of mind rather than specified content. In furtherance of this goal, we would like to see as a more specific goal of IHUM the cultivation of a humane sensibility.

Teaching humanities in an effective, engaging way is an expensive, time-intensive commitment. Such engaging teaching is virtually impossible, in our view, through large lecture courses alone. The experience that shapes, challenges, and at times even changes a student happens in much closer contact with a gifted teacher; and it happens rarely enough that we need to maximize the chances that it will happen at all, through offering students a number of different venues for this contact: many small course experiences, as well as extracurricular events focusing on the humanities (discussions with authors, dorm talks by leading intellectuals, film series). We owe it to our students to make sure those life-shaping experiences happen. If Stanford intends to educate America's, and the world's, future leaders, it needs to equip them to deal with the new world in the making.

In the following pages (and linked appendices), we document in some detail the ways in which the IHUM Program as currently constituted has taken strides in the past few years towards achieving the mission outlined above. We also document ongoing challenges, both external and internal, associated with achieving that mission. To summarize these findings:

Building a New Curriculum: In the years since 1997-98, the IHUM Program has developed and offered a wide array of courses with illustrious faculty, both for the interdisciplinary, critical skills-based fall quarter courses, and for the more discipline-based winter/spring courses. Far more faculty and departments/programs participate than did in the older CIV structure: we now have 40 faculty per year involved (as opposed to 20 per year in CIV) and 19 departments and programs (as opposed to seven in CIV). Our extensive course evaluation data indicate that these courses are good (even really exciting) now, and are consistently improving over the years.
Fostering Informed Student Choice: Informed student choice has been furthered both by the one-two structure of IHUM (students pick their winter/spring classes late in fall quarter, with the benefit of advising, rather than before their arrival to Stanford), and by yearly improvements in the course assignment process. Crucial to student satisfaction, we currently place an average of 95% students in either their first or their second choice course.
Building an IHUM Fellows Program: The use of postdoctoral scholars as section leaders has proven to be a productive and mutually beneficial practice for the program and the fellows: the program benefits from the presence of a cohort of 35 intellectually passionate, well trained young academics who consistently achieve enviable teaching evaluations (for good reason). The fellows find financial and professional development support, both as scholars and as teachers, for their transition into regular academic positions: we have placed approximately 45% of our fellows in tenure-track positions, with another 45% entering other academic positions (for example, visiting professor, lecturer, post-doctoral researcher).
Emphasizing Pedagogy: We have encouraged and staged various activities in fulfillment of our legislated mandate to emphasize pedagogy, including course design meetings; weekly staff meetings for all teaching teams; workshops for IHUM faculty; training and orientation workshops for fellows, and an evaluation plan emphasizing mid-quarter assessment.
Improving Student Writing: While it is impossible to pinpoint all the components at work in this category, or to ascribe all of the improvement to IHUM, students do demonstrably improve their writing skills during the course of their year in IHUM. The Stanford Study of Writing shows that students in IHUM demonstrate progressively enhanced abilities to construct engaging intellectual problems, questions and puzzles; to structure arguments; and to engage carefully and critically with texts.

We divide these challenges up into external and internal groups. The external challenges are not under IHUM's sole control. In some cases, the internal challenges are not solely in our purview either, but at least the attempted solutions are.

Recruiting Faculty: Recruiting faculty remains an issue for us, particularly for our fall interdisciplinary courses. This is not a matter of sheer numbers. We want and need to recruit faculty who can teach in an informed and responsible (not to mention exciting) way the culturally diverse courses that both students and faculty tell us are necessary in the program. An additional issue involves navigating as best as we can the various demands on departments and programs to offer sufficient courses to their own undergraduate and graduate students, and to fulfill Freshman Seminar obligations (and desires), while at the same time supporting this core humanities requirement.
Budget Concerns: Like other programs at Stanford, IHUM is subject to budget pressures. We want to make sure that any changes to the program are driven by educational goals, not financial ones, especially in this unique freshman-year program. Three examples of financially-driven changes we would see as unhelpful are decreasing our number of fellows; increasing section size; and increasing the teaching/student load of fellows.
Student Culture: We would like to change the student culture that views IHUM as bad precisely because it is required. We have seen some improvement in this area, but not enough.

Clarifying the Rationale and Purpose of IHUM's Structure: Our survey results make abundantly clear to us that we need to clarify the reasons for the 1-2 structure of IHUM to everybody, in particular to faculty and to students (IHUM fellows, probably as a result of their training, seem a little clearer on the reasons for the structure).
Nurturing Diversity in Our Curriculum: Besides recruiting faculty who would bring diverse perspectives to course design, as we have mentioned above, we need to nurture diversity both through our hiring of fellows and through our work with teaching teams on course development.
Improving Faculty-Fellow Working Relations: We need to foster consistently productive collegial relationships between faculty and fellows, for example in developing courses through teaching-teamwork; in clarifying course goals; in actively relating section to lecture; and, on a different level, in establishing mentoring relationships between faculty and fellows, who are future colleagues in their academic fields.
Cultivating Consistency in Student Learning Experiences: We need to maintain student learning at a consistently high level, where both "consistent" and "high" should be emphasized. Concerns here include section sizes; equity of grading and workload across courses and sections; and quality of learning in section.
Developing IHUM's Teaching Goals in the Context of the Changing Writing Requirement: Following naturally from the last desideratum, we need to adjust in not-yet-known, but surely supportive, ways, to the developing structure of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, especially regarding the reorientation in PWR 2 courses toward oral communication.

