CAL Spring Meeting (May 4, 2020)

Webinar of the CAL spring meeting held on May 4, 2020, including opening remarks from Dean Long, a discussion of issues and questions by the dean and associate deans (questions collected prior to the meeting by the College Advisory Council via Qualtrics), and a live question-and-answer session.

Complete transcripts available:
transcript.pdf
transcript.txt

Partial transcript appears below.

************************************************************

Danielle:

Well, I think we'll go ahead and get started. Thank you all for being here in a different format with a different agenda for our spring college meeting, and coming together at the end of an interesting and exceptionally challenging semester. I hope everyone is safe and well. I'm Danielle Nicole DeVoss. I'm the chair of the College Advisory Council. I want to thank Daniel Trego who's been a huge help in setting us up technically to meet with you all today and providing this forum for us, and also Danny Mendez and Brian DeVries for moderating our question-and-answer portion of this meeting. Everyone is muted, not because we want to shut down conversation during the meeting, but because we don't really want to listen to your kids, your dogs, or your pollen sneezes.

Danielle:

We plan to first ask the dean questions and issues that you all shared through the Qualtrics links we distributed. CAC read through the questions to identify themes and threads. I will host during that section and pose questions to the dean and the associate deans. We will then open things for question and answer. We'll use the Q&A button at the bottom of your Zoom window depending on how you have Zoom configured. You may want to find that Q&A button now. That would be great. Danny and Brian will help move your questions into our conversation in the second half of the webinar. Feel free to post questions anytime in the Q and A and know that we'll toggle over through that for the second half of the meeting. I will turn things over to Dean Long for opening remarks.

Dean Long:

Thank you, Danielle. I hope everyone can hear me all right. It is wonderful to be with you virtually. I have behind me a picture that I took of the lower falls at Yellowstone as what I like to remind myself that there is an outside world out there with beautiful sights and it reminds me of a wonderful time we had there a couple of years ago. So it's really wonderful to be with you and I want to begin with just a heartfelt and deep sense of gratitude that I have for all the work that I know all of you have done this semester. It has been an unbelievable semester. We began the year in one of our retreats with the chairs and directors with a period of sharing gratitude with one another because that is one of the core ways in which we want to be together in our college.

Dean Long:

And I don't really have enough words or eloquence to express to you all just how grateful I am for the work that everyone has done. I tried to put a few of those words to the blog post I wrote about deepening connection in a time of distancing. But it's just never enough. We didn't anticipate any of this. We did the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threat exercises over the fall. And I do not recall anyone mentioning a pandemic as a major threat. So and, in fact, a few days before we actually moved to remote teaching, the university was doing the presidential strategic planning retreat and we did strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and even then it wasn't quite fully clear that we were going to within a couple of days move to remote teaching.

Dean Long:

I have been just awed by the work and the commitment and the integrity and creativity that you have all brought to this move to remote working, to remote teaching, to remote learning from our students who have just been unbelievably resilient and creative, and for whom we just found ways to celebrate their graduation. We would have all been together yesterday at the graduation and what a beautiful day it was yesterday for that. I keep thinking about the work and the disappointment that the students would have been feeling because they weren't able to be together. We weren't all able to be together for that and all of you have done an amazing job of reaching out to students, of producing videos and messages and just celebrating the work that they done. That has been beautiful to watch and to see so many people being so creative about that.

Dean Long:

I also have been enormously grateful for our staff who moved to a remote working very quickly who have adopted new technologies and learn new ways of being together across distances and had done that with enormous grace and managed to have a great deal of fun. I saw as well in various forum and, of course, to our faculty of all appointment types. Thank you. You've been unbelievable. It was a completely untenable thing to ask you to do, namely to move in the middle of the semester, all onto remote teaching and you did it with enormous amount of generosity and thoughtfulness and integrity. Our college has been a leader at the university for working on how to help people make that shift and also to reemphasize to everyone that remote teaching and learning is different from online teaching and learning.

Dean Long:

Online teaching and learning is a designed endeavor. Remote teaching and learning is a process by which we draw on all of our adaptability and I think of it in theatrical terms a little bit like improv. And so everybody was amazing with their yes-and mentality and we really moved into a space that had integrity for our students and for our expectations of ourselves. We have done this all with a commitment to the core values of openness, equity and community. And I want to begin with that and come back to that as we always do to just remind ourselves of the values that we want to put into practice in our work together as we continue to move through a real period of uncertainty and ambiguity. I think we all pride ourselves on saying that a liberal arts education and education in the arts and the humanities helps students learn how to navigate ambiguity and uncertainty.

