Office of the Dean

August 2024

Dear Colleagues,

Following what I trust was a pleasant summer, I am pleased to welcome you back to our West Lafayette campus, to Purdue, and to Purdue Indianapolis.

Again this fall, we welcome a new cohort of scholars and educators to our faculty ranks. This year, 27 faculty join us, a handful who are hires we have announced over the past two years. Most will work with us in West Lafayette, while three new faculty will make up the initial core of our Purdue Indianapolis faculty. Some of our new colleagues, as before, will be on various leaves for the coming academic year. I am impressed and proud to note that our hires included two—Professor Erin Dunn and Professor Mark Suchman—who were part of the University’s Moveable Dream Hire program. Along with them, we are joined by new faculty who are outstanding scholars and educators from leading universities across the U.S. and abroad. In total, more than 100 faculty have joined the College over the past three years.

Much of our hiring continues to center on strategic investment in expanding our research profile in the areas of artificial intelligence (AI) and sociogenomics, in support of the University’s Purdue Computes and One Health initiatives. All of these scholars will be integral to our commitment to excellence in teaching and scholarship. Other hiring supported our partnership with the Daniels School and the Cornerstone for Business initiative as well as Purdue Indianapolis. Please join me in welcoming our new colleagues. You can read more about them and their work here.

As the University launches our new urban campus, I am happy to report that the College of Liberal Arts has a significant presence in Indianapolis. Four faculty are there full-time, teaching SCLA 101 and 102; in addition, lecturers from PLaCE will teach SCLA 110 and 111. We also have opened a new satellite Purdue OWL location to provide writing support to our students there.

As we look forward to the new academic year and our research goals, I am pleased to note that several of our faculty published in the various Nature journals last year. Congratulations to Evelina Akimova (Sociology), Bryce Dietrich (Political Science), Dana Tulodziecki (Philosophy) and Robbee Wedow (Sociology). A word of congratulations as well to Scott Feld (Sociology) for his piece in PNAS/Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To build upon these accomplishments, we will continue to invest in our faculty through our Empowering Excellence initiative with its array of support programs. The Dean’s Faculty Research Fellows program, which launched last year, focuses on enhancing faculty excellence and elevating our research profile and contributing to AAU Phase I indicators of research impact for the University. Dean’s Faculty Research Fellows will have no teaching or service obligations for a semester or a full academic year. Fellows will receive full compensation and may be eligible to receive up to one month of summer salary and a $10,000 research allocation. One to three CLA Dean’s Faculty Fellows may be selected annually based on nominations from Department Heads. The Dean’s Faculty Research Fellows program represents one element of the evolution of the internal College faculty development centers, Exploratory Research in the Social Sciences and Enhancing Research in the Humanities and Arts.

The College will fully fund our faculty and graduate student support programs from our operating budget and will offer the following faculty support programs this year: Aspire, Engage, and Create. Updated program deadlines and guidelines will be published on the respective web pages. Alongside these programs, we will continue our post-doctoral fellows program, which was launched last year and makes funds available through the Ross-Lynn program. Each CLA academic unit can submit one proposal to hire a post-doctoral fellow for two years.

To support the research and creative endeavor of our graduate students, we continue to fund the PROMISE program. As we look to recruiting the next generation of scholars the College of Liberal Arts Dean’s Graduate Fellows program continues to be a tool to recruit top graduate students to our disciplines. With support from the Central Administration, we offer highly-competitive graduate fellowships to support exceptional graduate students. CLA Dean’s Fellows will receive a stipend comparable to the NSF Fellow Program for six years with three years of fellowship and three years of research/teaching assistantship and a generous allotment per year for travel and research support. Our CLA Dean’s Graduate Fellows will work alongside and in support of faculty whose scholarship will elevate the research profile of the College and contribute to AAU metrics. Up to ten CLA Dean’s Graduate Fellows will be selected annually based upon proposals submitted by the Department Heads.

As part of our strategy to share our research, the College will continue to incentivize faculty engagement with The Conversation. Coordinated by the marketing and communications team, faculty can pitch stories on their research or may respond to staff outreach regarding expert requests. For each article published on the platform, the faculty member will receive a $500 cash award.

Many of you – like those of us in the Dean’s Office – are starting the semester in a different office from where you were at the end of spring semester. Thank you for your patience. All of this is part of the $46.6M space project that is transforming many of College’s spaces. Work is complete in Stanley Coulter and much of Beering Hall and in full swing to restore University Hall, the new front door to the College of Liberal Arts that will open next academic year. For this year, the Dean’s Office will work from the fourth floor of Wang Hall.

Each fall, there is a pulse of energy on campus as we reconvene and continue our efforts to elevate the College as an innovative leader in liberal arts education and scholarship. Purdue welcomes another record-breaking class this fall. With this large class, comes a large responsibility for our College, which delivers nearly one-fifth of the credit hours on campus. Thank you for your contributions to the academic experience of students across this campus and for your scholarship to advance our research aspirations.

Sincerely,

David A. Reingold

Senior Vice President for Policy Planning

Justin S. Morrill Dean of Liberal Arts