In the pages that follow, we present our self-study. We focus on the ways that the IHUM Program has, in its first five years of existence, addressed the objectives and requirements of the IHUM legislation, and we evaluate the success of those efforts. In "Program Accomplishments" and "Ongoing and Anticipated Challenges" we present the results of both our self-reflection and our constituents' views on IHUM's efforts and effects in its first five years. We discuss each topic using representative examples and evidence. In the appendices, "Feedback from IHUM's Constituents," we summarize the vast amount of data we collected in the course of completing our self-study. The appendices also provide access to fuller documentation available in the digital form of this document.

The legislation for the Area One requirement enacted in 1997, calling for the creation of the Introduction to the Humanities (IHUM) Program, continues some emphases of Stanford's earlier Area One programs at the same time that it charts a new direction. As in the Western Culture and Cultures, Ideas, and Values (CIV) Programs, IHUM Program courses are required to address significant issues, themes, ideas, and values concerning human identity and existence; develop students' understanding of what constitutes culture; and enhance students' abilities in analysis, reasoning, argumentation, and oral and written expression as preparation for more advanced university work. In addition, IHUM courses are mandated to preserve opportunities for cultural breadth, diversity and inclusiveness emphasized in the previous CIV legislation.

Unlike the Western Culture and CIV mandates, however, the IHUM legislation prevents introductory courses from presenting vast spans of human cultural achievement through a fast-paced three-quarter survey course (or "track," in the old Western Culture and CIV parlance). Rather, IHUM courses are required to introduce students to the diverse traditions, methods, and debates of humanistic inquiry through focusing on intensive reading and study of a limited number of important primary texts. Through team-taught fall quarter courses that emphasize a variety of methods and forms of humanistic inquiry, and especially close reading, students should learn to appreciate both the multiple truths excavated in humanistic scholarship and the processes (from methods of analysis and interpretation to argumentation) that produce these truths -- in short, to begin to approach texts as scholars working in different humanities disciplines do. The winter/spring course sequences that follow these courses are intended to allow students to use their fall training as they study in greater depth and over a sustained period of time particular themes, issues, forms of experience, modes of expression, and bodies of knowledge in the humanities.

In addition to redefining the goals for Area One courses, the IHUM legislation mandates several practical changes in their administration. The legislation calls for the creation of an Area One Governance Board to guide and monitor all aspects of the program, and the convening of a Coordinating Committee, including representatives from all Area One courses (both IHUM and SLE), to attend to grade policy, workload equity, and the maintenance of consistent standards across courses. The IHUM legislation, endorsing the value of the small group discussion experience offered in prior Area One programs, requires students to spend three of the five weekly course hours in discussion sections (the remaining two are lecture hours) and mandates making consistent the level, experience, and training of discussion leaders in the IHUM Program. The legislation requires that these instructors be postdoctoral scholars hired through a national search undertaken centrally by the IHUM Program. Both the postdoctoral scholars and the faculty in IHUM courses should, according to the new legislation, participate in ongoing discussions of pedagogy through regular meetings of teaching teams in courses, training seminars, and workshops.

From 1997 to 2000, the IHUM Program was phased in gradually to replace the Cultures, Ideas, and Values Program. In 1997-98, the first year of IHUM, one-third of the freshmen were enrolled in IHUM courses in fall and winter/spring, with the remainder enrolled in CIV tracks or SLE for the entire year. In 1998-99, the second year of IHUM, this proportion was reversed, with two-thirds of freshmen enrolled in IHUM. By 1999-2000, the transition to IHUM was complete: all freshmen were enrolled in IHUM courses, except for a small number (approximately 90) enrolled in SLE (which enjoys exceptional status due to its residential character and was allowed to continue in its original format rather than move to the one-quarter/two-quarter structure of IHUM).

In the first five years of the IHUM Program, the course offerings in fall quarter have numbered up to ten (plus SLE), while the winter/spring offerings have numbered up to twelve (plus SLE). By comparison, the number of CIV tracks in the last two years of the program was nine (plus SLE). The number of departments and programs teaching Area One courses in the program has grown from seven (in CIV, plus SLE) to nineteen (plus SLE). The number of faculty teaching each year in Area One courses has doubled, from approximately 20 (in the final years of CIV) to 40. (See Departments and Faculty Teaching in IHUM.) One reason for this increase is the requirement of team teaching in fall quarter IHUM courses, which has resulted in more faculty recruited into the program by both colleagues and IHUM directors.

IHUM differs from previous programs in pedagogical goals as well as in structure. The IHUM legislation strictly limits the number of texts to be taught in a fall quarter course to no fewer than three and no more than five primary works. This limitation allows students to read assigned works deeply, from different disciplinary perspectives. The presentation of different perspectives on each work is encouraged through the requirement that fall quarter IHUM courses be team-taught by two or three faculty members who represent different disciplinary approaches in the humanities. Ideally, each of the faculty members lectures at least once on each work, approaching the text from a particular disciplinary vantage-point. As a result, students repeatedly confront the possibility of different, but equally valid and interesting -- readings of the texts. Students are encouraged to develop their own skills of analysis and argumentation through three hours per week of work in discussion groups led by postdoctoral scholars specifically hired for this role.

In contrast to the deep focus and interdisciplinary emphasis of IHUM's fall quarter courses, IHUM's winter/spring sequences focus on a specific subject matter and a definite set of themes. Sequences are mandated by legislation to treat a broad historical span of at least two centuries, presenting the material chronologically; their course materials, like those in fall quarter, should preserve the spirit of diversity in the 1989 CIV legislation by including selections from outside the traditional Western canon. Winter/spring sequences, like fall quarter courses, stress primary readings and are organized into two lecture hours and three discussion hours per week. Stanford faculty members from the sponsoring department take on the lecturing duties, while postdoctoral scholars (the same group employed in IHUM fall quarter courses) lead discussions and guide and evaluate students' written work.