Dean Long:

And I think that's very much the case. And it's also true that living through ambiguity on uncertainty is a challenge that requires us to bring all of the work that we've done as students of the human condition into practice. So I am grateful for that and I look forward to this conversation. It's surreal to be with 192 people and seeming like I'm talking to a group of, what do we, seven or so who I can see physically. So I miss you, I miss you all. I love these meetings in the Kellogg Center where we can actually be with one another and respond to each other. And I'm missing that. And I think one of the things that we realized in this period of separation is the degree to which we miss each other's presence in reality, in the ability to respond to each other in real time.

Dean Long:

So we'll try and do our best with this, but I am thankful for all the work that you've done and I want to recognize that you've all done this with an enormous amount of other complex things at play in your lives with your loved ones, children, older parents, partners, concerns about health, concerns about safety, children at home, now, all of a sudden, being the teachers of them and being the comforters of them and trying to be present to one another, one another as partners and our parents and other loved ones. So it's an enormous amount and I'm grateful for all the work everyone's done.

Danielle:

Thanks, Chris. I know quite a few people have joined us since we started, so just a moment on format. Chris has provided some opening remarks for us. We're going to toggle over to sharing some of the questions that you all shared via the Qualtrics survey that the college advisory council sent out and then we'll toggle over to open question and answer. We have turned off chat and we have muted everyone, again, not because we don't want to be speaking with you but about 200 voices all at once would be a little bit much. Please if you haven't found it yet, there should be a Q&A button at the bottom of your Zoom window. That's how we'll be facilitating question and answer when we move into the second part of this meeting.

Danielle:

For now I want to post a couple of questions first to Chris and then Sonja, Bill and Cara. Chris, the first question's for you and the first set of questions has to do with our budget context, right now. Do we yet, in this moment of uncertainty and ambiguity, have a sense of the budget-cut percentages that we as a college are going to face over the next three years to meet the university shortfall?

Dean Long:

Short answer to that is no, but I will give you some parameters about what's being discussed at the university level and how we're thinking about it here in the college. So the president has talked about a $96 million to $170 million shortcut for the university in fiscal '21, that's the next fiscal year. There's a number of things that are happening with the current fiscal year that had to do with the refunds we had to provide to students and the loss revenues from the food services and the NCAA tournament and other things. But we're focusing really here on the fiscal '21 scenario because that's the planning that we're doing right now. So now I think thinking about this as a $100 to $200 million shortfall is a daunting thing for us to do, especially when you consider that our college budget is about $36 million.

Dean Long:

If you consider some other elements of this, maybe closer to 40 but you know that's one and a half colleges or two and a half colleges, sorry, to think about at the lower end of that $100 million number. But the university has been doing some very intentional things around trying to provide some resources to make that big span of numbers smaller. And so to reduce the amount of pressure on the units to do budget cutting. So they are, for example, suspending and pausing their major capital projects. They are focusing in enormous attention, as we all should be, on the enrollment numbers for the fall. And a lot of what we're thinking about is what are those enrollment numbers going to look like? We are slightly up this year in terms of deposits. There has been an extension of the deadline for deposits to June 1st so in some ways we're going to know a lot more about our incoming class at the beginning of June and then that will allow us to make some more decisions.

Dean Long:

So one thing I want to say is we're all in this period of uncertainty and there are some questions that I know people want answers to and I am one among you for wanting those answers. And part of it is we have to think about settling into the uncertainty of this a little bit. Now having said that, we are also doing some pretty significant contingency planning and, well, let me talk a little bit about that. So we have started in the dean's office and we're going to be talking to the chairs and directors and the CAC and also the CAL Connect supervisors and the staff about some contingency planning on the low end numbers that would ask us to do maybe a 3% cut in fiscal '21, a 5% cut in '22, and a 5% cut in '23.

Dean Long:

So that's kind of what we're thinking about as on the low end if we had that $100 million for the budget shortfall moving forward. The upper end is really going to be more in line with a 5% this next fiscal '21, potentially 9% in '22, and 9% in '23. And all of that is on top of the current 1% give back, it's called the perf, but it's a give back that we give to central administration for a strategic investments. Those that want that ongoing 1% cut is part of the main budget model that we have and the provost has committed funds in years out to that. So that that is that that continues. And I will say some of the funds that we're relying on for some of our initiatives, like the department of African American studies, is part of that as well. So, but those are the numbers that we're looking at.

