Binghamton University’s Academic Building B just got a little more crowded.
The institution formerly known as the School of Education and Human Development, the building’s occupant, officially split in two at the end of the spring 2006 semester. Now, Academic B is home to the School of Education and the College for Community and Public Affairs.
The separation of the schools fulfills an important element of BU’s five-year strategic plan, one in which the University expands and diversifies its academic offerings.
“The quality of education we’ve offered … would be available to students whose interests had not been previously served by the University,” said University provost Mary Ann Swain.
“It is the natural progression of this University,” said BU president Lois B. DeFleur. “In talking with a lot of our new students and asking them what attracted them to Binghamton, they say … they liked it because they felt they would have opportunities to get maybe one major, maybe two, to cut across different fields.”
The split, she said, is just one more step in making Binghamton more appealing to prospective students looking for more options in their education.
Among those options is a postgraduate education in teaching, something that the School of Education has always offered but that it can now focus upon more extensively. It can expend all of its resources on minting teachers with graduate degrees, said its interim dean, Robert Carpenter.
“Not only is there a need for teachers, but there’s a need for good teachers,” Carpenter said. He said the school — which only offers graduate programs — would place an emphasis on recruiting heavily within BU’s Harpur College of Arts and Sciences.
“We can find good solid students, people coming out of Harpur College, who are good chemists, good speakers of foreign languages, good mathematicians, and get them into the ranks of teaching at the secondary level, in middle schools and high schools,” he said.
He emphasized the potential of joint-degree programs, in which students could earn both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in only five years, to help students who are considering teaching as a career get on the fast track.
“The idea is to capture people who love their content area, who were majors in mathematics or chemistry, and maybe have an inkling that they want to work with young people,” Carpenter said.
He also said the school would continue to strengthen its educational leadership offerings, including programs to help students qualify for jobs as principals, superintendents and building-level administrators. Not included in the plan — for the forseeable future, anyway — are programs for training guidance counselors, gym teachers and educational support staff.
Still, Carpenter would like to see the school expand — “commensurate, of course, with resources,” he said. But while he wouldn’t attach a figure the statement, he did say he wanted to keep the school small during the five or so years he intends to act as interim dean.
“We’re a small operation … and have no pretensions along that. We do a very fine job of preparing teachers,” he said.
Across the hall (at least for now) is the newborn College of Community and Public Affairs, headed up by Patricia Wallace Ingraham. Ingraham, who was recruited from a distinguished career at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, got her doctorate from BU in 1979.
CCPA is developing its own programs to train students in government and public service, nonprofit work and urban development. It offers some undergraduate classes, but again, it also focuses more heavily on graduate-level education.
In order to better provide in-the-trenches training, CCPA will move to a new building on downtown Binghamton’s Washington Street. Here students will be have quick access to the city that is to serve as their learning lab.
But preparing for the fall 2007 move — while building an entire college from the ground up at the same time — involves a bit of legwork, and Ingraham will likely have her hands full over the coming year.
“Our number one priority right now is insuring faculty and students think about [CCPA] as a college with a common purpose,” Ingraham said, something that will come with time and good practices.
Just getting there may prove daunting, as the very mechanisms for making the college function are still in transition. “We need bylaws,” she said with a laugh.
To Ingraham, her return to her alma mater after over two and a half decades to shake things up is a sign of BU’s overall success, especially in its undergraduate programs and even more so in those of Harpur.
“The ability of the University to focus more on professional programs … says to me at least that the rest of the University is so healthy and that the liberal arts and the parts of it that we all loved for so much for such a long period of time are doing well enough for the University to have some flexibility in how it focuses its sights and how it looks for longer-term objectives. And this school is pure indication of that to me.”