From where I sit as Dean of Students and Undergraduate Education, the most important recent event at MIT has been the creation of "the new dean's office" which I oversee. Just under a year ago, President Charles Vest created this new office by consolidating administrative units that had formerly reported to three different senior officers. As a result, the budget and staff of the dean's office expanded almost seven-fold; in terms of square footage, the dean's office expanded almost forty times. During the past year, much of my energy has gone into developing an administrative structure for what was recently dubbed ODSUE -- the Office of the Dean of Students and -- Undergraduate Education.

From a student's point of view, however, this is underwhelming news. So what? Who cares? I would like to address these very legitimate responses and explain why students should notice -- and welcome -- these administrative events. The first reason why students should care is that you should expect to get better service from MIT. In the dean's office, we handle a wide range of routine transactions involving your money, food, parties, athletics, academic forms, campus organizations, and so forth. All these are routine transactions, but they are not trivial ones. They support your education, both academic and cocurricular -- and the -- concentration of administrative functions in one office enables MIT -- to consolidate and simplify its student services.

You know how frustrating it can be to run from office to office trying to get questions answered and routine matters handled. In individual offices, most staff try hard to respond to your questions and needs, but all too often, administrative walls get in their way and yours. They have to send you somewhere else, and then "somewhere else" often has to send you yet somewhere else, and so on.

One primary motivation for the administrative consolidation is to provide "one-stop shopping" for students. The most spectacular example of "one-stop shopping" so far is the new Student Services Center in Building 11, on the Infinite Corridor. In that center, you should be able to handle most transactions involving your financial and academic records. The Center has just opened, so we may not have it completely right yet, but the staff there is making every effort to run the place so it serves your needs. I hope that in the future -- either through -- an expanded Student Services Center, or through a similar facility -- elsewhere -- we can provide comparable one-stop shopping for -- transactions involving residential life and campus activities.

Efficiency, however, is only one advantage offered by the newly consolidated dean's office. The consolidation also redefines MIT education in two ways. First, it reminds everyone of our common academic goals. Second, it reminds everyone that learning includes community as well as academic activities.

MIT was founded on a distinctive philosophy of integrated education: it was novel in the 1860s, and is still fresh today. William Barton Rogers insisted that this Institute integrate liberal, or general, and professional education throughout the college years, rather than having a "liberal arts" base precede a subsequent professional layer. He was convinced that a useful education could also be a profoundly humanistic education, if faculty approached their work with clarity and unity of purpose. MIT therefore has a common faculty and a common core curriculum.

At the same time, however, MIT is profoundly decentralized. Educational initiatives have always originated and should always originate in departments, labs, and centers. There is a creative tension at the heart of MIT -- the tension between the -- dynamism of these units, and the larger vision of an integrated -- education. We must never stifle the creativity that emerges from -- the particular units. At the same time, we must have a way to -- ensuring that we optimize, in the end, the overall educational -- experience for students.

The dean's office is the place that has the responsibility of looking at, and speaking for, the whole educational experience. We must maintain coherence among MIT's many educational initiatives. We must be sure that there is a robust academic infrastructure to support those initiatives. We must maintain our physical infrastructure: our rooms, desks, chairs, and chalk, not to mention our cutting edge technologies. We must maintain our bureaucratic infrastructure, such as fifth-week flags, petitions, and transcripts. We must provide pedagogical support, such as teaching assessment, orientation for new teachers, and consulting services.

We must also make sure that the Institute pays heed to common educational activities that overflow the boundaries of any one department, such as freshman advising, UROP, IAP, and the Writing Requirement, to name a few key examples. If one department does a marvelous job with its curriculum and teaching, other departments should know about its success so they do not remain isolated from outside developments.

Finally, ODSUE is uniquely responsible for integrating academic and out-of-classroom learning experiences. More and more, students come here seeking experiences that go beyond the formal curriculum. You want to learn how to work successfully in groups, to have leadership opportunities, to manage organizations, to practice starting up new ventures, and to get a global education appropriate for your global future. MIT offers these experiences, but too often unintentionally or sporadically. The larger dean's office will be a more effective advocate for the educational significance of these campus experiences.

It will take time to create an administrative unit capable of realizing these ambitions. We have a great opportunity to invent an organization that will express our vision of a more integrated education. We can do it only in close collaboration with you, MIT's graduate and undergraduate students, because our ultimate goal is to give you the best possible education.

We are still experimenting with the best possible forms of collaboration. This fall ODSUE will continue its regular meetings with the Graduate Student Council, institute regular meetings with the Undergraduate Association leaders, and start some "random student dinners" in order to communicate with students who are not part of student government.

In addition, there are all sorts of formal and informal student contacts that go on in each of the units of ODSUE. We hire a larger number of student workers; we work with many students as tutors and associate advisors; we serve alongside students on faculty committees. All these and more are opportunities that exist for you to let us know how we are doing and where we should be going. Please help us live up to the great expectations that we have for the "new dean's office."