Dean Long:

I will say that as we think about this work over the next few years, it's going to be important for us to continue to keep our values and our priorities in mind. And I will say it is my intention to make sure that we're putting people first in all of these decision making processes. That we are attuning ourselves into the livelihood. That we know so many of you are relying on from the university. That we are keeping people and their roles in the various parts of the mission of the university at the center of our thinking. I would hope that you would expect nothing less than from our leadership but also from our college as focusing on arts and humanities as a human-centered endeavor. So we are going to be doing that and but there's going to be a lot of things that are up in play that are not normally in play.

Dean Long:

One of the things that university has allowed us to do is carry forward up to 10% of our budget so that we can try to ease the burden of these potential percentage cuts and those percentage cuts are just the percentages that we're using in the college to plan. There has not been any indication specifically about percentages. There's not yet been any indication about how they would or would not be shared across the university, whether certain units would be required to take more or less depending on various things that the university might be thinking about. I think we can take a lot of pride in the fact that a huge component of our budget goes to educating undergraduate and graduate students. And we talked about this earlier in the year that for every $1 the university invests in the college, we return $3 to the university through tuition.

Dean Long:

So it seems to me that the cuts, it would be unwise to do draconian cuts to our college given the return that we provide to the university. But everybody is going to be in this together and we're going to have to make some decisions. Those decisions, the framework for that we're going to be trying to share with our chairs and directors and with the CAC as and with the staff advisory with the supervisors on account connect, so that we can live out our commitment to being as open and transparent as we can with these issues. I know the anxiety around this is made worse by a lack of communication, so we're going to do our best to communicate as effectively as we can. Even when that might mean we don't know.

Danielle:

Absolutely. Thank you and thank you, too, for clarifying that. A framework will be created. You're working on contingency plans with CAC, with chairs and directors with the Cal staff. We do have one follow-up question about budget issues and that is do we yet know specifically about the president's responsibility-centered management model for the budget and what impact it might have over the cuts you've just described over the coming years?

Dean Long:

We don't know and we've all been reading the tea leaves a little bit because the last time we were all physically together, the president was with us and he did mention the responsibility-centered management. We have been engaged in, and Danielle, I know you and Rob Roznowski and a number of our colleagues have been engaged in trying to discuss with the university's strategic planning committee, our strategic vision for the future in which the arts and humanities are at the center of the life of the university. And I think that process will unfold. Right now they're really trying to focus on values and doing what they can in this distancing phase to continue to move that forward. I think that'll continue in the fall. We now have a new provost, provost Woodruff.

Dean Long:

And so now I think that question about the budget model will move forward. But from what I've understood, no decision has been made about what that model will look like moving forward. I did want to circle back one other thing, Danielle, because I know the number of people have asked me about this, which is around salary increases in the faculty side. The faculty Senate has recommended a 0% salary increase to the board of trustees, and when I press the provost on this at the dean's council last week, she expressed confidence that the board would accept that recommendation. So I think we can anticipate a 0% salary increases for faculty. I will hasten to add, the provost has been very clear that we will stand by our standard increments for those who have gone forward through for tenure and promotion and the promotion process in general so those resources will still be provided, but there will not likely to be a salary increase on top of that.

Danielle:

Excellent. Thank you. I'm sure there are more budget questions. If you have follow-up questions, folks, please know you can use the Q and A to post those for when we toggle over to question and answer. I want to move us into some staff and faculty, life and wellbeing questions. First, Chris, will faculty and staff have autonomy or some freedom for deciding if and when and how they return to campus to work?

Dean Long:

There's a lot of conversation around what are the conditions under which we will bring people back to campus. I want to just try and cut to the chase about that specific question. It is my intention to give people as much flexibility as I can within the parameters that are set out within the university. So I want to assure everyone that their safety, their sense of safety, the peculiarities of their individual situation. We want to be responsive to that. Sorry. Darcy is barking… the UPS person is coming. But this is an indication of where we are or with... interruptions abound. So it's my commitment to be flexible. There are a number of roles that do require people being physically on campus. But there are enormous number of roles in our college where that's not required. And I think we've learned and we've shown over the last eight weeks that people can work well and effectively from a distance if they need to do that. So we want to maximize flexibility on that.

