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Research Bulletin Highlights University's Commitment to Intellectual Inquiry |
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Mergers and Takeovers Topic of Recent Forum for 21st Century |
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A new campus
publication has a lot to say about UMass Boston as a crossroads for education
and intellectual inquiry. The 1999 UMass Boston Bulletin of Research and
Scholarship is the first of a series scheduled to be published every two
years.
The Bulletin organizes, in readable form, extensive information about the scholarly pursuits of our faculty, research staff, and graduate students, from September 1996 to December 1998. This period culminated a decade's "extraordinary growth" in research and scholarship, as Chancellor Penney remarks in her introductory message, observing that between 1988 and 1998 the number of UMass Boston's doctoral programs grew from one to nine, and that external research funding increased from $7.1 million to $17.2 million.
This Bulletin of Research and Scholarship celebrates this period of growth and also fills a need for information. In the words of Martin H. Quitt, Vice Provost for Research and Dean of Graduate Studies, who conceived and oversaw the massive project, the Bulletin is our only "central record of the range of work we do." He also points to its comprehensive nature, linking as it does the work of students, faculty, and staff in graduate programs, research institutes and centers. "It is organized," he says, "to show clearly the link between graduate study and research."
The UMass Boston Bulletin of Research and Scholarship will serve a general public interested in the University's research and scholarship, and will also be a resource document for the media, for University trustees, state legislators, and prospective UMass Boston students. And since it's impossible for all of us to know everything that goes on here, the Bulletin is sure to inform members of the campus community about some scholarly activities they had not been aware of.
At first glance it's a daunting prospect: a book about the size and weight of the West Suburban Boston telephone directory. But a brief look inside is reassuring: A pair of indexes at the back helps you quickly find either a research subject or a particular researcher's name.
And the publication has been carefully planned. University Editor Jeffrey Mitchell, who compiled, organized, and edited the Bulletin, says that special attention was given to fairly full descriptions of "representative projects" in each academic area in a way "intended to give non-specialist readers a sense of the what and why of the projects&emdash;to make everything more concrete."
The publication is easy to use. Each of the University's colleges and institutes has a section in the Bulletin. (CAS has one for liberal arts and one for the sciences.) There is also a section about graduate programs that focus on public issues, and one about research being done by graduate students. Each section features
• detailed accounts of representative major projects
• a brief description of each graduate program
• a directory of faculty and staff, their areas of interest, publications, and grants received
• a listing of master's theses and/or doctoral dissertations.
The breadth and depth of the Bulletin of Research and Scholarship is apparent from a casual look at the descriptions of major projects. These are some of the areas our faculty, staff, and graduate students are exploring:
• race, community, and moral education
• an "electronic field guide" for identifying biological specimens
• providing services to the homeless through technology
• coping with cancer pain
• welfare reform
• school-university partnerships
• cultural factors in health-care delivery
• middle school students with learning problems
The publication is available from the Office of Graduate Studies. If you want to know more about research and scholarship on our campus, this Bulletin is a good place to start.