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Cook hopes to change humanities graduate studies

January 30, 2008 By Gwen Evans

Susan Cook is the associate dean for arts and humanities in the Graduate School, taking the job in June, with a leadership role in guiding graduate studies from administrative and scholarly perspectives.

Susan Cook

Susan Cook (right) meets with graduate student Jessica Courtier in Cook’s office in the Mosse Humanities Building. Cook, associate dean of arts and humanities in the Graduate School and professor in the School of Music and Women’s Studies Program, is an adviser to Courtier’s studies and musicology dissertation.

Photo: Jeff Miller

There are more than 35 graduate programs of study in arts and humanities at UW–Madison accounting for more than 1,600 master’s, MFA and Ph.D. students. These students represent about 20 percent of all graduate students in the four graduate divisions: arts and humanities, social studies, physical sciences and biological sciences.

As associate dean, Cook works with arts and humanities faculty, keeps up with research under way on campus and oversees Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation-named professorships, the Kellett Mid-Career Awards and the H. I. Romnes Faculty Fellowships. As a member of the graduate faculty herself, she is also advising six graduate students in musicology, most of whom are exploring aspects of her own interest in American musical culture and contemporary musical practices.

In addition to her work with the School of Music, Cook holds a joint appointment with the Women’s Studies Program. Most recently, she also served as the director of the Arts Institute and briefly served as interim director of the University Press.

She has been involved in interdisciplinary initiatives of all kinds through her connection with the Women’s Studies Program and involvement with the Arts Institute and the Center for the Humanities — good preparation for her current position.

Just don’t assume she’s been cloistered away in solitary scholastic research on music. Instead, she embraced the full scale of musical influences and has championed the arts and humanities on campus for years. “I realized I had leadership skills I didn’t know I had,” says Cook. “I decided I wanted to use them to ends beyond my own departmental boundaries.”

Initially, Cook planned on a career in music performance in the harpsichord, but changed to musicology for her graduate work at the University of Michigan.

That doesn’t mean her past music performance experience doesn’t come into play in her new position at the Graduate School. “Because of my time on a stage before an audience, I learned to conquer stage fright and project enthusiasm for the performance projects I had chosen,” she says.

Indeed, there is a daunting financial situation ahead that might make a less-determined person lose heart and forget to paste on a smile: Declining financial support for graduate students in arts and humanities makes recruiting the best and brightest students a challenge.

In addition, there are fewer grants available from the federal government that support the arts and humanities and there is growing competition from other universities. “We are lagging in the level and years of support we offer compared to peer institutions. …I hear all time that students say they wished they could have come here — we were their first choice — but ended up going somewhere else because of the package they were offered,” says Cook. “And they’re not just going to other Big Ten schools, Stanford, Yale, Berkeley and Harvard, our usual competitors. State schools and smaller universities that didn’t used to have Ph.D. programs do now. We’re at a tipping point. There’s time to correct things, but we are feeling the pinch.”

Budget issues also affect graduate students already enrolled here. Time spent at jobs to earn money for tuition and living expenses is time away from studies. That makes it take longer to graduate and get out in the field; increased burnout leads to higher attrition rates.

This situation is a concern for the entire university because it ripples down and touches thousands of other students, because graduate students teach sections or are teaching assistants for many undergraduate courses. Without the best-quality graduate students and the contributions they make, meeting the university’s missions, not only to graduate education and faculty research but also to undergraduate education, becomes increasingly difficult.

A recent influx of support from WARF is a good start toward making UW–Madison competitive. Starting next fall, the Graduate School will increase awards for University Fellowships and Advanced Opportunity Fellowships by $2,000. Also, funds designated for students in the arts and humanities and social studies will be two-year fellowships, rather than one-year awards. It is hoped these changes will help recruiting efforts.

Increased financial support, though, is just part of the solution to attracting and keeping the best students, says Cook. Transforming graduate education is key — a transformation that includes a humane, interdisciplinary and global approach. “We need to encourage the creation of new systems of collaboration and support. We can no longer train students to replicate ourselves or take on the same kinds of jobs we had,” Cook says. “A Ph.D. was never intended to be a license to practice anything — it’s a commitment to a long and complicated course of study. Graduate students need to hone a powerful set of critical thinking, research and writing skills that allow them to solve complex problems. And increasingly more of them are taking those skills outside academe. I love the Wisconsin Idea, and the challenge for us in the arts and humanities is to continue to be responsive to these students who want to work in new areas of civic engagement as well as continue to be able to articulate our relevance to the state and larger world.”

Faculty are also part of Cook’s transformation because they are expected more and more to help with student recruitment and fundraising. These expectations represent a shift in faculty roles.

Although Cook devotes a lot of thought to looking ahead for the Graduate School, as a music historian, she looks to the past at another forward-thinker for inspiration: “[President John Bascom] was committed to academic freedom, education for women and tenure rights. And he was an innovator who wanted to ensure that a Wisconsin education was the best it could be because of the inherent quality of the faculty.”

Susan Cook’s wish list for arts and humanities graduate education

  • An increase in support and student aid is essential. I’d love to see us provide multiple years of fellowship support coupled with TA experience in order to attract the most diverse and exciting student body we can.
  • We need to increase support for faculty research, especially where students and faculty work side by side in collaborative projects.
  • The University Press needs to be better recognized on campus for its work in meeting the mission of the Graduate School in promoting top-quality research and scholarship.
  • Engage graduate education from an international perspective. This includes examining education on a global scale and identifying how other countries structure their programs as well as fostering exchanges of students and faculty through relationships like the Worldwide University Network (WUN) and others.