Dean Long:

There is a university-level task force that met with the deans last week about the conditions under which we would reopen and I was glad to see that it is a very much a values inflected process. The values we talk about as deans are at the top of that list around creating a culture that is open, transparent, trusting and safe and inclusive and equitable and caring and accountable. And those are the things that we want to be up front and center of all this. The question of safety will drive this and it is important to recognize that we have a president who studies viruses who has not been out in front and some other university presidents have been about coming back to campus at all costs. And so I take that as a positive sign that we are going to be doing this in the way that has the safety of all our members of our community front and center, and that's the way it has to be. So we're going to do our best to maximize flexibility to people as they come in.

Danielle:

Excellent. Thank you. This is a question on primarily I think for Sonja. As I know you know, faculty parents have been significantly, and staff parents have been significantly impacted by school closures, stay at home orders, and social distancing. For faculty parents this is impacting research productivity and it's going to impact the tenure clock not just coming into the next year, but perhaps over the next two to three years. So this is a two part question. The first question is beyond the tenure clock extension granted by the university, how might we further address the current caregiving crisis for our colleagues? And second, will these issues be brought to bear on annual reporting and merit review?

Sonja:

You think I would have figured this out by now. I wanted to say I'm really appreciative for these questions because I know they've been on a lot of people's minds and I'd like to expand the questions to all appointment types in the answer that I give, particularly when it comes to the annual review process. I'd like to start with the annual review and merit review question first if I could. I know that we've all had so many challenges to adapt to that Chris was talking about in a variety of situations that go far beyond just our workload. I've just been talking to a number of you in a variety of different Zoom and Teams meetings and I hear of a partner or a family who has lost their job, a family member who works in the healthcare industry or in another essential service, someone who has become sick and so there are caregiving issues there.

Sonja:

Of course, the challenges of living alone at this time, they bring their own difficulties. Then for many of us suddenly having children at home trying to balance care, schooling, work. Then on top of it some of us are single parents trying to do all of that. There is staff and faculty, and students now, our graduate students we all know are facing their own unique challenges and I think we all just all, when we approach the topic of annual review or merit review, need to be thinking about this. Of course as chairs and directors are writing their review letters now and over the summer and then also in next spring as annual review committees are convening for the 2020 year.

Sonja:

I think it's important if we go back to Chris's statement on expectations, that it will be important for annual review committees to consider the impact that this current situation has on productivity in a variety of different areas of workload. I think many of you have read his blog post on March 16 called Adjusting Expectations and there Chris stressed the need to prioritize the health and safety of faculty, staff, and students and also the importance of high quality teaching. That is where all of us have been putting our efforts towards. So what does this look like with annual reviews? I think it's important to discuss as departments, centers, programs, and you personally, discuss the ways in which you've adapted your work to the current situation in your annual review materials and talk about that with your chair. Whether it's in outreach and engagement, in teaching, in advising, curriculum development, administration, the challenges of research and creative scholarship at the moment and also any unique hurdles that you have been facing. Write this down right now, as it's fresh in your mind ,so that you can refer to it later when write up annual review materials for next year.

Sonja:

To help review committees assess all of this, I think it might be important for departments to consider altering the workload percentage. And this could mean that if you are normally on a 40-40-20, maybe that looks like 20% research, 60% teaching, 20% service. Or a 20-70-10 or I don't know what this would look like, but I think it's a good conversation to have for the unique challenges that this approach has provided a variety of different people. You'd want to make sure that you have this conversation as a department, so that you're doing this in a fair and equitable way, in an open way. I think any non-tenure stream faculty academic specialists with a teaching load should have a similar adjustment made to acknowledge that extra teaching that's going on. Also, of course all across all appointment types, we've got advisors who are just working so hard, people in outreach and engagement have their own unique challenges right now and it really varies there.

Sonja:

And for many of you, I really understand you're working beyond your workload and I really don't know how else to address this at the moment except to say thanks. I know this isn't enough and you're very stressed about it and I hear all sorts of stories. So I want to say thank you. And I'd also like to ask maybe chairs if possible, I don't know if it's possible to look at faculty who have 3-3 teaching loads and is it possible to give them fewer preps? I realized they'd be teaching three classes, but could you give them two preps? I know this is not always possible, but it could be maybe in certain cases, so I wanted to mention that. And remember that we have some people we're teaching 150 students online this next fall with three different preps, and that's a lot. I don't know if there are ways that colleagues could be helping each other out and however you can, I know you're already doing this. There are so many opportunities to pay it forward right now, so be looking for those and how you can support each other.

