Chair Talk 4.6-Welcome to 2018
Chair Talk 4.6 - Welcome to 2018
Faculty Colleagues,
Hope you all had a refreshing and rewarding holiday break – for a number of reasons, some discussed below, this is likely to be a pretty turbulent semester. I started 2018 in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego – about as far south as you can get and still find a good meal, and this week saw the birth of my 6th grandchild, half a planet away in Australia.
Our concerns at the UA are not as vast as Patagonia, nor as distant as my grandchild, but they are many, and they seem to multiply. One concern is how we, as faculty, govern ourselves, and share in the governance of the university as a whole. I’m nearly through my second 2-year term as Chair of the Faculty, and much of my time has been devoted to encouraging greater faculty engagement in governance. With the critical help of Michael Brewer, Bobbi McKean and Amy Fountain, and the Faculty Center staff, Jane Cherry, Barb Kuehn and Yadira Caballero, I believe we have improved how faculty governance works, and perhaps even encouraged some people to get involved. I will not rehearse the arguments for involvement here – I will merely point out that it all starts with individual faculty members running for election to the Senate, or one of the critical Committees that has elected faculty members, or for one of the Faculty Officer positions (Chair, Vice-Chair, Secretary). This is a particularly good time to get involved, with an energetic new President in place, who wants to move the UA forward.
Please consider running for one of these elected positions – the process itself has been simplified and can be carried out entirely online, via the Faculty Governance website. No more hand-signed petitions. Let’s make Senate great again.
Amongst the things I do as Chair is serve on various one-time committees – right now there are three that are of particular interest to faculty, so here is a quick update on each:
- Search Committee for SVP Health Sciences (co-chairs Gregg Goldman and Iman Hakim): this search is moving ahead smartly. The President ultimately makes this appointment, which is likely to happen fairly soon.
- RCM Review Committee (co-chairs Gregg Goldman and Andrew Comrie): this committee of about 20 people is about to set up sub-committees to focus on various aspects of RCM that emerged from its discussions and from interactions with a wide range of stakeholders. It is likely that more people, not on the RCM Review Committee at the moment, will be drawn into various sub-committee activities, so the range of inputs to the review process is going to be extended. If you have strong feelings about RCM you can communicate them directly to me, and I will make certain they are conveyed to the appropriate sub-committee.
- Strategic Plan Executive Committee (co-chairs Lisa Ordonéz and Elliot Cheu): this committee is overseeing the burgeoning strategic planning exercise that is now underway at the UA. Largely UA-driven, this process is just getting going in a way that the campus as a whole will feel it. Part of what is exciting about this particular planning exercise is the fact that it is designed to engage the whole campus. There will be ways for everyone at the UA -- faculty, staff, students – to have their say. And this is not a rigged game – of course it would be shocking if certain things were not part of our plan going forward (eg., space sciences, precision medicine) – but I can attest that this process, and this President, is open to entirely new possibilities. This too, makes it exciting. When your opportunity arises, think big and express your views.
A few ways you can provide input: (1) ten faculty focus group sessions will be held between January 17th and February 8th. Click here to sign up as soon as possible because we expect each to be at capacity: https://uarizona.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3XgVo7nOQL605RX; (2) a website devoted to the strategic plan will go live January 12, with a ‘Share Input’ link on the site for you to offer your thoughts; (3) send an email to strategicplan@email.arizona.edu or forward your input to me. Bottom line --- get engaged in this planning process, it might just lead to transformational change.
Another of my jobs as Chair of the Faculty, is to attend the meetings of ICAC – the Intercollegiate Athletics Committee, which includes the leaders of the Athletics Program and various faculty representing the academic side of the student-athlete dynamic. Along with most of the members of that group, I was blindsided by the recent events around our football program. The actions taken by President Robbins and AD Heeke seem appropriate. Most important is their stated commitment to changing a culture that should not have been allowed to persist. The faculty who attend ICAC hope to contribute to that change. We all owe thanks to Jory Hancock for his lengthy service as Faculty Athletics Representative. The faculty member in this role is the ultimate arbiter of just about all academic decisions posed by our athletes. It’s a quite time-consuming job, and it’s a very important one, as this person maintains the integrity of the academic side of every student-athlete’s life. Replacing Jory is Ricardo Valerdi, who has already injected energy into our committee meetings.
So that’s a semester-starting update on a number of things going on at the UA. I could have said something about the start of construction on the new Honor’s College campus. I could have commented on our men’s basketball team, or the women’s basketball team, or the crazy weather we are having. But I won’t.
WELCOME BACK!
Lynn Nadel
Chair of the Faculty