Beyond having recruited enough faculty participation and fielded enough courses to meet the needs of approximately 1550 students each year, we are pleased by the outcomes of the new program structure. Our constituents' evaluations of IHUM's fall quarter courses, with their unique structure, range from extremely positive (the views of nearly all of our fall quarter faculty and fellows) to more mixed but improving (the views of successive classes of freshmen). Particularly appreciated by all these groups are the team-taught and interdisciplinary nature of our fall quarter courses, as well as their deep focus on a small number of texts. In regard to our winter/spring courses, we have received markedly positive response to the shortening of the three-quarter sequence to just two quarters, particularly from smaller departments now able to mount course sequences (where in previous Area One programs they were unable to muster sufficient faculty resources to staff a three-quarter sequence).

One of the goals in restructuring from CIV to IHUM and from a three-quarter to a one-quarter/two-quarter framework was to allow students to make informed choices about their Area One courses. This structural shift presented a real challenge to IHUM's administration: informing students about their choices, and then assigning students to courses, not just once during the summer, as in CIV, but twice: first to fall quarter courses and then to winter/spring sequences. We were also concerned about maximizing student satisfaction by assigning most of the students to their top course choice. We solved this double-barreled problem by designing our own course publication and website (which mirrors our print publication and is updated throughout the year as courses develop their syllabi and other teaching materials), and by mounting our own web-based assignment system.

IHUM course and section assignments are made through a managed process to increase students' overall chances of assignment to one of their top course choices. Initial placement has consistently put approximately 95% of students into their first or second choice course, though those numbers decrease slightly at the time of final enrollment since some students are unable to obtain a section time that fits their schedules and therefore find themselves compelled to enroll in a lower-ranked course. This process has gradually evolved over the past four years from paper-based procedures to online processes, which has enabled us to develop more effective methods for assigning students to classes and for keeping them, and their section leaders, informed with the latest enrollment information.

As mentioned above, the complex process of balancing student demand with available space in IHUM courses happens not just once but twice. The first set of assignments is made in late summer for fall quarter courses, based on preferences students express either online or on written forms. During winter quarter, usually the week before Thanksgiving, IHUM holds an Open House highlighting our winter/spring courses. This well-attended event allows students to meet with winter/spring faculty and teaching fellows. Each course table is staffed by one or more instructors, and print and web-based information is mounted describing the courses, syllabi and readings. Some faculty members have provided digital video introductions to their courses as well.

Immediately after the Open House, we start a second, web-based process of soliciting student preferences for courses. On the basis of these preferences, we enroll students into winter/spring sequences, optimizing for first and second choices. Students generally stay in the same section for winter and spring quarters. However, to accommodate those who need to change sections, we conduct a third enrollment process at the beginning of spring quarter.

The IHUM legislation mandates that the experience and training of discussion leaders teaching in IHUM courses be of the highest level, specifically by requiring that they be postdoctoral scholars hired through a national search. The legislation also requires that the IHUM Program hire and appoint these scholars centrally, rather than, as in the CIV and Western Culture Programs, leaving this task to the departments offering courses in the program.

Thus far we have conducted six national searches for postdoctoral discussion leaders. Each year we hire, on average, fifteen new fellows from applicant pools that range from 217 to 596 (see Fellows Search: Table 1 for additional details]). By hiring a group of new fellows equal in number to the group that has departed (for other positions or after completing their third year), we maintain a cohort of 35 teaching fellows, the number required to staff all IHUM sections.

In our searches, we look for excellent postdoctoral instructors who are able to teach both the more generalized and interdisciplinary first quarter courses and the specialized winter/spring sequences. In order to find the optimal match between disciplinary skill and cross-disciplinary knowledge, we pay extremely close attention to the candidates' teaching experience as well as to their areas of expertise. We also ask faculty teaching in both fall and winter-spring courses to review the files of the finalists, comment on the candidates' teaching acumen and scholarly promise, and conduct phone interviews when appropriate. Needless to say, the sheer size of the annual search, the number of constituencies, and the complexity of the criteria all make each search a complex puzzle; nevertheless, each year we succeed in arranging the pieces and welcoming an outstanding group of new fellows drawn from top programs from around the country and beyond. (See Fellows Search: Table 2 for additional details regarding fellows' educational background and positions held prior to joining IHUM.)

Our discussion leaders are appointed at the level of lecturer, for one year at a time; their appointments can be renewed up to a maximum of three years based on performance. Each newly hired fellow undergoes a review in early February. This review is based upon student evaluations; letters of evaluation from the faculty who worked with the particular discussion leader; a brief written statement by the applicant articulating her or his teaching strategies and how s/he integrated lectures and discussion section assignments; and three representative examples of graded student work with comments. Based on a review of this evidence, we decide whether to renew the discussion leader for another year. If the review suggests certain problems, we notify the candidate about our concerns, work with the candidate to improve performance, and re-evaluate that performance at the end of the winter quarter. These performance reviews are scheduled for February and March to allow our discussion leaders to secure other employment if they are not renewed in the IHUM Program.

We are extremely pleased with the response of faculty working with these fellows. Almost without exception, our faculty members praise the teaching expertise and training of our fellows, and many suggest that working with this group of young scholars is one of the best aspects of the IHUM Program. The teaching evaluations of our fellows suggest that the students in general think the same.