Sonja:

Also remember that a university wide series forms are only to be included for consideration in annual reviews if the faculty or academic staff members wish them to be for this spring and as we go forward. Right now I think it's just for the spring but that might change if we're online again in the fall. We just don't know yet. And Chris mentioned that there will be no salary increase for this fall. We don't know what that will look like in the future at this point.

Sonja:

So, to adjust the question about the tenure system, promotion and tenure, I just wanted to review because there was a recent decision in case not everybody had seen it. So all pre-tenure faculty and academic staff in the continuing system have been given an automatic one year extension on their review timelines. So that went out for the academic staff, just came out this past week. This year extension assumes that a full year of productivity will be lost due to interruptions from the novel coronavirus, and it's important to know that anyone who already has an extension due to an FMLA leave, that that extension is also being honored. So you would have two years of an extension with that.

Sonja:

Anyone also who feels that they have an additional impact to their productivity beyond the COVID-19 extension year should petition the Dean and then the provost as per the process in the faculty handbook. There is a process for this. The link to it is on the CAL HR faculty development website. Actually not faculty development website but the faculty staff and then it's under policies. You can find it there. I can also send it to you. Any incoming tenure stream faculty member arriving this fall will need to follow this petition process. They're not covered by this one year extension. And there's also an FAQ document online that addresses a variety of different cases in case you have a question about this.

Sonja:

So for additional needs, first of all, again, this extension covers an entire year. It is with that in mind that all of these additional challenges that everyone has been facing in a variety of ways, that they are being addressed by this year. Let's hope that our children are back in school in the fall, at least part time. That will start to help. I know my son is anxious to start fifth grade and it's sad to have to have left Cornell Elementary School so far behind so suddenly. As a college, I want to learn about further challenges, listen to suggestions, help faculty find potential solutions and academic staff as they come. I think right now we're in a space where we're not sure again yet what the fall is going to look like and I think we need... But I'm collecting information and we need to have conversations.

Sonja:

It's important though, too, that any accommodations provided would follow the college values of equity, openness, and community, as well as the principles that we have for the COVID-19 situation that we're working on so that we make sure that if there are needs that they're addressed equally across the college. I please invite you to come to me. I'm always happy to get email, phone conversations about challenges that you are having. Go to your chair, your director too, so that we can continue to try and address these. So thanks.

Danielle:

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Sonja. There was some fantastic advice in there. I want to reiterate. Take notes now, regardless of what unit you're in, what your role is, what you're working on. Prep to represent your work and the changes to it, especially as this continues to unfold. I know in my department Writing Rhetoric in American Cultures, we have a bylaws appendix that allows faculty to petition our chair to change our percentages. If it's possible, and it makes sense to shift your percentages, you might want to seek that out in your unit. Folks who are in charge of staffing and scheduling, if you can assign fewer preps to folks with heavier teaching loads, that would be generous. And bear in mind, SIRS will only be included in next year's reviews if we request them to be... On an individual basis. Sonja?

Sonja:

Yes. Yeah, it would basically... I'm not muted. Oh, amazing. Okay. You would submit them as part of your dossier, basically, so that's how you have the agency to do that.

Danielle:

Excellent. Thank you. And finally, and I want to echo this is as loudly as I can. Please keep these communication lines open with the Dean's office, with CAC, in your units, in your departments, in your programs. I'm often quick to tell people if your issues aren't visible to me, I don't know how to work to address them. So I think talking to one another and surfacing issues whether it's two weeks ago, they're immediate. We can anticipate them for the fall. In a time of uncertainty, sharing our experiences and making sure those issues are heard I think are crucial. Thank you, Sonja.

Danielle:

This next question I believe is a Bill question. Might be a Chris question. So the university and the college, I think, were generous in recognizing the transition to remote teaching. Chris, you just helpfully reminded us the difference between remote teaching in an emergency crisis versus online teaching and learning, which is engaging these best practices we've cultivated. The university, though, has made it really clear that the expectations are ramped up for summer and beyond if need be, that we will be expected to embrace more best practices in online teaching and learning. So the question is how is CAL coordinating efforts in this transition from triaged remote teaching to online teaching, including the allocation of professional development and tech resources for instructors?

