"The Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences is a vital public good.
"We provide a transformational education that prepares all students to lead and thrive in a complex world. Our research, scholarship and creative expression address society's great challenges and push the boundaries of human understanding.
"Fulbright College brings the world to Arkansas and Arkansas to the world."
This is Ozarks at Large. Let's start today with a new, of sorts, launch for the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas. The college is looking forward to the next decade of education with new mission statement.
Fulbright Dean Brian Raines says the statement emphasizes that the college educates adaptable, intellectually curious leaders.
Raines: When I started as dean about 14 months ago, I knew that critical to my first couple of years as dean was going to be drafting a new strategic plan for Fulbright College, a plan that would lead us for the next five to 10 years. And it needed to be a plan that was built out of a joint vision. So me and the team embarked on a major undertaking of listening and learning. I spent the entire first year listening and learning, and in that process, we spent over 115 hours listening with faculty and staff.
We had 90-plus meetings with alumni and friends of the college all over the country, talking about the impact of Fulbright College. And from gathering all of that data, thinking about the impact that we had already had on so many of our alumni, and then what we were having now on their children. From all of that data collection, I put together a smaller group this summer in the dean’s office, and we spent, I don’t know how many weeks, but it was many. It was probably a total of six weeks, kicking ideas around and meeting and talking. And we finally settled on this version of our mission statement.
Kellams: The first sentence of the mission statement is pretty straightforward. Subject, verb, object. Really. “The Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences is a vital public good.”
Those last three words — vital public good.
Raines: Yeah, I love that. And I was so pleased when we settled on that as our first sentence. When I think about education broadly, it’s a public good. It is open to all. We take all students from across the state of Arkansas, and what we offer them is a transformational experience. Earning a college degree transforms the individual and transforms their family for generations. So it is, it’s one of our biggest services to the state of Arkansas and to the world.
Kellams: Vital public good. That just sums up both sort of a liberal arts sort of guide, but also you’re just laying it out for folks, right? I mean, this is what we do.
Raines: And, you know, I mentioned education a minute ago, and you’re right, it is at the heart of the liberal arts education, but it’s also at the heart of most of our research and our creative expression and our scholarship. And it also captures the public service that we do. So many of the faculty in Fulbright College are serving the community in deep, meaningful ways, everything from psychology faculty who spend time in women’s prisons, social work faculty who are working to address mental health crises and more. It’s across the college — 19 departments.
Kellams: Nineteen departments.
Raines: Well, 16 departments and three schools.
Kellams: Okay. So when you think about this, you’ve got people creating art. You have psychologists, you have biologists, you have all sorts — mathematicians.
Raines: Mathematicians.
Kellams: Right. Journalists. So what was the challenge to get a mission statement for such a broad, wide-reaching college?
Raines: I think focusing on our impact on the world was the first piece of it. It was really thinking about how each unit in Fulbright impacts the world, both through their students, their impact on their students, and their impact on the community and their thinking of Arkansas, thinking of the region, but then also thinking about the community of experts in, say, biology or in material science, you know, which is a subfield of physics and engineering. It’s very technical, but the work that they’re doing is world class and is changing the world.
Kellams: Transformational is a word that’s in there. And as you mentioned, getting that college degree is very important. There’s also — look, college now is about what you’re going to do next. So that careers are important to the people going and to the people.
Raines: Absolutely. Absolutely. Could not agree more. And the great thing about a degree from Fulbright College and the College of Arts and Sciences, so whether that’s a degree in sociology or psychology or English or history or math or physics, we’re setting students up not only for their first job but for their career. When you think about hiring, say, a computer programmer in the 1990s, that person probably graduated from college with a lot of technical skills that were relevant in 1995. But today they’ve probably had to learn a lot on the job in order to be relevant today. What a college degree from Fulbright College does is it sets you up not only for your first job but for an entire career.
Kellams: I don’t know about you, but when I first went into college, I wasn’t thinking about what was next. It was just sort of this chapter, and I just sort of absorbed things like a sponge. I think you have very different kinds of students, those who — okay, this is going to get me to that job and then I can get a secure life. How do you deal with all of that?
Raines: You know, it’s interesting because I came from a pretty low-income background, first-generation student. So when I set foot on a college campus the first time, I was very clear I was going to go to law school. I was going to become — now I’m not. Obviously, I didn’t do that, but that was my plan. And I’ve talked to so many students, especially students like me who were from Arkansas, who were low-income and first-gen students, who are worried. They’ll think, okay, I’m going to be a doctor. But then maybe their first biology class doesn’t go as well, and they think, why am I at this big fancy school if it isn’t going to lead directly to medical school and a doctor? And my message to them and to all students is the value of a college degree is tremendous. A degree in anything.
