How a four-person faculty renewed a struggling physics department

In 2020, Donald Walter knew that his physics department needed to address some problems. As the area coordinator for physics within South Carolina State University’s Department of Biological and Physical Sciences, he had no doubt that the four-person physics faculty cared about each student’s success. But they were struggling to make an impact outside that cohort — and failing to attract new students.

The department graduated a small number of physics majors each year, in the single digits. As a result, the physics area was in constant danger of being shut down, and stuck in a consistent cycle of arguing its value. Like many historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), Walter says, SCSU is chronically underfunded. "When you're really under-resourced for 20, 30, 40, 50 years, it's hard to build new programs," says Walter.

The physics area also had a PR problem, even within the university. "Most of the faculty and students in our own department, let alone our own college, [...] didn't really know much about the physics program because we're too busy writing grants, doing research, teaching classes,” he says.

That lack of visibility extended to the university administration. As physics has no accrediting body, Walter and his colleagues were at a loss in seeking external validation of their work to demonstrate its value.

“One of the things we wanted to do was impress upon the higher administration the role that physics plays and how important it is,” Walter says.

Teaching the teachers

Walter’s department was an ideal candidate for the Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) initiative, a joint effort of APS and the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT). EP3 stewards a free, and constantly expanding, online guide, providing physics programs with department-strengthening strategies that have worked at other institutions.

The SCSU faculty applied to participate in the first cohort of the EP3 Departmental Action Leadership Institute (DALI) in 2021, with virtual instruction designed to put effective practices into action, delivered over an 11-month span.

In 2024, a newly formed SCSU Action Committee produced a three-phase, five-year plan, based on the instruction. And even though SCSU is only partway through implementing it, the faculty is already applying EP3 lessons. For one thing, the faculty encouraged its students to revive SCSU’s chapter of the Society of Physics Students after a ten-year hiatus — an opportunity for their students to coalesce around, and identify with, the physics community.

The physics faculty also began to engage more with the campus community to build awareness of their activities. For example, during the 2024 partial solar eclipse, “we took a cart out with our physics majors and set up with solar glasses and other general physics displays and toys,” Walter says.

“Another spinoff that we're working on now that hasn't gone through yet, is we're creating a concentration of physics major with an engineering concentration,” he explains, a method of attracting more students that doesn’t require hiring of additional faculty.

The physics area’s rising profile has already had an impact: The department has seen an uptick of additional minors.

On-site visit at SCSU

The DALI program went well enough that Walter and his colleagues requested an in-person, two-day site visit facilitated by the EP3 team in early 2024 to assess their area’s effectiveness. The DALI team interviewed faculty in physics and other sciences, the provost, the dean, and SCSU students.

The EP3 reviewers had good news for SCSU’s faculty, Walter reports. “They said, ‘You do things that other faculty and other areas don't — you help them figure out problems with financial aid and [the] bookstore and all that kind of stuff,’” he explains. “We're small, and so we can do these kinds of things. And the students don't always give you that feedback.”

Other takeaways were more tangible. In the absence of a physics accrediting body, Walter says, the university administration was impressed by the endorsement and validation provided by the EP3 team. “One of the immediate consequences of the site visit was [that] the dean committed $30,000 to upgrade our physics lab equipment, and so we've been able to buy some modern equipment, like photoelectric effect kits and Michelson-Morley interferometer kits, that we couldn't afford normally.”

EP3 site visit team member Michael Jackson, a faculty member and administrator at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, was glad to play a role in supporting physics at SCSU. “The external review team was able to report on the outstanding hands-on educational and research experiences students were receiving — insights the department had previously overlooked,” Jackson says. And with the EP3 Guide and reviewer feedback, the department was able to refine their initiatives to make sure they were actionable and realistic, he adds.

As for his own experience with the APS-AAPT partnership and online EP3 Guide, Don Walter is elated. “Every time I look at it, I realize, ‘Oh, those are great ideas,’” Walter says. “And the beauty is, they're not just a committee. [The guide] is based on people who actually have implemented some of this stuff. And that's important.”