We here at the Institute are very excited about this bit of publicity: the current issue of Change Magazine, published in cooperation with The Carnegie Foundation For the Advancement of Teaching, features a profile of the Schwartz Institute written by Fara Warner, whom some of you may remember from last year’s Symposium. Fara’s article, entitled “Improving Communication is Everyone’s Responsibility” is a lengthy, in-depth discussion of the Institute and the tremendously varied work that we do here at Baruch College. Take a look. Here’s a snippet:
The Institute
To understand how the Institute was created—and has grown into a model for developing and supporting communication-intensive curricula—you have to look at the college’s history and its extraordinarily diverse student body.Baruch’s beginnings stretch back to 1847. Its Newman Vertical Campus is now located at Lexington and 24th Street in Manhattan, one block from the original site of the Free Academy, the country’s first free institution of higher education. In 1919, the City University system created a school of business and civic administration on the site of the Academy. The next year, it added a master’s degree in business administration. In 1953, the college was renamed in honor of Bernard M. Baruch, the statesman and financier who had been instrumental in the college’s creation. In 1968, Baruch College became a freestanding college within the City University of New York. The College currently encompasses the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Public Affairs, and the Zicklin School of Business—now the largest school of business in the nation.
Even in its early years, the college was known for its diversity, drawing its student body from the immigrant populations that called New York City home. Over the years, those populations have changed from Italian, Jewish, and German to today’s immigrants from countries such as Turkey, Uzbekistan, and China. Approximately one-third of Baruch students were born outside the U.S., and half are the children of immigrants. About 90 percent of Baruch’s undergraduate students graduated from New York City’s public and parochial high schools, and more than half come from families with an income of less than $44,000 annually. The college’s nearly 16,000 students speak 110 languages and come from 160 countries—prompting publications such as U.S. News and World Report and the Princeton Review to name it “the most diverse university in the U.S.”
“The college always had to operate with the knowledge that for many of its students English wasn’t just their second language but sometimes their third or fourth,” says Professor Paula Berggren, who has worked extensively with the Institute to enhance students’ writing and oral communication skills in Great Works of Literature courses, which all Baruch students are required to take. Moreover, “in the U.S., we don’t know how to communicate even if we’re native English speakers.” By the mid-1990s, the combination of a school devoted to teaching business skills and a diverse and underprepared student body had created a situation in which “Baruch was turning out competent vocationally trained students who lacked an ease with communication,” Berggren says.
Baruch faculty members weren’t the only ones who noticed the problem. Over the decades, Baruch had gained a reputation for turning out highly capable business majors who got very desirable jobs in accounting and other business sectors. But major employers reported that Baruch graduates sometimes lacked confidence, sophistication, and facility in business communication. The problem wasn’t lost on the college’s alumni either—including Bernard L. Schwartz, the former chairman and chief executive officer of Loral Space & Communication, who had graduated from Baruch with a bachelor’s of science degree in finance. He believed that Baruch needed to do a better job of teaching students real-world communication skills in addition to their core studies. In 1997 he donated the initial funding to create the Institute that now bears his name, with the expressed wish to help Baruch students become more effective communicators.
There are a number of ways to teach and enhance oral and written communication, from required communication-specific courses and formal academic support units to loose, informal programs driven primarily by individual faculty members. Baruch created an organization that operated somewhere between those two extremes. A few core principles and organizing structures were set down that have guided the Institute, but room was left for creativity and evolution stimulated by the changing needs of faculty and students and by technological developments.
The Institute isn’t housed under a specific department—English or communication studies, for instance. In keeping with the idea that communication is everyone’s responsibility, it operates under the Office of the Provost and remains independent of any one department’s requirements or direct control. It also receives private funds (including ongoing support from Schwartz), giving it flexibility in the breadth, depth, and scope of the programs it offers. It invites outsiders, most notably from the business world, to discuss communication issues that are of importance to the employers who hire Baruch students. Each year, the Institute hosts an annual symposium that brings together faculty and business executives to explore areas of mutual concern, such as the role of new technologies in shaping criteria for effective communication in academic and business contexts.
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