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Leadership, it is said, is all about ideas -- having them, sharing them, promoting them and, with persistence, seeing them to fruition. In that context, IU Kokomo's Allen Safianow provides a fresh perspective on the traditional notion of faculty leadership. Soft-spoken, bespectacled and with a dry wit, the history professor maintains a low profile that belies a reputation for quietly getting things done.
For example, Safianow, along with fellow faculty member Sue Ridlen and other colleagues, saw the need for an American studies minor at IUK, discussed it with colleagues and then worked with fellow faculty for years to have the program established. It was Safianow, too, who, several years ago, helped fashion a major grant proposal to develop a formal mentoring program for students. While the program didn't make it -- at least not initially -- the notion of student mentoring did.
Today, in fact, mentoring is a watchword at the Kokomo campus, where this year a team of faculty volunteers is concentrating on effective ways to move students through levels of increasing competency toward success in the university.
Safianow points out that not all of his ideas become realities. While plans for an American studies major got the go-ahead from the Indiana Commission for Higher Education, campus funding did not materialize. It is a disappointment Safianow takes in stride.
"Allen defines the true meaning of shared governance," says IUK's Acting Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Stuart Green, who has known Safianow since the two joined the Kokomo campus as young faculty members about 25 years ago. "Whether it's curricular reform, interdisciplinary teaching or supplemental instruction, whenever key issues or critical needs are deserving of attention, Allen is out there working to bring them to the forefront."
In the area of university service, Safianow devotes a fair share of his time to IUK's annual International Day Festival, an event that draws standing-room-only crowds from throughout north central Indiana to campus each spring.
Recently, Safianow has committed a significant share of time to two campus committees, one that is searching for ways to encourage service as a value-added component of faculty promotion/tenure criteria and another that is seeking ways to increase college matriculation rates of Indiana's citizens. The latter, part of a statewide initiative, is funded by an $8 million grant to IU from the Lilly Endowment, Inc. (See Home Pages, Sept. 5 issue)
With student retention already a major focus at IUK, Safianow says the Lilly initiative is particularly significant to campus efforts to help students survive the vulnerable freshmen year and to persist to graduation. Safianow points out that only 60 percent of IU's graduates complete their coursework for a baccalaureate degree in four years. At IUK, where many students have family responsibilities, work full time and are enrolled part time, that percentage is even lower. The goal is to have each IU campus reach at least the median graduation rate for its peers and then the 75th percentile of its peers. Since Indiana ranks low in measures of educational attainment, the campuses really have their work cut out for them, Safianow adds.
But Safianow doesn't look for easy outs, and if his own success with students is an indicator of what can happen, the matriculation goals set via the Lilly grant are more than achievable.
A winner of IUK's most coveted teaching accolade, the Claude Rich Award for Excellence in Teaching, Safianow is clearly first and foremost dedicated to students. "One of the greatest rewards of being a teacher is when someone comes up to you and says they were in your class 15 years ago, and then they tell you how much they learned," he notes, adding that no other feeling is comparable.
| IUK history professor 'defines the meaning of shared governance' |
As faculty adviser of the IUK History Club, Safianow organizes excursions to historic sites throughout the state -- to Madison to see a river community, to New Harmony to study the utopian society of Father Rapp, to museums in Indianapolis and Fort Wayne. And he uses the club as a vehicle to analyze current affairs within the context of history.
Because the learning process is complex and individual, Safianow says he views himself as a facilitator whose goal is to stretch each student's understanding of the complexities of history and its relevance to contemporary times.
"The impact you have isn't always immediately known to you -- or even to the student," says Safianow."You can't really expect to reach everyone, but you hope to have some impact on some."
Linda Stout, a student who had her first course with Safianow in 1986, says the history professor has had more than "some impact."
"He encouraged me to speak up," Stout recalls."When I did speak, he listened to what I had to say, and he used it as a springboard to discussions in class. . . . He made me feel like I can do whatever there is to be done."