At the beginning of each academic year since 1998, new fellows have attended a workshop series that orients them to working at Stanford and in IHUM. The workshops address a variety of topics, including the learning goals in IHUM, the importance of linking work in section to lectures, and theoretical and practical suggestions for leading discussion, helping students improve their writing, and evaluating student work. Other sessions included presentations on the freshman year experience, both inside and outside the classroom; using technology in teaching; and, of particular interest to IHUM fellows, using their position as a springboard to permanent jobs. Typically, these workshops take place over a two-week period, with the first week devoted exclusively to orienting and training the new fellows and the second week focused on bringing together first-, second- and third-year fellows as a group to discuss and develop pedagogical skills. While some fellows have complained of the length of time and pacing of the workshops, in general their evaluations suggest that the workshops have provided an important level of training and orientation to the University and to IHUM.

As the year goes on, the skills developed during this orientation continue to be honed in a number of different ways, including ongoing pedagogical workshops, individual meetings with fellows about specific challenges, a growing library of texts useful for college instructors, and assistance from the Center for Teaching and Learning, including the CTL's collection of videos on successful teaching and pedagogical training sessions.

Providing support to the cohort of fellows has been a priority from the inception of the program. This crucial task is made difficult in large part because of the fellows' unique status at the University. Although they hold doctoral degrees and possess considerable teaching and research experience, the fellows are hired into positions that require them to teach sections in courses of someone else's design (in this subordinate role on the teaching teams, they are often mistaken for graduate student teaching assistants). In addition, they have no departmental homes and thus tend to feel isolated from the larger academic community on campus. Finally, they are acutely aware that their positions here are term appointments and thus they remain "on the market," balancing the demands of a teaching-intensive job with the ever-present pressures of research, professional development and job searches. The concerns are manifold and complex, but we have addressed them in a number of ways.

Our initial strategy was to create the part-time position of Fellows Support Coordinator (FSC), whose job it was to help the fellows flourish during their time here at Stanford. This task entailed providing support in a variety of different areas, including orientation, academic technology, pedagogy, professional development, job searches, and community building. In 1998 and 1999, the FSC successfully played a central role in supporting the fellows. When the program grew to its full size in 1999, the part-time FSC position was replaced by the full-time position of Program Officer who, in addition to taking on the responsibilities of the FSC, also more generally coordinates features of the program related to its the fellows (including managing the annual search; designing and delivering orientation and training systems for newly hired fellows; acting as liaison between fellows and faculty and other IHUM leadership; developing events for fellows to share their research, etc.). In short, the Program Officer aims to make the environment for the fellows as frictionless as possible so they have time and energy to devote to the more crucial components of their job.

Although the fellows' primary responsibility is teaching, we have gone to great lengths to help them to develop as scholars as well. From 1998 to 2001, fellows were eligible for a one-quarter paid research leave in their second or third year. Beginning in 2002, thanks to a grant from the Mellon Foundation, we have offered fellows an additional quarter of research leave. Thus fellows now have a one-quarter leave in both their second and third year. In addition, each fellow has funding available for research or professional expenses. We have also planned colloquia and brown-bag lunches in which fellows present and discuss their recent research projects with one another. Through our fellows' website, fellows are also kept informed of fellowships, conferences, and lectures germane to their field of study. In addition, we have invited university press editors to talk with fellows about publishing and to counsel them on their research interests and book proposals. Finally, we have worked to bridge the gap between fellows and the academic departments by sponsoring events that allow fellows to forge stronger ties with potential mentors and colleagues in their fields.

Yet another area in which the fellows receive support is in their ongoing search for tenure-track employment. To help fellows in the highly competitive academic job search process, we have tapped into a variety of the resources here at Stanford and created a few of our own. We keep the fellows current about available jobs through our subscriptions to job lists. In addition, we have organized workshops on preparing teaching portfolios (an increasingly important aspect of any academic job application), staged mock interviews, and scheduled practice job talks.

Fellows have uniformly agreed that the support they receive during their time in IHUM helps enormously as they strive to do their best work; they also appreciate the training and experience, as well as the research support, as aids to future employment.

Our interest in the fellows' professional development extends to a great concern for seeing the fellows placed well as they leave the program. We are proud to report that of the 58 individuals who left the teaching fellowship since 1997, 90% (52) have found academic positions. Of these, half (26) moved into tenure-track jobs and half (26) into other academic positions (including, for example, visiting professor, lecturer, academic administrator, post-doctoral researcher, fellow, etc.) (See Fellows Placement: Tables 3-9 for more detailed information.)

The IHUM legislation places a strong emphasis on pedagogy, requiring that faculty and fellows participate in ongoing pedagogy discussions through regular meetings, training seminars, and workshops. We have encouraged and staged various activities in fulfillment of this mandate. These activities include course design meetings; weekly staff meetings for all teaching teams; workshops for IHUM faculty; training and orientation workshops for fellows, as detailed above; and an evaluation plan emphasizing mid-quarter assessment.

Faculty members teaching in IHUM have discovered that designing and developing a new course with a team of five or more persons, including both faculty and fellows, requires that assumptions about pedagogy and learning goals for the students be articulated and supported by all members of the team. While this process of investigation and consensus-building has invariably proved time-consuming and challenging in ways that differ from the usual experience of conventional, independent course design, faculty and fellows have both profited from learning new pedagogical techniques from their colleagues. As the results of our IHUM Faculty Survey show, most faculty agree that the experience has been rewarding. Fellows have similarly reported that they find the teaching teams collegial and effective, although many experience some degree of frustration due to their subordinate role in the intrinsically hierarchical faculty-fellow relationship.

Annually since 1997, we have held workshops to guide and facilitate the process by which faculty teams develop their IHUM courses. During these workshops, IHUM faculty members have considered such topics as: how to teach (and what are) methods of humanistic inquiry; how to create good working relationships among teaching team members (in particular between faculty and fellows); how to lecture effectively to freshmen; how to use midcourse assessment to guide course construction; and how to deploy technology in support of teaching. In our most recent workshop in August 2002, we presented faculty with initial results of our self-study and discussed ways to respond to issues and problems raised in our student surveys.