Chris:

So I'll start with that and then Bill and Cara may also have some things to add to this. It's really important for us to be as flexible and as creative as possible for the fall semester. We really don't know what it's going to bring and we need to be ready for everything from a fully online start to starting on starting in person with distancing strategies that have components of the course online, to potentially starting in person and then having to move to online if there's an increase of cases. So there's a number of aspects of this and it is a real challenge for everyone to think about it. The experience that our students have in the fall and our ability to give students a really high quality experience, as high quality as we can, is going to be critical to our ability to weather this storm because the revenue from tuition, which is 70% of our budget at the university, is a huge component of this, so we need to be thoughtful and intentional about it and that's exactly what we have been to this to this point and I think we will continue to do that.

Chris:

Our ed tech team has been unbelievable in terms of leading the university in terms of creating the professional development opportunities that are being used university-wide. They are very much involved in the hubs of various forms of professional development and we had a call out to people to participate in that professional development process. Those opportunities are funded from the provost office, and it's very important from my perspective to have as many people engaged in that as possible now, precisely because the funds that we would have in the college for supporting professional development beyond that, for online teaching or for hybrid teaching or more course development is going to be extremely limited. So I think that that's a key component of this.

Chris:

I would say that Scott Schopieray and his team have definitely ramped up a number of opportunities for faculty in the college above and beyond what the Hub is going to be able to offer. The challenge for us is going to be... It's not going to be the delivery of those opportunities for people. It's going to be actually giving faculty remunerations for that work over the summer. We're just not going to have the resources for it. So it's really that PD funding has to be coming from the provost office. I don't know if Cara and Bill want to chime in on that a little bit.

Bill:

I can start. I've worked a little bit with Cara and with Scott to make sure that one particular group in the college, what I'm calling our “lemons to lemonade” strategy in this regard, and that is graduate students. Some of the folks who are receiving some professional development support over the summer for making this transition are graduate students, and we are also working on ways to think carefully about how we prepare students who might be going into the classroom into the fall and to offer that as an experience and professional development too. I'll talk about this in a minute in response to another question, but I think this is one way we're going to have to reorient the use of resources generally in the college and that is we have to recognize that the current situation has reordered our priorities and it has eliminated some opportunities for people. We're not getting those back because they were going to take place now or soon. And it doesn't mean that we do nothing. It means that we acknowledge that that opportunity is lost and we try to supplement as best we can. And that is part of what we've been trying to do to respond.

Cara:

Okay. Hi everybody. I just want to reiterate the process that Chris just talked about broadly with respect to the push that we saw late March and early April to make the professional development opportunities available through the hub. CAL really has been a leader in that. Scott and his team are just exceptional and have really been the ones setting the pace. We communicated with chairs and directors at the end of March, early April on a really quick timeline to try to get as many people in these professional development opportunities, largely in preparation for sessions one and two over the summer. So the communications we received back from the chairs and the directors helped us feed all of those names and we had a tremendously robust response from the faculty. So thank you very much for being really interested in this pedagogical development. It really matters.

Cara:

The Hub has scheduled all of those people, and those are the individuals... That short window that we had to get people into these Hub experiences and to some of the experiences that Scott and his team have created, those are the individuals who are first in line to get that professional development money from the provost office. We had an unbelievable response across the university, in fact. Really a title wave response from the associate deans perspectives and from the Hub’s perspective. More than 600 faculty from across the university signed up for these designs sprints sponsored by the Hub. They were not anticipating that larger response. I say all of that to say good for us, it's going to benefit our students, but that also means that the professional development money that the provost was providing got spent.

Cara:

There will remain professional development opportunities through the summer for people who are teaching fall, teaching next year through the Hub, institutionalized resources, and then Scott and his team will be able to really work in a more boutique fashion with our colleagues in the college because we all know we have disciplines specific sorts of things that we wrestle with when when we're doing different kinds of of teaching. So those opportunities will be there, so people can still get the kind of training that they want to have. I will also say thanks to the CUC, the college undergraduate committee, they developed a document that we called friendly suggestions for fall of 2020 that we'll be sending out through chairs and directors and it's basically just some stuff to be thinking about. Your own mini contingency planning as you're anticipating what could be in the fall and maybe things that you could start thinking about now so that you're in a better position in the fall.

