Albertine leaves U. for Temple

The former Provost's assistant now oversees undergraduate education at Temple University. Susan Albertine -- who served as assistant to the Provost for the 21st Century Project -- became Vice Provost for Undergraduate Studies at Temple University earlier this month. Under Temple's Provost James England, Albertine is responsible for undergraduate studies on the university's main campus. She coordinates academic planning, academic resource and support programs -- including a Writing Center and Math/Science Resource Center -- the core curriculum, degree auditing, freshman seminars, the honors program, ROTC, and main campus evening and summer programs. She will also oversee the Temple Learning Communities -- a special program of related core courses for first-year students -- and interdisciplinary academic initiatives among Temple's 11 schools with undergraduate programs. Albertine graduated from Cornell University in 1972 and earned her doctorate in English from the University of Chicago. She was also a visiting lecturer in English at the University. Editor of A Living of Words: American Women in Print Culture, she is the author of numerous papers and of a forthcoming book on women's writing and the language of industrialism. Albertine's work at Penn centered around the 21st Century Project, a major initiative of the Agenda for Excellence. The 21st Century Project involves educating the leaders of the future through providing research opportunities for undergraduates and offering more multidisciplinary courses. The initiative aims to connect different academic fields and extend learning beyond a student's major department through programs such as Foreign Languages across the Curriculum. Another aspect of the 21st Century Project is restructuring and improving student resources and support services. Programs implemented under Albertine to achieve this goal include residence-based computing and library support and the Web Support Services Project -- through which student volunteers teach professors how to make homepages for their classes. The third goal of the 21st Century Project is to break down boundaries between academic and social life at the University through restructuring residential life to include more living and learning programs like the Science and Technology Wing and the Effect Project. Based on the results of the Biddison-Hier and Brownlee reports earlier this year, administrators are also planning to establish residential colleges to serve as intellectual and social communities within the context of the larger University.