In response to the IHUM legislation's requirement that Area One courses be evaluated for effectiveness of curriculum, pedagogical training, and teaching, and in consultation with the Center for Teaching and Learning, we have emphasized an approach featuring ongoing assessment as much as evaluation. The purpose of such mid-quarter assessment is to improve students' learning experiences by bringing to light any problems students may be encountering in a course and addressing these issues before the quarter concludes and the learning opportunity has ended. In these assessments, students are prompted to think not only about how the course is working and how it might be improved, but also, crucially, what they themselves can do to improve it.

Each quarter we recommend to all of our faculty and fellows that they incorporate an assessment into their mid-quarter plans; we also provide various samples of assessment forms (both paper and web-based) and suggestions on assessment procedures. In fall quarter, we explicitly require of all our fellows some form of midquarter assessment; further, we require specifically of our fellows in their first year of teaching IHUM a form of assessment involving peer visits to their classes. The peer (another IHUM fellow) visits the instructor's classes to administer a small-group evaluation, and then meets afterward to discuss results and approaches to addressing any issues that have surfaced in the assessment process. Peer facilitation in fall section assessment for new fellows thus prompts discussion of effective pedagogical techniques among our instructors, and in particular engages the newly-appointed fellows in these important conversations. Judging from feedback we've received, such pedagogical exchange has been a frequent and happy outcome of the assessment process.

Academic technology in IHUM has centered around four major areas: online course materials and tools, presentation technologies, informational websites, and administrative systems. For the past four years IHUM has had an Academic Technology Specialist (ATS) supporting its curricular and administrative technological needs. The work of the ATS has built upon courses and systems developed in IHUM's first year, expanding upon and refining initial efforts as well as moving the program towards best practices and systematic procedures that allow for self-help among faculty, students, and staff whenever feasible.

Online course materials and tools used in IHUM include web versions of syllabi and assignments; galleries of digital images; audio and video clips; and various online discussion tools. The challenge and promise of academic technology is to take advantage of the computer medium to convey pedagogical points already central to the curriculum, and, secondarily, to generate new insights and connection through the use of a new medium of expression. Generally one or two courses per year have taken the lead in using academic technology for course delivery. The Word and the World, offered from 1997-2000, has become the benchmark against which subsequent academic technology ventures in IHUM have been judged. From Word and the World we learned lessons about reasonable expectations for student use of technology; the intensive amount of labor required to create a media-rich course; and how best to integrate electronic discussion tools into a traditional curricular format. Though not every course uses technology to the same degree, each IHUM course has, at a minimum, a website with an online syllabus, and most also use the web to post paper topics and other assignments as well.

As the range and amount of academic technology used in IHUM courses suggests, reasonable expectations about the role technology should play often means scaling down grand visions to manageable chunks. Fortunately, because most IHUM courses run for multiple years, this kind of choice does not preclude investment of time and resources into course technologies, but rather means fostering a more gradual development of these technologies. In Myth and Modernity, for example, the winter and spring faculty have built up a substantial archive of materials so that in this, the course's third year of committed academic technology usage, the trouble of maintaining web materials is relatively minor when weighed against the wealth of resources available. Our emphasis has been on creating re-usable resources, or re-purposing existing ones, when significant labor was involved in the production: clips of four different screen versions of Hamlet, for example, have been course supplements for three different IHUM courses. Most recently, Bodies in Place developed substantial media resources for both lecture and section use, and allowed students to do final projects that combined conventional essays with various types of multimedia expression. We look forward to adding to these resources in subsequent years, as well as providing best-practice information on the challenging tasks of assigning and evaluating group and multimedia work.

IHUM faculty and fellows have also taken advantage of the academic technology tools Stanford has developed over the past five years. Many courses have used online discussion tools, and IHUM fellows provided instructor feedback that helped shape the development of PanFora, the online discussion tool developed by the Stanford Learning Lab. One IHUM fellow did a research project on using online discussion tools in teaching that we have incorporated into our fellows training program. More recently, IHUM courses have begun to use CourseWork, the online course management system developed in Stanford's Academic Computing in collaboration with MIT's Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI). The IHUM ATS represents the humanities point of view, gleaned in part from IHUM feedback, at OKI design meetings, where new tools for course management systems are imagined and developed by a dozen schools involved in the consortium. Taking advantage of the consistency and ease of use of a tool like CourseWork gives both the instructors and the ATS more time to focus on teaching and other work, since it requires less time devoted to making relatively straightforward technologies work effectively.

Among IHUM's faculty, the most prevalent use of technology, besides traditional audio-visual supplements, is PowerPoint, which is used as a delivery mechanism for lecture outlines, slides, and video. In addition to providing added interest and information to the lecture delivery, online presentation materials have been made available to students after class by posting them on course websites for review. The advantages of using presentation media have sometimes been offset by unreliable classroom technology or inadequate preparation, however. IHUM works to minimize this through training sessions and initial intensive support of our faculty and fellows. Individual consultation with the ATS on using such technologies always involves developing a worst-case scenario (foregoing the show entirely), and then a less drastic backup plan (downloading a website if the connection is dead). Over time we anticipate fewer such experiences as instructors become more familiar with the tools and resources available for help.

IHUM's website and administrative systems also play a crucial role in delivering our curriculum. Our online placement process depends heavily on databases and web pages, while the IHUM website is a source of information about courses, special events, and deadlines. In addition, our digital archive of course materials provides faculty and fellows with information about how courses have been taught in the past as well as ideas and resources for future development. In combination with more direct course support, these systems allow IHUM to continue to focus on its core mission, while also nudging the boundaries of humanities education with enhanced content and delivery mechanisms operating in the service of the greater goals of the program.