Danielle:

Thank you. I have a quick follow-up question. You've described some fantastic resources and support. I think you called it a “boutique fashion.” So we have these university resources to draw from and then we have more discipline specific resources of anchor to humanities, arts and letters teaching. Is there a central space where instructors can access the support that Scott and the tech team are providing? Where do we go to find out more?

Cara:

I would say for now, and Chris may know better if there's something very specific on the college's page, but that keep teaching website. I know that Scott and his team were really on the ground floor building that out and that's really continued to be the clearing house for resources.

Chris:

Yeah, I was going to say the key teaching site, and also we're building that out on the edtech.cal.msu.edu site as well. So you know when in doubt, sorry Scott, but email, connect with Scott, because he's got his finger on the pulse of everything that's going on. And Dan Trego just... It's edtech.cal.msu.edu, and that's got all the resources there. But please reach out to Scott if you have any questions about it.

Danielle:

Excellent. Thank you. Bill, you just foreshadowed this next question. I want to toggle over... Again, I know there are more questions on all of these lines. Please keep questions coming in the Q&A box, we'll be turning over to that in a moment. But I want to toggle more specifically to students and how we can best care for students in the college and the university. So Bill, the graduate school extended times to file theses and dissertations this semester and also extended time to degree by one semester. Is there any other action that the college is planning or taking right now, or any other support we might provide for grad students, especially those who are planning... Who are either finishing right now or planning to finish in the coming year and in a really uncertain job market?

Bill:

Yeah, this is a great question. I appreciate it. Let me take the opportunity to talk a little bit about how we're making the decisions that we make, which is what I alluded to and how we're using the resources available to us. Our guiding value, as Chris mentioned, is very clear. We want to take care of students first, and helping students is my first priority when I get up every morning. I have great colleagues in the dean's office who are helping to do that, including Laura and Lee Ann most immediately in the staff. We have mobilized this in this way, and so I invite others to think with me about this. Our first priority is to take care of basic needs that students have. This includes anything immediate and concerning, like do they have a place to live? Do they have a way to pay rent? We have some resources available and I've been working mostly with graduate directors on a one-to-one basis, handling each individual case, helping people get home if they need to get home. Helping people who can't get home, find a new place to live.

Bill:

We've been doing that since the moment that all of this started, and everyone has been as responsive and wonderful as we could hope. I really haven't encountered very many human obstacles there. If you have students with immediate needs, there are emergency funds available, and the process for graduate students is the same as our emergency fellowships in a normal time. So your grad directors know about it, your grad secretaries know about it. The form is a little bit different, but the process is the same. So, we can be immediately responsive, usually within a day or two, of what those needs are. So that's my first thing. If there are immediate needs, we want to know about them, we have some resources we can draw on and we will act quickly.

Bill:

Second, I want to say is, priority-wise is, minimizing obstacles that this current circumstance that has put into our students' way. We usually can't get rid of them altogether, but the kind of things that have derailed folks' degree progress, we can work to make smaller. That's where doing things like extending time to degree, giving folks a little bit more time to turn things in, are small but important changes that we can make, and we are being as flexible as we possibly can. That's our stance.

Bill:

We're also doing things like, I have put all of the money available to me in the dean's office for graduate education into one big bucket of summer support. For the first time ever, we have given every summer support request money. So this has been the way that we've sought to mobilize immediate help for the next three to four months, is tell us what your students most need and we'll give it to you in a way that is as flexible as we can. That might be to take a course, it might be for other things, to make up for something. So that's an example of that.

Bill:

For folks whose timelines have been extended into the fall, Thomas Jeitschko in the dean's office has also reopened the process and we've worked with your graduate directors to accept more dissertation completion fellowships. So this would affect people whose timelines have been extended, but are now into next year and not beyond next year. I've worked usually, again, on a case-by-case basis, to make that a full-year experience if we need to. So a DCF plus a fall, or a DCF in the fall and something else in the spring, in case it's not just one semester. But we have added to our DCF beyond the initial deadline, and that was in cooperation with the graduate program, the graduate school.

Bill:

The other thing that Thomas did is he increased the DCF amount by 30%. It went from $7,000 to $10,000. Also in direct response, he was hoping to do that anyway, but this just convinced him it was time. And so that makes it a little bit more of a resource for folks who are relying on those funds in a given semester. I want to get to the specific question because I think it's an example of the third situation. That's the third priority I mentioned, which is once we've taken care of immediate needs and we've minimized obstacles as much as we can. The third is supplement, right? This is what I mentioned before. We also need to recognize that some people's opportunities have vanished out from under them, through no fault of their own. So, our third thing is to try to [inaudible 00:52:55]. If it's not as good as it was, then to make something new. The lemons to lemonade approach is one way that we're doing that.

