On building flexible, inclusive graduate programs and why it matters
I recently received the following email from a student in the MS program that I run (excerpted with permission of the author):
Hi Emily,
I wanted to follow up about your comments a few weeks back about student mental health and formally thank you.
You have been an incredible ally as I have navigated a mental health emergency in my family over the last six months. Your flexibility with schedules and location, respect for privacy, and encouragement to put health and welfare far above work have been critical to allowing me to continue working with you and being a student in this program. In most other learning environments, I probably would have needed to drop out in November. Instead, thanks to the incredible administration of CLMS, I’m doing research with you, working closely with an advisor on a thesis, doing well in all my classes, and I have never been faced with a choice of school versus family.
Unfortunately, in my first-hand experience and according to what friends studying around the country have told me, there are many other institutions that struggle to accommodate and support student mental health. It seems to me that not only is this counter-productive to growth; it highly hinders university diversity. As this department, and especially CLMS, has been so successful in creating an environment where students from all walks of life can survive and thrive, have you thought about writing or providing training on this topic to other universities?
From the bottom of my heart, thank you for your kindness this year. Your quarterly “I don’t want to be the one responsible for you all not getting enough sleep” is truly valuable, and sets the tone for a rare work and study environment that prizes life and health. This environment has been one of the best lessons of my graduate experience, and if I ever end up in academia or management, I will do my best to emulate it.
This blog post is a first attempt to answer my student’s request to try to encourage similar environments elsewhere.
How we do it
The elements that make up the flexibility of CLMS that were critical to this student’s success on one level are simple: The program can be done full time (three classes/quarter + a summer internship; finishing in 12 months) or part time (one-two classes/quarter). Students can be in person on the UW campus, or join in the same courses online (we use Zoom to webcast the lectures). And students can move flexibility between those modes: if someone starts full time but needs to drop back to part time, that’s fine. People can move back and forth between being online and in person even within a course. Students who typically attend in person can avail themselves of the online option (or catch up later with recordings) if they’re home sick, home caring for someone who is sick, traveling, etc. Students who are typically online (e.g. living in another part of the country) are welcome to come in person if they are in Seattle.
We built this flexibility over time, because it benefitted our program: When we first started (in 2005), we imagined that the program would be full-time only, that all students would finish in 12 months (and also, terribly unrealistically, that all students would do an internship and then also complete a thesis based on that internship). In order for this self-sustaining (“fee-based”) degree to be viable, it had to attract enough students. And we quickly discovered that we could attract more students if we made it possible to attend part time. Then our student audience could include those who were also working, for example. We have also, from the beginning, been committed to making this program accessible to people coming from both linguistics and CS (and plenty of other!) academic backgrounds. We’re a linguistics department, so we can get CS majors (and others) up to speed with linguistics, but for the required CS background, students need to go elsewhere. Making it possible to take the program over 2–3 years allows for students to take additional CS and probability classes alongside.
In 2007 I had the opportunity to pilot the online option (using Adobe Connect, back then) for one course. There is some logistical overhead to doing this: one has to set up more software at the start of the class, learn to make gestures visible to online students (using the mouse, rather than hands only), make sure that student comments and questions in the classroom are audible to online students (our current solution for this is the CatchBox microphone), and generally keep the online students in one’s awareness. However, the benefits were also immediately clear! For one thing, it meant that all of the sudden our program could draw an audience of students beyond those already in or able to relocate to Seattle. For another, webcasting also enables producing lecture recordings, which are very helpful for students for review or if they need to miss a class. There was a further benefit of time zones: We were facing some pressure to offer evening classes, but neither I nor the other faculty wanted our teaching to be in the evening. I pointed out to the folks in administration asking for evening classes that our afternoon classes in Seattle are evening classes on the East Coast! In the following years, we took more classes online and eventually got to the point where the whole program can be done remotely. Crucially, these aren’t canned, pre-packaged copies of the program’s courses, but actually one and the same courses, that students can attend in two different modes.
Why we do it
The above description is basically about the mechanics, the various logistical aspects of the program that allows us to accommodate various kinds of needs for flexibility. None of that is particularly difficult, but it certainly is facilitated by the nature of our program and the institutional structures behind it: CLMS is jointly administered by the Department of Linguistics and a unit on campus called UW Continuum College (previously UW Professional and Continuing Education). That gave us a lot of space to be creative with program structure that might take more work within a traditional academic program.
But more important than how we do it is why we do it: we do it because it benefits our program to be able to serve a broader audience of students. In the beginning, it was literally a matter of program survival. If we had failed to attract (and graduate) sufficient numbers, the program would have been cancelled. Over time, we have also learned that our original commitment to being a ‘way in’ to computational linguistics/NLP for linguistics majors also benefitted the program as a whole. By bringing together students with diverse training we create an environment from which they can learn from each other, making a much richer experience for everyone. In other words, making our program flexible and accessible is not some extra nice-to-have but a core part of our mission.
‘A work and study environment that prizes life and health’
Graduate school is demanding, and CLMS is no exception. Our general approach in CLMS courses is to set big challenges for the students and then help them to meet them by providing appropriate scaffolding. In other words, even though there is scaffolding, there are big challenges. Students who are working full time and also taking a CLMS course (we strongly discourage more than one course/quarter for those working full time) and students who are taking the full-time CLMS schedule are very busy people.
And even still this doesn’t mean we should or do just say “deal with it”. Instead we recognize that students (and faculty and staff) are first and foremost people. People with lives outside of school & work. People who may be facing short-term or long-term health challenges of their own or of people they care for. We recognize that the CLMS course load is heavy, and we talk with students about this, starting from the two-day program orientation. Not in the usual “we’re all suffering together” culture of overwork way, but rather with an invitation to speak openly if things are too much, and hopefully early in the process so that we can help students head off problems before they become overwhelming. We encourage collaboration and communication among students and between students and faculty, so people can spend their time on the most important aspects of their studies rather than getting buried in debugging black holes.
I would like to remind my fellow educators and researchers that this academic world is what we make it. Those of us who are in positions of relative power should be using that power to build environments that are inclusive and to push back against the culture of overwork. If there seem to be too many demands and it seems out of our hands, we can ask: Where are these demands coming from? Which ones can I change or push back on?
Still room for improvement
I don’t want to make it sound like CLMS has solved every problem there is. This is always a journey. We are doing very well on gender diversity (we have a handful of non-binary students and the rest of the population is about 50/50 men/women) and probably better than average for graduate degrees like ours in terms of recruiting and graduating members of underrepresented minority groups, but such groups remain underrepresented in our student population. This means there is more we can and should be doing to make our corner of the academy a space that is everyone’s rather than a white space that we encourage members of URMs to join. And similarly, I am sure that there is more that we can do to make sure our program is accessible to students with disabilities. I firmly believe, however, that understanding that the students are the program, and that the students’ success is the program’s success, positions us well to keep learning and keep improving.
