This summer, the dean’s office welcomed Marguerite Rippy to Mason as the CHSS associate dean for graduate academic affairs. She joined Mason from Marymount University, where she had served as the literature and languages department chair and director of the MA program in English and humanities, as well as leading Marymount’s reaccreditation process with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges. She brings a wealth of experience in promoting lifelong learning and fostering diversity in education.
Asked about the role of graduate education in the unusual circumstances presented by COVID-19, Rippy expresses a degree of hope. “It’s become even more obvious to me as we’re moving through this COVID-19 era that this is the ideal time for people with humanities and social sciences backgrounds to really retool and retrain and help the community adjust to the changing world,” she said.
She is also clear about the particular challenges facing students and faculty at the current time, urging that we “keep ourselves focused and on-task even as 2020 tries to disrupt us.” Rippy aims to counter these challenges by creating a sense of community. “We need to offer students a sense that we still have a shared mission, we are still moving forward, we are taking the steps that we always plan to take in every academic year, and we’re adapting to the unique environment of 2020.”
She looks forward to spending more time with the students when that becomes possible. “I’m going to still identify as faculty,” she said. “I think that position gives a better sense of the student experience. Graduate students have a unique set of interests from undergrads but also from each other, because the disciplines are so distinct that unlike undergraduate study where you can kind of come up with a set of structures that support students across the board, at the graduate level you really have to get into the details of the individual programs to figure out how best to support students. And that’s the kind of problem solving that I love – figuring out how you actually get in there and make the biggest difference on student experience.”
September 01, 2020