Objective methods for measuring the achievement of IHUM's intellectual goals are hard to find. We have no particularly reliable measures for assessing close reading skills, critical thinking abilities, or the awareness of multiple perspectives when approaching a text. But in fact, all of these skills, among others, should come to bear in the papers that students write for their IHUM classes. Furthermore, among the general learning goals for students in our courses, the IHUM legislation mandates the improvement of analytic and argumentative writing skills themselves. In order to measure IHUM's progress toward these goals, we need some kind of objective assessment of students' IHUM writing.

In a stroke of luck for our self-study, the Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR), under the leadership of Prof. Andrea Lunsford, initiated in 2001-02 a large-scale longitudinal study of writing at Stanford, beginning with that year's freshman class. This database represents about 200 randomly selected students from that class, and contains in principle everything written by those students at Stanford, including IHUM papers. We asked the research coordinator for the Stanford Study on Writing, Dr. Roland Hsu, to identify 20 students whose IHUM portfolios appeared to be complete, and then carefully classify those papers, by student, as to which quarter they were written, and in what order. 217 papers were so classified. Dr. Hsu then completely stripped all papers of any such classification information, and presented these randomized papers to four graduate-student readers he had trained, for grading according to ten criteria. All four of these students read and graded all of the papers. Dr. Hsu's analysis of the results is included in this report. Here it seems reasonable simply to quote from Dr. Hsu's introduction to the Writing Study results:

While we are extremely pleased with these results, we do not feel that IHUM can take full credit for them. Many factors affect the development of students' writing in their first year in college: among these are their courses, their exposure to different kinds of writing than they may have read in high school, their contact with mentors, friends, and classmates. Among the influences contributing to these results we want to isolate an extremely valuable source of aid to students: the Writing Center. We actively encourage IHUM fellows to use the Writing Center to support their instruction, resulting in several IHUM section-specific presentations taking place each year in the Center. The Writing Center's tutoring resources and general programming have been deployed to support IHUM students' needs as well, with input from IHUM as to appropriate topics to feature in Writing Center workshops.

We certainly want to credit the myriad influences working to improve student writing in the freshman year -- but we also want to emphasize that the three-quarter scope and writing-intensive nature of our courses make it likely that IHUM is significantly contributing to this growth.

The IHUM legislation calls for IHUM, as a program and in its individual courses, to foster students' appreciation of the humanities. We have tried to engage and excite students about the humanities both in their regular coursework and through special events. Some of the most successful of these efforts have involved inviting guest speakers to IHUM courses and organizing field trips. In the former category, our courses have hosted the following speakers: Alexander Saxton, labor historian and novelist; Abe Osheroff, Spanish Civil War film-maker; Herbert Aptheker, historian of the African-American experience and colleague, close friend and editor of W.E.B. Du Bois; Lawrence Paull, production designer of the film Blade Runner; and writers Leslie Marmon Silko and Opal Palmer Adisa. Our courses have arranged field trips for students to such diverse destinations as San Jose's Egyptian Museum; the San Francisco Opera (co-sponsored by the Music Department); Mission District murals in San Francisco; and the Rosie the Riveter memorial in Richmond.

Our most ambitious effort to engage students in the humanities occurred as an extracurricular event. Beginning in 1998-99, IHUM instituted the Freshman Book Program. All freshmen received a carefully selected text in the fall as the first part of a two-part gift from the IHUM Program. Then came Part Two: the author of the text was invited to campus to address the freshman class.

The Freshman Book was intended to foster students' independent interest in the humanities. The first three Freshman Books were Charles Johnson's Middle Passage; Tom Stoppard's Arcadia; and Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior. In 2001-2002, the Freshman Book Program expanded to include other kinds of works. The "book" for the year was a set of films by the acclaimed documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. In presenting students with these video texts, IHUM intended to acknowledge, as the IHUM legislation reminds us, the variety of media in which creativity is expressed in the humanities. We invited students to hone their interpretative abilities and to appreciate a different artistic form.

Works chosen as the Freshman Book came from a wide variety of arenas, but they had a couple of things in common: they could be read and re-read, viewed again and again, analyzed and enjoyed repeatedly --and the persons who created them were not only talented artists but also gifted and charismatic speakers. We hoped that the Freshman Book Program would acquaint students with the creative process, bring them into contact with people who dedicate their lives to the arts, and excite students about the humanities as sources of lifelong enjoyment.

Responses to the program varied with the different speakers: we had a reasonable turn-out for Charles Johnson's talk (roughly 250 students attended); a crowd so big that many people had to be turned away for Tom Stoppard's appearance; and an ideally sized audience for Maxine Hong Kingston (approximately 400). Last year's guest, Errol Morris, drew a disappointingly small audience -- a phenomenon he is quite familiar with as a documentary filmmaker. Throughout the four years of the program, the effort and expense of the event were repaid by the enthusiasm of the students it affected, even when these students represented only a fraction of the whole class. The program has been put on hiatus this year due to budget cuts, but we hope to restore it or something comparable, offered to all the freshmen, when funding becomes available.

In the absence of the Freshman Book, we have organized a smaller-scale program intended to enhance students' enjoyment of the humanities: the IHUM Monday Movies. We have engaged the help of a film scholar on campus to host a weekly film screening and discussion of classics of world cinema. The program began in winter 2003; early reactions suggest that the response is enthusiastic.

The IHUM legislation called for the creation of an Area One Governance Board to guide and monitor all aspects of the program, and the convening of a Coordinating Committee with representatives from all Area One-satisfying courses to attend to grade policy, workload equity, and the maintenance of consistent standards across courses.

