As of Fall 2022, Dr. Gary Armstrong, professor of political science, has been appointed Interim Vice President of Academic Affairs.

The Vice President of Academic Affairs (or VPAA) is best understood in the context of the previous role that it partially replaced – that of the Provost. The Provost, in the absence of the President, is the chief executive officer of the college. The Provost supervised numerous aspects of the William Jewell College’s affairs, including student life, academic affairs and sometimes enrollment and marketing. 

The College’s adoption of The Flight Plan is what precipitated the dissolution of the Provost role. The Flight Plan describes the college’s long-term, institutional trajectory goals, including plans to increase the student body to 2,000 students, an increase to student diversity to 50% and a $500 million endowment. 

Because these goals are so numerous and so ambitious, Dr. Elizabeth MacLeod Walls, President of the College, decided that the role of provost needed to be split into three roles. In this way, one vice president would focus on just academic affairs, another on student life and another on enrollment and marketing. This split would facilitate the attainment of the goals of the Flight Plan. 

Armstrong’s role as Interim Vice President of Academic Affairs encompasses the academic affairs section of the previous provost role. This role is complemented by the Vice President of Access and Engagement, currently Dr. Rodney Smith, and the Vice President of Marketing, Enrollment and Student Life, currently Eric Blair.

According to Armstrong, “[The]… principal job [of the Vice President of Academic Affairs] is to encourage support [and] lead excellence in academic affairs under our new strategic priorities of highest quality and highest access [in education]. [The Vice President of Academic Affairs] also [leads] and [develops] new academic programs, [while] ensuring assessment of them in their alignment towards the mission.”

Armstrong offered some examples of just how the Vice President role directly affected the student body, faculty and staff.

On the student end: Armstrong – in his capacity as Interim Vice President – hears several complaints and appeals. These include appeals concerning final grades in a class, unfair collegiate policies and complaints about the behavior of faculty at the college; although these complaints are heard by the appropriate department head first.

On the faculty end: Armstrong said he leads the department chairs, who are “the key people in building the courses, building the curricula and…the key assessment officers.” 

Though Armstrong was not able to provide the details of these projects, he is working with the faculty to develop three major structural changes within the college’s curriculum. Furthermore, Armstrong is helping faculty construct a cohesive narrative describing their particular coursework and programs in preparation for an upcoming accreditation visit from the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) in October. Finally, Armstrong helps to set the agenda for faculty meetings, which are then led by the Faculty Council Chair. 

All department chairs serve under the appointment of the Vice President of Academic Affairs. Furthermore, though this is not always the case, the Vice President of Academic Affairs can help with academic searches for candidates  to fill in vacant faculty positions; the Vice President makes final recommendations for these roles to the President.

On the staff end: several staff are under the direct purview of the Vice President role. These include such roles as Director of Teaching and Learning Technologies, Heath Hase, and Assistant Dean for Student Success, Pharamond Guice. Working with these staff members, Armstrong has been helping to develop the new Student Success Center, an undertaking which revamps the old Academic Success Center by implementing new training strategies for tutors and expanding the range of available subjects that are tutored. Armstrong adds that the strategy surrounding the Student Success Center is part of the college’s ongoing commitment to raising graduation rates from around 60% to closer to 80%.

The VPAA role is also concerned with the budget for academic affairs. “The cool part of the budget is always knowing so many excellent things going on here, and there’s more of them than we can possibly afford,” Armstrong said. “The good news is that when you’re working on the best budget stuff or the hardest budget stuff, it’s not a choice between good and bad stuff; it’s a choice between really good, really good, really good and unfortunately we can’t do it all.” 

Armstrong is specifically Interim VPAA and will eventually be replaced. Armstrong asserts that he is not a candidate for a permanent position: “I’m happy to help the college in the moment, but my love is the classroom and working with students and helping to administer programs where I’m teaching.”

In fact, there is a search committee specifically for a permanent VPAA role. This committee has received numerous applications for this role – this committee has now narrowed potential candidates to the extent that Zoom interviews will begin soon. 
“The plan is that they will have the finalists on campus in or by November, and be ready to make an offer… so there’s a chance that a new person will be here in January… But there’s a bigger chance that… they’ll start next academic year,” Armstrong said.

