Chair Talk Volume 3 #1 August 2016

Aug. 15, 2016

Welcome back

Welcome back to all my old friends, and to new colleagues – methinks this is going to be an interesting academic year.  These are times of change in higher education – change that is both challenging and necessary.  At the UA we pride ourselves on being ready for, and open to such challenges, or as they say, “opportunities.”

To highlight just a few of these opportunities:

  • We are going to have the chance to live up to our values in the areas of diversity and inclusive excellence.  New initiatives in this area will involve faculty in various ways.  We played a leading role in last year’s “Listening Tours” that revealed our need for a more strategic approach to diversity, and we will continue to play the central role faculty should play.  Two examples are forthcoming recommendations around content warnings and pronoun usage in the classroom that we hope all faculty will implement this year.
  • We will finish the initial stage of the “quality” project, defining quality in scholarship and instruction in ways that we can all recognize and agree upon.  These definitions will then find their way into policy at the UA – a task for this year and possibly next.
  • We will continue highlighting the importance of faculty both on and off the tenure-track, to recognize the different but critical roles that all faculty play.
  •  We will, if there is time, get started on a serious re-thinking of the general education curriculum.  It’s been too long, and there are some pretty exciting things we could imagine doing, given the interdisciplinarity inherent at the UA.  We haven’t done enough to bring that interdisciplinarity to bear on our undergraduate curriculum and this year we can get started on changing that.

These are merely a subset of the opportunities this year will provide, in addition of course to the reasons we are here in the first place – our students, our scholarship, our sense of community and commitment to each other.  In that context we will also this year be in the midst of a leadership transition – such transitions can oftentimes be bumpy. Faculty will be directly engaged in the search for a new President – I am meeting with the Chair of the Search Committee (Regent Ridenour) this week to discuss that engagement. I suggest we spend most of our time on the above opportunities and reasons for being here, and ride out the bumps. 

Have a great start to the new year! 

Lynn Nadel, Chair of the Faculty