In the first year of the transition from CIV to IHUM, the Area One Governance Board began its operation. Specified by legislation, the Governance Board membership, selected by the Vice-Provost for Undergraduate Education in coordination with the Faculty Director of the IHUM Program, includes a total of six Academic Council faculty members from both within and outside the program; two IHUM fellows; two undergraduate student members; and, ex officio, the Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric; the Chair of C-US (now C-USP); the Dean of Humanities and Sciences; the Dean of Engineering, and the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education. Responding to the legislation's emphasis on pedagogy and assessment, the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning has also served on the Board from its inception. The Governance Board meets approximately once monthly and is chaired by IHUM's Faculty Director.

The creation of the Governance Board centralized control over the planning and implementation of courses satisfying Area One, with the goal of making the program's offerings and operations more consistent. In the years when the new IHUM Program was designed and implemented, the Governance Board examined and approved proposed strategies for hiring and training discussion leaders; considered and approved recommendations of the Coordinating Committee concerning grading and workload in IHUM courses; developed a plan for reviewing and renewing IHUM courses; oversaw the yearly planning of IHUM's curriculum (including course sizes and student allotments); approved plans for special events such as the IHUM Open House and Freshman Book Program; and dealt with a myriad of smaller issues as they arose.

Perhaps the most important function of the Governance Board is the approval of new courses to meet the requirements of the IHUM legislation. Governance Board members individually read all new course proposals. Then the Board meets as a whole with the teaching teams to review their proposals and to make recommendations. In this way, the Governance Board reinforces the goals of the new legislation, maintains consistency across courses and encourages, clarifies, and strengthens the course designs of the faculty teaching teams.

IHUM's Coordinating Committee consists of representatives from the teaching team of each Area One course (both IHUM and SLE). The legislation set up the Coordinating Committee to oversee the pedagogical operations of all courses meeting the Area One requirement: specifically, the Committee is charged to maintain consistent grading and workload standards across courses. Accordingly, the Coordinating Committee devoted itself in the first years of the IHUM Program to the task of developing consistency in grading across courses. It addressed this problem by tracking grades as they were awarded in courses, reporting to courses the program grade distributions and averages, and developing a set of grading guidelines to be applied in all Area One courses, which were then reviewed and approved by the Governance Board.

The Coordinating Committee also examined workloads across courses with the aim of developing a set of consistent standards. Recognizing that different disciplines by their very nature require different kinds of reading and writing assignments, the Committee charged the IHUM administration to examine the range of assignments (both reading and written) and to develop a description of the norm, which individual course teaching teams could examine and adapt as needed. The goal was not to limit faculty freedom to require assignments in line with the learning goals of their individual courses, but rather to address a glaring problem in previous Area One Programs: student dissatisfaction with inconsistent grading and course requirements. The results of these efforts to inform toward the goal of consistency may be seen in the course syllabi templates for fall and winter/spring courses, which are made available to IHUM faculty as guidelines for course development.

As the program has developed, the pioneering work of the Coordinating Committee has finished and most of the tasks of overseeing the day-to-day operations of the IHUM Program have, for the sake of practicality, fallen to full-time program staff. However, the Coordinating Committee still convenes when issues involving consistency and connections across courses arise.

In spite of substantial incentives, recruiting faculty to teach in the fall quarter remains challenging. Our methods for soliciting course proposals from faculty have remained consistent throughout our years of operation. We have invited faculty who have expressed an interest in IHUM, who have been recommended to us, or who have demonstrated an affinity for teaching large lecture classes. As a result of these efforts, we have been able to offer between seven and ten fall quarter IHUM courses each year since 1999-2000, when the program began full-scale operations.

Team-teaching an interdisciplinary course is both challenging and time-consuming and, thus, not for everyone. We take pride in having involved many more faculty in IHUM than took part in the CIV Program. Still, the number of faculty teaching fall IHUM courses represents only a fraction of the total number in Humanities and Sciences who might take part. An additional issue involves navigating as best as we can the various demands on departments and programs to offer sufficient courses to their own undergraduate and graduate students, and to fulfill Freshman Seminar obligations (and desires), while at the same time supporting this core humanities requirement.

Winter/spring recruitment has been easier than fall recruitment. We have offered between ten and twelve winter/spring IHUM sequences each year since 1999-2000, when the program began full-scale operations. Smaller departments find it quite feasible to develop and staff these two-quarter sequences. In addition, departments can see the tangible benefits of offering a winter/spring sequence in terms of potential departmental majors and course enrollments. Departments need to perceive participation in fall IHUM courses as equally beneficial.

In both fall and winter/spring courses, we need to foster genuine (rather than tacked-on, tokenistic) diversity, whether it happens within individual classes, or by the inclusion of more classes whose major orientation is non-canonical. Diversity should be understood as not only ethnic or international; we also need to introduce more courses that may appeal to freshmen with a scientific or technical bent.

Like other programs at Stanford, IHUM is subject to budget pressures. We want to make sure that any changes in this unique freshman-year program are driven by educational goals, not financial ones. Three examples of financially-driven changes we would see as unhelpful are decreasing the number of fellows we hire, increasing section size, and increasing the teaching/student load of fellows.

We are committed to maintaining an average size of fifteen students in our sections. To achieve this goal while also responding to student choice requires that we slightly over-budget space in our courses (amounting to approximately one extra fellow). If we were to eliminate this extra person, we would make it impossible to satisfy student choice at our current rate; we would be forced to place many more students in courses and sections they do not want to take: hardly an ideal learning situation.

