New Vision for McGhee Focuses on Rich Collegial Experience
Susan Kinsey, divisional dean, NYUSCPS Paul McGhee Division.Covering more than half a wall in Susan Kinsey’s office is a brilliantly colored map of Paris. The map recalls Kinsey’s eight years heading up continuing education for the American University in Paris. But it also serves as a metaphor for her global ambitions for the program she now leads at the Paul McGhee Division of NYU-SCPS.
“SCPS, and McGhee in particular, must reflect what NYU has become in the last 10 or 15 years,” she says, “one of the nation’s premier teaching and research universities.”
Under the direction of SCPS Dean Robert S. Lapiner, McGhee has embarked on a major rethinking of its role as a school for adults working for an undergraduate degree.
“Our very first objective,” Kinsey emphasizes, “is to make sure that, in everything we do, we embody what NYU stands for today.”
It is that shared vision of a new McGhee—distinctive, transformative, and coherent—that she’s charged with bringing to life.
“For example, we’re not divided into liberal arts and professional studies anymore,” Kinsey points out. Every McGhee student, regardless of major, will now be exposed to an interdisciplinary core curriculum.
The idea is to build a stronger McGhee community. “We want to bind our students together—with each other and with the faculty—in the kind of shared experience that’s always been so important in traditional undergraduate schools.”
Doing so will not only enrich what McGhee students learn, she explains, but also the collegial sense of community will help “keep them with us—completing their studies, instead of ‘stopping out’ as adult students do all too often when life gets in the way.”
In the works for two years, the vision and strategy for the new McGhee resulted from a collaborative effort by all its stakeholders—academic administrators, faculty, students, and alumni. And, Kinsey notes, putting what they came up with into practice will require heavy lifting on everybody’s part.
“It starts with rethinking how we identify the kind of adult student we know will thrive in the McGhee academic environment,” says Kinsey. “Our current students’ success stories have guided us in refining our admissions process so that incoming students are a perfect match for what we have to offer.”
NYUSCPS student procession outside of Washington Square Park.
Equally important is McGhee’s commitment to quality in the classroom. The program has begun conversations with the NYU Center for Teaching Excellence to help it establish a plan to ensure teaching effectiveness, outcomes-based learning, and continuous improvement feedback.
“We view the syllabus as a kind of implicit contract between teacher and student,” Kinsey says. “The same thing holds true in the classroom.”
There’s another way that being in the NYU family will work for McGhee students. As part of the new vision, McGhee is creating more linkages with NYU graduate programs and stronger partnerships with NYU’s academic, social, and professional networks.
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