Bill Falls discovered his scholarly calling by accident. A first-generation college student interested in law, Falls enrolled at Brandeis University because its law school placement rate was one of the best in the country. When the political science course he wanted to take was full, he enrolled in a psychology class on a lark and was captivated by his professor’s research specialty, sensation and perception -- how and why the brain misperceives an optical illusion like Escher’s impossible staircase. Law a distant memory, Falls transferred to Bates College, where he was taken under the wing of a psychology professor whose mentorship he recalls fondly to this day. After earning a doctorate from Yale in experimental psychology, Falls wanted to teach at a university where he could mentor undergraduates as he was mentored at Bates but still pursue the active research career he began at Yale. A New Englander who attended high school in New Hampshire, Falls knew UVM to be just that place. When a job in the Psychology Department opened in 1989, he applied and was hired. After 17 years on the faculty, he became chair of the department in 2005, interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in April 2015 and -- after a national search that attracted scores of highly qualified candidates -- dean in March 2016.

You’ve been at the helm of the College of Arts & Sciences for about a year, first as interim dean and now as dean. What’s your assessment of the college?

I think the college is really strong. We have amazing faculty. Strong scholars, devoted teachers. What we’re working on is how to turn those excellent faculty into an excellent college. It's not the idea that we aren’t a really good college. We are. But what can we do to bring it to the next level?

So how do you do that? 

In two parts. I think we continue to build areas of scholarly excellence by making strategic hires. There may be 10 of these areas, or there may be more. So that strengthens the college. But the key to continue making the college better is to say, wow, how can we parlay these areas of rich scholarly strength into unique undergraduate experiences?

Can you give an example of what you mean?

We could ask, for example, what are the strategic hires we could make in Anthropology that really solidified a cluster of faculty around the issue of health? So, now we can contribute in an important way to a health-centered curriculum -- Society and Health, it might be called -- that would be university-wide or within the college, which doesn't exist right now. That's what I'm talking about, strengthening the scholarship and then building or reinventing or reimagining existing programs into something that would be attractive and interesting to students.

Who comes up with the ideas for these scholarly clusters? 

They have to come from my colleagues. I can talk about cool things in Psychology, but I don't know anything about Classics or History or Political Science. I need the faculty’s energy, their vision, their interest -- and I can be a facilitator. We need to have the college, not constantly reinventing itself, but willing to continue to move forward, continue to adjust. Students change rapidly, their needs change. We need to be able to offer our core liberal arts but in a way that is meaningful and appropriate. So the question is, who does that? And that really needs to come from faculty.

Are you hearing about other interesting curriculum developments you could share? 

I hear a lot of really great ideas. How can we strengthen and broaden Global Studies? How can we develop this new cross-university program in health and society that I mentioned. We've got philosophers talking with political scientists talking with economists to come up with a new major that combines all three disciplines. That would be brilliant. We've got Art History and History talking about a museum studies certificate. We’ve got Music and Dance and the Lane Series talking about an arts management certificate. I know English is talking about the possibility of doing something in creative writing. So there are a lot of these awesome ideas out there that I want to nurture and grow.

Do you think the perspective of having been a department chair will help you as dean? 

Absolutely, and I hope I never lose that perspective because the chair is a difficult job. You’re managing the faculty, you're managing your dean. You’re responsible for making the trains run on time, and you have a lot of those day-to-day sorts of responsibilities. As a dean, you can risk asking too much of them. When you move up that ladder, you tend to lose that perspective. But I trust my colleagues to remind me. They're not going to say, Oh, he doesn't know what we’re talking about. They might instead say, Bill remember when… And I'll go, yes.

Faculty say that today's post-millennial students are different from their predecessors. How are you adapting? 

We have to meet this new generation of students where they are. The way we delivered a liberal arts education 10 years ago may not work today. Students are coming to us very anxious about their futures, about their careers. So what can we do to help them without changing the core of the liberal arts? One idea is to have a new first-year experience program that talks to students about the value of a liberal arts education, that helps students understand that, yes, that's your major but your degree is a liberal arts degree, and that is preparing you to think, to work as part of a team, to communicate. If we can really get them to understand that, they'll be much more relaxed about their futures.

You’re also addressing student anxiety about jobs and careers by beefing up your internship program, right?

Yes, my predecessor recognized that this is an issue for the college and worked with (Associate Dean) Abby McGowan to get more internships front and center in the college. We’ve given over a staff position in student services to facilitate internships and work with our foundation board of directors to raise money to support internships, so I think that's growing.

Study abroad is another area of focus, but you have a different twist. Tell us about that.  

The programs I’m particularly keen on are the exchange programs, because those are more economically viable for our students. Students can't take their grants and loans with them (in a conventional program). But if a student studies abroad in an exchange program, they're paying UVM tuition and have the same financial aid. So you can have students of less means take advantage of these programs.  

Are you looking to expand the number of universities in other countries that we have exchanges with?

Yes, there's a huge list that (Associate Provost) Gail Nunley is working from. And we’re also asking departments to identify one or two where they know something about the faculty and the program, so we can actually certify them as high-quality programs. So the faculty are creating these links, and that gives us the opportunity to integrate those experiences into the courses they’re teaching. So if you think about students in Global Studies, for example, when they're talking about southeast Asia in a class, the professor can talk about the opportunity to go study there if they wanted to, at this university in southeast Asia. So we want to work more on this integration and create a portfolio of study abroad experiences and try to get more of our students to take advantage of them.  

The new STEM complex is a big deal for the university and for the college, I would guess. 

Absolutely, from what it means to our faculty to have world-class labs to its importance in recruiting new faculty. We are already very competitive in getting excellent faculty to come here. I think what the building will do is give us even more ability to attract faculty that may be saying, I could go to place X that's offering me the same sort of thing, and maybe it's a bigger university, but look what they're investing in at UVM.

How will STEM teaching and scholarship be impacted? 

There are a lot better teaching facilities in this building and opportunities for new ways, new methods of teaching in STEM. For example, physics is proposing to take their introductory physics courses and integrate labs into them so they’re much more interactive. That's done at MIT, Stanford and Harvard, and the outcome data are amazing. And the fact that we’re now getting engineering, physics, chemistry, computer science and mathematics in this complex together; there's going to be opportunity for more collaboration just by having people close together.

You're optimistic about the state of the humanities at UVM. Tell us why. 

We have great strengths in the humanities, across all the disciplines, and David Jenemann and Luis Vivanco are doing a great job with the Humanities Center. Are more students, at UVM and in higher ed generally, gravitating toward STEM? Yes, I understand that, but I don't think that weakens what were doing in the humanities. This isn’t only about majors. If you look at History, their majors are down, but they’re teaching a ton of students. This is also about the ability of those disciplines to educate more broadly. It's the ability spread the love, if you will, spread the news about what humanities are all about. The provost has recently written a blog essay on the importance of arts and humanities in the STEM disciplines. I really want to push that. I would love to be able to get to a point where we say, if you're interested in biology, you need to study the humanities not because you’re required to, but to tell students why. We can do more of that to strengthen what we mean by liberal arts for all our students.

Any parting words?  

I came to this university for the same reasons our faculty did, because I wanted to be the best teacher I could be, I wanted to be able to pursue my scholarship. I hope they know that that's what I want for the college, that we’re all in this together. Sure, tough decisions have to be made, but I want faculty and staff to know that I'm coming to work every day trying to do what's best for them collectively and for the college in support of pursuing academic and scholarly excellence.