All degrees are incredibly, incredibly valuable. The U.S. Census Bureau released a report a couple of weeks ago that showed that household median income for a household with college-degree adults in it — the household median income is $132,000 a year. That’s more than double households with no college degrees, no college at all. That’s tremendous. So that’s just dollars and cents. And that says come to college, come to the UofA, find the discipline that you really align with, and you’ll be successful in. Maybe it’s pre-med, but maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s history. It is great for the world. It’s great for the state of Arkansas when we get another history graduate.
Kellams: That’s such an interesting way to put it because 18 or 19 is such a young age to try to have that plan, and you’re just stuck with it.
Raines: Yes. And it changes for so many students. Yeah. And all of us, I think, you know, who’ve been through it have experienced that. I mean, I started off as an English major heading to law school, ended up as an English and math double major going to grad school to become a mathematician. Not all people who study mathematics or English are going to go into academia, of course, but there’s a lot of paths. There’s so many paths out there for them.
Kellams: What got you to math? Because going English to law school — math doesn’t seem to be anything but a requirement.
Raines: Yeah, I took a calculus class. I thought it would be interesting. And then I just loved it and I took the next class. The professor had a lot to do with it. That’s one of the great things about this line of work is you get to work with motivated students and you get to impact students’ lives. And so this professor really took me under his wing. And once I take, I think it was after second-semester calculus, he started giving me some open problems to work on in the field. And then I got really — I just completely fell in love with mathematics.
Kellams: And that’s what can happen on a campus.
Raines: Absolutely. And you get exposed. That’s the great thing also about Fulbright College is we are so broad, students can really find themselves in any of our disciplines, and then they can go as deep as they want. So we have this enormous breadth, but then we also have a lot of depth.
Kellams: A lot of people have worked on a mission statement. They high-five when it’s done, it goes into a drawer, and there it goes. That’s not the intention here.
Raines: Indeed. So one of the real motivating drivers for us in drafting this mission statement was the need for a strategic plan. I want a strategic plan, a vision for the college that will guide us for the next 10 years, making decisions about where resources are going to go, making decisions about what we invest in and what we focus on. Our time and our resources should be guided by a document, a strategic plan that the college broadly has drafted and has broadly agreed upon.
So we put together a committee, a steering committee with members from all 19 departments and schools and several other members. There’s alumni, there’s students, there’s staff, and their job is to draft this big vision, this bold vision for the future. And we — in order to do that, every initiative that is dreamt of in this vision needs to point back to our mission. Why are we doing those things? We’re doing those things because we’re a vital public good, because we transform students through education, because we address society’s big problems with our research and our creative expression. We bring Arkansas to the world and the world to Arkansas. That’s how the mission statement ends.
Kellams: And I want to bring that up because Fulbright’s in the name.
Raines: It is. And you have the Fulbright Scholarship. Absolutely. We have a tradition of international education.
Kellams: So as we continue, I mean, it’s easier to bring the world into, you know, our classrooms now. When you think about 10 years out, how do you think about bringing Arkansas to the world and the world to Arkansas?
Raines: That’s really fascinating to think about. I mean, even just thinking about the future of higher education just writ large is something I do a lot, and I have a lot of conversations about that. I think — I suspect it will just get easier to bring the world to Arkansas. Bringing Arkansas to the world is the other part of that, though. It’s showcasing our brilliant students and our outstanding faculty. It’s giving them a platform. You know, we send so many students on Fulbright Scholarships. We have a student that was working in my office this last semester who is going to Sicily on a Fulbright to study the Mafia. So increasing opportunities like that is going to be central to it. I have to believe that those opportunities are only going to increase in the next 10 years.
Kellams: Do you see this mission statement as something that can unify folks?
Raines: I think so. I think so. That’s actually another big motivating factor here — let’s give a clarion call that will unite the faculty and say, yes, this is something we can all work on. Not just faculty — faculty, staff, alumni, all the stakeholders, the students in Fulbright College — and say, yes, this. And it should reflect what they already think of themselves as doing. It shouldn’t be new, it shouldn’t be a surprise, but a new wording of what we do.
Brian Raines is the dean of the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas. He discussed the new mission statement for the college earlier this week in the Anthony and Susan Hui News Studio.
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