Though Dr. Armstrong’s role as Interim VPAA is somewhat constrained given its limited temporal nature, there have already been some important changes that have taken place under his leadership. For example, there was a persistent issue with the ratio of advisors to advisees when it came to first-year college students. In some cases, as in departments like business and nursing, the number of advisees allotted to one or two advisors was quite large. Thus, the faculty and Armstrong came to the conclusion that all full-time faculty have to have a minimum of ten primary advisees. Thus, faculty advisors will now mentor freshmen and sophomores who are not in their academic department – an action that has led to increased training overall.

On the whole, changes like the addition of the Vice President of Academic Affairs role represent an ongoing commitment to be a “student-ready” college. As Dr. Armstrong stated, “Jewell wants to be student-ready and focus on whether we’re student-ready, not whether our college students are college-ready.”

Successfully completing a college degree can sometimes feel like an impossible and unending odyssey. Inevitably, one hits a point in the academic year where the whole affair feels like a slog. No matter how much work is completed or time is spent studying, the toil seems to amount to nothing. 

It is possible that this sense of futility is at least partially engendered by a near-sightedness. When one is actually hunched over a textbook, trying to read the same sentence over and over, it can be difficult to get out of a state of frustration. In this frustration, one fails to take into consideration the basic fact of progress. Simply put: when I’m irritated or tired from doing academic work, I am unable to realize both that the work I’m doing is actually work (and not just suffering) and that this work is part of a broader project (that of getting a college degree).

The question is: how does one manage to track progress, both at a small-scale (the progress I make in doing individual assignments) and at large-scale (my overall progress in my degree path)? The unhelpful advice here would be to say: try getting less annoyed when you’re doing work so that you can keep a clear enough head to register yourself as being productive. The reason why this advice is unhelpful is because getting a degree and doing assignments are just the kinds of things that will inevitably be hard to do. 

Therefore, I want to give some advice about tracking progress and growth, even when one is annoyed or in a general state of panic. I’ll start my advice by going through an analogous case. I happen to love knitting, but it is quite a labor-intensive and time-consuming hobby. I love the look of a finished object, but sometimes doing row after row of stitches feels like torture. Hours of knitting can yield just a centimeter or two of fabric. So, how can I remain motivated enough to finish a nice garment? 

Knitters who are struck by knitting fatigue may find their energy revitalized if they place markers indicating where they started knitting to where they ended knitting for that particular day. In other words, I’ve learned that I can take a little clip and attach it to the fabric at the start of my knitting session, and then when I’m done, I can compare the amount of fabric I’ve created by measuring the distance from this initial marker. The reminder is a physical reminder – its physicality is what prevents a slip into a near-sightedness that makes one unable to mark progress. 

What is the equivalent of this physical knitting-marker to real life? The answer is: “It depends!” What counts as a marker to an individual is dependent on what they think they would be able to see even in a state of agony or despair. With knitting, it’s pretty easy for everyone to pick out a physical clip stuck on to a particular section of fabric. But what people see as a ‘marker’ in a similar fashion in real life is harder to identify. 

Probably the most common thing people do to create physical markers of progress is to keep a journal. It doesn’t have to be a daily thing, but it can be good to write about persistent issues or concerns. When I was in high school, I had persistent issues with interpersonal relations and would use journaling as a means of thinking through my problems. It’s not clear to me that the act of journaling itself helped me to resolve my issues, but when I rediscovered the journals and read through them, I could very clearly see the ways that my thinking itself had evolved. Even though I was struggling through some of the same issues, I could see that I had made progress. 

Being able to visualize my own development through my writing gave me impetus to continue working on issues. My journaling was in no way consistent; my entries were far-apart and often disconnected. Still, thumbing through them was useful to me: when I was struck by something particularly unpleasant or difficult, I noted it down and this was enough to yield a fruitful point of comparison. 

If you have difficulties taking the time to write things out in a journal, it can also be useful to talk to friends when you feel stuck in an academic slog. Near-sightedness, and generally an inability to see one’s own progression, is a you-specific problem. Your friends are more likely to be able to keep a clear-head and assess you — because they are not you. 

Of course, journaling and consulting friends are not the sole ways of tracking personal growth and progress. What will work for one individual may not work for another, but the trick is finding some way of creating markers. Progress can be difficult to estimate, particularly when one is feeling annoyed or irritated. Consider making your life easier by intentionally creating markers.