Dear Colleagues, Though we do not have an official position announcement yet, we have been informed by our Dean that we will be conducting a search for a new department chairperson this year to start summer of 2007. Thus, I wanted to send to this list a bit of information and encourage those of you qualified to consider this position to be on the look out for the formal advertisement. In addition, if any of you know of anyone who is highly qualified, please feel free to send this message to them.
Our department is a combined Sociology-Anthropology department though the programs operate very independently. We are housed in a recently renovated building with nice facilities and technology. Sociology has about 250 undergraduate majors, many more minors, and about 25 Masters degree students (full and part-time). We have involvement in a variety of interdisciplinary programs as well (Women's Studies, Stevenson Center --community work, PeaceCorp students--, Gerontology...). At full strength (we have some faculty lines we expect to also fill this and next year), we have about 25 full-time soc faculty and 7 full-time Anth faculty. Along with a Bachelor's degree in Anthropology, we have a fairly new Masters in Historical Archeology. We have many wonderful and productive faculty members in a wide range of areas. Faculty in our department earn, I believe, a disproportionate share of college and university teaching and research awards. We are currently (this and next year) in the process of conducting a program review and writing a strategic plan. Illinois State is a (old Carnegie categories) public, research II university. We have a mission that strongly emphasizes both teaching and research. We are supportive of the scholarship of teaching and learning. We have good teaching and research support through a teaching center and college and university research offices/support staff. ISU is the first public university in the state of Illinois. We will be celebrating 150 years soon. There are about 20,000 students, about 3,000 of these are graduate students in six academic colleges. We have good honors and international studies programs. Our students are very diverse, as in many state schools, in terms of what skills and background they bring to campus. The average ACT score of our freshman, however, has been consistently on the rise and is now second in the state in terms of public schools only to the U of I. But, we pride ourselves on the progress students make after they come to campus. We are located in Normal, Illinois (actually, Bloomington-Normal) which is almost half-way between Chicago and St. Louis (a bit closer to Chicago- about 2 hours to downtown) on I55 and about midway between Peoria and Champaign-Urbana on I74 (about 45-50 minutes to either). We have a regional airport with regional and full size jets to Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit, Orlando..., and we are directly on the Amtrack train line. Located here as well is the international corporate headquarters for State Farm Insurance, Country Companies, Illinois Wesleyan University, Heartland Community College, Mitsubishi Motors plant, and more. We have a strong and diverse local economy. We are a relatively safe community with many diverse activities and opportunities (for example, a great walk/bike trail all over town, a well-known summer Shakespeare festival, many park/rec activities, a Children's Discovery Museum, a small zoo, concerts in the parks, art fairs, community theater...). I am happy to try to answer any questions anyone might have. Below are a few relevant web sites (we hope to do major reworking and additions of the dept one though). http://www.ilstu.edu/ http://www.soa.ilstu.edu/ Kathleen --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Teaching Sociology" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/teachsoc -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