If we were to increase section size, we would substantially decrease the quality of the learning experience as well. We already have experience on a small scale with this effect: student insistence on being enrolled in a full IHUM course has, in the past, resulted in some overcrowding, with sections reaching 20 students rather than the optimal 15. On the advice of the Governance Board, we agreed to sacrifice some placement statistics and initial student satisfaction for greater uniformity in class size. We did this for many reasons. First, the quality of learning dramatically drops when too many students are enrolled in a discussion section and the opportunity for full participation is decreased. Second, the quality of teaching (particularly in the context of paper evaluation and feedback) drops when our fellows, who already have an average teaching load of 45, must shoulder additional students. (Obviously this is also an argument for not increasing the overall student load for our fellows.) Finally, bigger sections encounter space limitations: many of the seminar rooms to which our courses have been assigned simply cannot accommodate more than 17 or 18 people comfortably. Although our section sizes average 15, this average disguises a great variation in size. Rather than making cuts that would necessitate an average growth across all sections, we need to do more to cap the size of individual sections.

We would like to change the student culture that views IHUM as bad precisely because it is required. The new structure, which reduces the burn-out associated with a three-quarter sequence, has helped in this regard, as have our efforts at satisfying student choice. As the program has grown and years have passed, we have seen some improvement in this area, but not enough.

Our survey results make abundantly clear to us that we need to clarify the reasons for the one quarter-two quarter structure of IHUM to everybody, in particular to faculty and to students (IHUM fellows, probably as a result of their training, seem a little clearer on the reasons for the structure). IHUM as a program needs to clarify its intellectual objectives and make them clearer to students. Individual classes need to do the same. The differences between, and also the purposes of, the fall and winter/spring courses need to be clarified for both students and faculty.

Specifically in relation to the purpose and structure of IHUM's fall quarter courses, we need to get fall lecturers to engage actively with each other's opinions on the selected texts, rather than lecture only on the texts they feel most comfortable with. This engagement should lead to a true development of multiple perspectives on the same texts.

Besides recruiting faculty who would bring diverse perspectives to course design, we need to nurture diversity both through our hiring of fellows and through our work with teaching teams on course development. Two approaches to the latter task are useful: to encourage wherever appropriate incorporating works and perspectives by women, persons of color, and writers outside the Western tradition; and to emphasize the critical importance of deploying pedagogies of diversity, to enable the teaching of even canonical texts in non-canonical ways.

We need to foster consistently productive collegial relationships between our faculty and fellows. The model of developing courses during the summer months once the teaching team is assembled has worked well in individual cases, but it has proved impossible to implement across our entire curriculum due to financial and logistical pressures. We can however ensure to the best of our ability that our teaching-teams are meeting regularly while the course is taught; and, for courses taught multiple years, we can encourage teams to have end-of-the-quarter reviews of the course to plan for the next iteration.

On a different level, we need to work harder at encouraging our faculty to establish mentoring relationships with fellows, who after all are future colleagues in their academic fields. At present this mentoring takes place in some cases, but it should be universal. We should facilitate contact between our fellows and their departments if these contacts are not being made through team-teaching, and we should also connect our fellows with extra-departmental organizations of interest, such as the Humanities Center.

We need to maintain student learning at a consistently high level, where both "consistent" and "high" should be emphasized. Among the concerns here are section sizes (already discussed above); equity of grading and workload across courses and sections; and quality of learning in section.

We need to pursue more aggressively consistency in workload and grading among and within IHUM classes. This effort needs to take place especially when courses are initially approved (notably with regard to graded assignments), when they are re-approved, and when, at the beginning of each course each year, the teaching teams are formed (i.e., there needs to be more discussion of workload distribution and grading criteria, as well as active grade norming).

Although our fellows' training is already fairly extensive, we need to do even more to ensure that all fellows have good facilitation skills and that none turns section into a place where the students are supposed to be searching for the "right" answers to intellectual questions. We must also emphasize the importance of timely and helpful feedback on students' assignments.

Finally, while the total number of section hours is mandated by IHUM legislation, we take to heart the fact that many students experience the ninety-minute section as too long. We should consider the idea of offering three shorter sections a week rather than two longer ones (which would also add more flexibility to scheduling for both students and classrooms). In addition, we will raise fellows' awareness of student concerns regarding the length of section time, and we will create more opportunities for fellows to share successful methods for varying pace and instruction style so all are using the allotted time effectively.

One of IHUM's mandates is to develop students' oral communication skills. We currently respond to this mandate by focusing primarily on discussion skills: building a good discussion through searching questions, analysis and argument, and listening as well as talking. Our grading guidelines for class participation make clear to students that the goal is not to fill the air but to further the discussion.

In the coming years, we need to adjust in not-yet-known, but surely supportive, ways, to the developing structure of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, especially regarding the reorientation in PWR 2 courses toward oral communication. We need to continue to emphasize teaching techniques that encourage students to develop their oral discussion and argumentative skills.

Based on all of the data we gathered as well as our own careful reflections, our general conclusion is that after a little over five years of existence, the IHUM Program is working reasonably well, and getting better. Students appear to be acquiring skills and interests that enrich both their academic experience and their lives, while the one-quarter/two-quarter structure both enables them to choose courses in a more informed way than in the older program, and allows more participation of departments in IHUM, thereby enhancing student choice. The interdisciplinary fall quarter, surely the most radical change from CIV, has proven to be increasingly popular with students, and it is very popular with the faculty teaching these courses as well. The other major change from CIV, namely the requirement that section leaders be young scholars with Ph.D.s, must be reckoned an extremely positive one.

All this said, we are still committed to continual improvement. We believe that the current structure of IHUM offers a productive environment for addressing these and other issues. We look forward to working with the rest of the University to make the program the best it can possibly be.

IHUM SELF-STUDY REPORT