Associate dean will coordinate graduate education

In a move to unify campuswide leadership of graduate education, Graduate School Dean Martin Cadwallader named Judith Kornblatt senior associate dean for graduate education on Jan. 12.

In the newly created position, Kornblatt is responsible for identifying and addressing issues that affect graduate education across disciplines.

Cadwallader cited the importance of high-caliber graduate education for maintaining UW–Madison’s role as a top research institution. “Our strength in graduate education is what has made us strong in research,” he says. “There’s a symbiotic relationship between research and graduate education — if you do better in one, you do better in the other.”

The appointment of a faculty member was a deliberate move to integrate research and education goals and coordinate responses to issues that affect all academic disciplines, says Cadwallader.

Praising Kornblatt’s leadership skills and extensive administrative experience, he says, “Judith was the right person in the right place at the right time.”

Kornblatt moves into the position following nine years as associate dean for arts and humanities in the Graduate School. The 75 percent appointment will allow her to continue faculty duties in the Slavic languages and literature department.

Kornblatt spoke with Wisconsin Week recently about her new role.

Wisconsin Week: In your view, what are the primary issues facing graduate education at UW–Madison?

Kornblatt: Our most important issues are recruiting and funding students. There’s a real sense of urgency on campus that we need a more coordinated way of approaching these issues, whether through tuition remission, fellowships or TA salaries. Each academic program feels that urgency in a slightly different way, and one of my goals is to get programs to learn from each other.

I’m also starting to see a shift in our understanding of the purpose of graduate education. Beyond providing opportunities for individual learning and focused research, the university is responsible for developing citizen-scholars. Graduate students want to be more engaged with the larger society in which we live, learning to translate their scholarly experiences into social interaction. We have found that many of our efforts to diversify the university both demand and encourage this kind of engagement, and for this reason and many others, we need to redouble our efforts to recruit and retain graduate students from a wide variety of racial, ethnic, religious and socioeconomic groups.

WW: What goals do you hope to achieve in your new position?

JK: My first big challenge is to create a forum for campuswide discussion of graduate support. In recent years, we’ve had smaller initiatives on individual issues, like tuition remission, that focused on one piece of the puzzle. Unfortunately, when you focus on one piece, the other pieces tend to fall off the table. My hope is to be a focal point for campus as a whole to look at the bigger issues and see what we can do as a group.

Graduate students are the engines of both research and education on this campus. We would not be a first-class research institution or educate our undergraduates as well without our graduate students. My role will be to preserve, improve and energize that engine.

WW: If anything were possible, what would you do first?

JK: We’re at a critical juncture right now — we’re falling behind most of our peer institutions in terms of the financial support we can give students, and we would be better positioned to recruit better and more diverse students if we could offer better support packages. I have talked to students who said UW–Madison offered the best program in their field but who chose instead to attend a school that offered a larger stipend.

We need to be investing in our graduate students, quite literally. Once students are here, we have the faculty, the facilities, the creativity and the prestige to send them around the world! However, we need to recruit and support graduate students so that they are able to take advantage of the tremendous resources we have to offer.

WW: What does your background allow you to bring to the table?

JK: I’ve been an administrator in the Graduate School for nine years, working closely with deans from all areas of campus. I bring that network and knowledge of a lot of issues from across the entire campus.

I also bring the faculty perspective. As someone who is living the experience and the challenges that faculty and students are feeling, I have an acute sense of what life is like out on the front lines. I am continuing as chair of my department this semester, and in that role I’ve seen what issues face individual faculty members and middle-level administrators who have to make a lot of the decisions on the ground. Though I’ll be dealing with issues on a larger scale, I hope to keep track of issues on a more individual level also.

Finally, I think I bring a very open style. My door is always open, and I’m easy to approach. I strive for transparency — I believe that when more parties have more information, chances are better that they’ll work together. It doesn’t always work, but my experience so far is that it helps draw people into the discussion. Sometimes it takes a little longer to get things done, but hopefully in the end there’s a stronger consensus.

WW: What is the biggest challenge facing you in the short term?

JK: My job is to make sure graduate education doesn’t get lost among the many other challenges facing the university. I can help the administration articulate the urgency of the issues facing us and make sure WARF, the university foundation and the state realize the importance of graduate students to our mission.

WW: What changes do you expect to see in graduate education during the next several years?

JK: I think there will be a greater sense of the holistic nature of the graduate school experience — the experience of grad students outside the individual mentor-mentee relationship. There’s a cultural change happening on campus, a growing awareness that graduate training is not only about intense, carefully delineated study. Students need to get out into the community and see how their scholarship has meaning in the larger context of the world. We’re teaching our students how to be constructive, productive adults and members of society. Though we can’t lose disciplinary focus, we have to realize the world is not compartmentalized. Everything is interdependent.

We’re embarking on a new area in the Graduate School. As administrators, we need to remain involved in the basic functions of university while providing a leadership role for graduate education. I expect to add a new dimension to intensify what we can do with graduate education on campus.