The Office of Communications and Marketing recently interviewed Erica Chito-Childs, who became the acting Ruth and Harold Newman Dean of Hunter College’s School of Arts and Sciences on June 15. Dean Chito-Childs, a sociologist who is a leading qualitative researcher on issues of race, gender, and sexuality, has taught at Hunter since 2005 and chaired the Sociology Department for six years. She takes the reins from Political Science Professor Andrew Polsky, who served as dean for 11 years and stepped down to work on a book. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
What are your plans? Are you promoting any initiatives?
As the senior associate dean last year under Andrew Polsky, I started several initiatives which I’ll continue, such as a focus on faculty mentoring.
When I came to Hunter as a brand-new assistant professor in 2005, I got to be part of something called the Gender-Equity project run by Virginia Valian and Vita Rabinowitz. It gave us great mentoring, resources, and support, which shaped my career and gave me an understanding of the importance of mentoring. If we have faculty who are well mentored, then they will mentor the students, and that will also spread to the staff. This includes having workshops and training opportunities, and more resources and stipends to support research and community engagement. Last year, I brought in the Op Ed Project, which helps faculty talk about their research to a larger audience.
Another big initiative is focused on interdisciplinarity and bringing together faculty to think in new and innovative ways around majors and curriculum initiatives. We had an event, bringing in Jeffrey Cohen, the Dean of Humanities at Arizona State University, to get our faculty thinking about how we can create some interdisciplinary majors out of our existing majors that will not only attract students but also help them be more marketable in this economy. What if we had a major like “Culture, Tech and the Environment” or “Medicine, Narratives, and Society” or “Migration, Language and Policy” that brings together our strengths in different departments to give our students more options. We have many students who come in wanting to major in Computer Science or Biology, and that is wonderful but when their skills aren’t necessarily aligned, they struggle, and we want to have exciting, related majors to draw them to. As a first-generation college student myself, I know it is often hard to know all the opportunities out there. So, we want to support faculty to work on interdisciplinary majors and collaborations, especially with our Arts and Humanities departments as way to expand opportunities for our students.
The third is that the Dean’s Office wants to promote the amazing accomplishments of our faculty, staff, students and alumni of School of Arts and Sciences. We will have a Dean’s Office LinkedIn page, Instagram page, and TikTok, to be a voice for public higher education. With the help of Shiao-Chuan King in the Center for Online Learning, we started this summer recording faculty talking about their research, their experiences with Hunter students both in and outside the classroom and ways they see their research, pedagogy and community engagement as making a difference in our world.
We want to promote what we do here in the School of Arts and Sciences to parents, have some fun videos, and spotlight our students, alumni, and faculty to complement what is being done in other parts of the college.
Talk about your style of deanship.
I hope I can help reenergize and reinfuse the school with a sense of community and a positive culture through a variety of ways. For example, I will do some student-focused events like “Donuts with the Dean.” Most students have no idea what a dean is. We will have100 donuts once a month, and my assistant deans and I will invite students to talk about anything and ask questions. We will ask them to tell us about themselves and their majors. We’re going to have an open-door policy, to do more training, to have more visibility, to have community partnership events, and develop more collaborations with community organizations.
The Dean’s office will hold a community partnership panel series spotlighting faculty who are doing great work within communities to name just a few like Assistant Anthropology Professor Megan Hicks, Associate Sociology Professor Calvin Smiley and Assistant Computer Science professor Raj Korpan. My office will also be collaborating with Student Affairs and finding ways to link faculty in mentorship roles in the newly open. Each faculty will bring a few representatives from the fields to help students understand not only faculty research but also how it connects to society and careers.
What is great about Hunter academically and what would you like to improve?
What’s great about Hunter is that students have access to top faculty who are renowned researchers but also really committed to teaching. We have this great combination: faculty who are invested in the classroom but also are invested and well-known in their areas of research and public-facing engagement, whether that be activism or advocacy.
What I’d like to improve is that there’s so much more we can do to tie together different disciplines. I’m a sociologist, and when I taught sociology of family, I would use dance and music to illustrate how dating norms change over time and space. When teaching about dating preferences, many times, a student might say that their Biology professor was saying something contradictory. I would always think about how to make those connections clear and help them connect what they are learning in sociology and biology about mating are not necessarily separate. And students are drawn to this, as we have seen with our interdisciplinary Human Biology major, which brings together Biology, Sociology, Anthropology, and Psychology, but how do we see more of that?
It could be infusing the arts into the curriculum. For example, the Hesselbach Professor of Biological Sciences, Jill Bargonetti, literally has the students learn to dance what they’re learning in Biology class. Thirty years from now, students are going to remember that they’ve danced the genomes that they were learning. That’s what’s great about Hunter, but how do we make that more widespread?
