Q&A: Provost Allison Pease Shares her Vision for Academic Excellence and Research

I'm Allison pce I'm the Provost and Senior vice president of academic Affairs I have been at John J for 27 years first starting out as a professor in the English Department taking on a series of different roles including the director of gender studies the chair of English the interim dean of undergraduate studies um a few administrative roles uh in the Provost office and eventually I am now here as [Music] Provost I'm excited to be the proost of John Jay it's an honor and John J to me has always been a place of opportunity and transformation that's what the college experience was about but it's for me as a professor and then an administrator it's been a place that's given me a lot of opportunity I want that for all of our students I want that for our faculty and our staff and so the opportunity personally to get to lead academic Affairs is just a real honor but professionally I want to make sure that everybody has these kinds of opportunities [Music] I have three priorities I want to focus on Student Success I want to focus on academic excellence and then administrative excellence and support starting with Student Success uh we have done a great job in improving the Student Success at John J and we have some more work to do so the next steps are on creating an undergraduate Foundation program where students really understand um that they belong to a smaller community that um they have opportunities to thrive and explore their careers and um that we are improving the educational experience for enough then when it comes to academic Excellence uh this is sort of where faculty and students meet right so it's about hiring just the the best faculty that we can and providing a rigorous curriculum and so the key here is investing in faculty and staff professional development and in our research Enterprise so that we can continue to grow and enhance the experience of everybody on campus faculty staff and students [Music] alike John J is already a research Powerhouse and one of the things as my job as proost is to Really T tell our research story we are we have the most productive faculty in terms of producing research per year in all of Kuni and we're the third largest Grant F Grant funded institution in cuni we continue to get better and support faculty by listening to what faculty need and figuring out how to reach them better I'm really proud of our office for the advancement of research for the work that they do in reaching out to individual faculty and smaller groups of faculty and also thinking interdisciplinarily right by creating uh clusters and knowledge clusters and ways that we can continue to advance our research Mission I'm proud of a lot of my research if I'm being honest but I would say the the work that I'm most proud of is um a book I published almost 20 years ago it's called modernism mass culture and the Aesthetics of obscenity it is a very rigorous cultural and aesthetic history and Analysis of the relationship between uh Believe It or Not art and pornography from the 18th century to the 20th century what I'm proud about in that work is that it ended up defining a field and um you know the the book is still in print 25 years later it's still cited and um it's sort of established my way of interacting in the um modernist studies field mentorship is a critical part of success in our field um I am a college professor because of mentorship and um I think some of my success is because of the mentors that I've had who've nurtured my uh I want that for every faculty member at John J so we do have a junior faculty mentoring program and that's a great start but it can't be the end and one of the things that I've tried to Foster is a collaborative culture of support right mentoring isn't always a vertical relationship of a senior and a junior faculty member it is often about communities that collaborate and support one another um and so you know we do have writing boot camp days when faculty get together talk about their research at lunch but also just write together hopefully departments are nurturing this sort of lateral mentorship as well um and I know again that our office for the advancement of research is partnering senior Scholars with more Junior Scholars to try and work on this we've appointed a distinguished faculty fellow for research at the college Dr pretty Chon and she's been mentoring a lot of Faculty on how to get Grant that's an important step for a lot of faculty and sort of a milestone and I'm hoping that that will help more faculty understand how to get crinks and how to be a national player I mindful that being provos is a temporary position and that I am a sprinter in a relay race right I've taken this role from someone and I will have pass it on to someone what I hope is achieved if not at the end of my proo ship um at least in the next two uh is that one will increase our graduation rates um at least by 20% right uh 20 percentage points so that we're up in the 70s by the time I'm done second um I do want to tell John J's research story such that um we already have the goods we have brilliant big-hearted professors who are doing You Know Field defining research somehow that story hasn't been communicated in a way that people understand John J is we exciting research happin and I want that to be a known fact I want to be the best feeder of our students getting into law school that we can be we are known as a Balor origin school for Hispanic students pursuing doctorates that's fantastic I want to be the best at that right our students come to us with their hopes and dreams and they are worthy of their aspirations I want to be able to serve them in a way that propels them into just outstanding features