Bill:

For those that have graduated but find themselves in a precarious job situation, it's a very difficult problem for us because they are no longer students, and so we can't use the resources that we use to help students to help them, but we have been working on a few plans. One is something that we want to give kudos to Chris, working with Melissa Wu and Thomas Jeitschko again, to create a set of post-docs. We got announcements out to grad programs last week about those. I think there's between six and eight of them. They are focused on teaching and learning in digital spaces, and our grad students may apply for those. They are explicitly meant to help students who need an option for the fall and no longer have one.

Bill:

We have also been working on, as much as we can, Sonya's has been working on this too, trying to anticipate if we do have enhanced labor needs because people do show up, ways to get our current grad students into existing hiring pools so that we can hire them, if we can't hire or do a broad search that's going to be tricky too, to create opportunities for them to teach in a different role in the fall. We've been doing some other things. We had a grant proposal that didn't make the final cut to be the institutionally limited proposal to the CARES Act, unfortunately last week. That would've created about eight new post-docs. No fault, but we're hustling every day here. I just want to say, this is the toughest challenge, is to help people for whom the immediate job prospects that were looking okay but still challenging, are now looking impossible. We aren't sleeping on it, but we're doing whatever we can.

Danielle:

Thanks, Bill. Thank you. Cara, I have two questions about supporting undergraduate students. The first is specific and the second, which I'll ask in a moment, is much bigger. So the first question is, "What is the college's commitment to undocumented students?" There's obviously some context there, for instance, undocumented students and DACA students, I believe, are not eligible to receive any of the federal support that's going out right now.

Cara:

That's right, unfortunately. Based on a communication that President Stanley and Interim Provost Sullivan released at the end of last week regarding how that CARES money was coming in, they also clarified that for students who do not file FAFSA paperwork, which is a way for us to not explicitly ask about people's status, other than through whether they're seeking financial aid, that for those students, their need would be prioritized for the Save Our Spartans fund, the SOS, which has been an ongoing fund for several years. Just since the novel coronavirus pandemic started really affecting our community, two student organizations made giant contributions to the SOS, so that they had upwards of $300,000 to support students.

Cara:

This is Denise Maybank's office. She has solicited and received, last I heard, which was about days ago, over 7,000 applications from students seeking help. So the restrictions around the CARES Act actually helps clarify how they'll work through those applications, because as I say, they'll be prioritizing those students who do not file FAFSA paperwork. So that's one thing at the university level. The question was very specifically about the college level. We too have an emergency fund in the college which is donor-based. It was part of the Green Line Initiative for this year. The last I knew, and Ken could correct me because I'm sure he tracks this every day, we had about 20 grand in that particular fund.

Cara:

Beth has been really, really helpful in helping us figure out how to get from the requests we've received so far, how to get those students money. Financial Aid plays a part and kind of ties our hands a little bit. But Christine Radtke, who is our development officer, thanks to her network, has figured out some ways that we might be able to disperse that money to students as cash, not into their student accounts. It requires a little paperwork, but it might allow us to help more students. So I'm going to put a pin in that for a second to say again, thanks to Beth and our fantastic advising colleagues, we are trying to find informal ways of identifying the DACA students who might need help.

Cara:

In addition, thanks to the work that Christine has done, for any units that have discretionary accounts, basically money that they just get from donors that are unrestricted. Some donor gifts have restrictions, others are just, "Here, do with what you will." I would very much welcome working with those chairs and directors, along the lines of the mechanism that Christine has figured out, the how to get the students money directly, if those units also wanted to devote a little bit of their money to helping out students in need. We can, much like Bill was talking about prioritize different kinds of student need, different kinds of students in different kinds of student need. So we've started to crack the nut a little bit in helping these students, which I think is really important.

Danielle:

That's so good to hear. Not surprising to hear, given the college staff and advisors and more, but good to hear. Here's the bigger question. So given that Associate Provost Largent has asked us to anticipate a first-year class that might be 3000, and might be 9,000. What programs support is CAL developing for a first-year class that is right now fairly unknown, but that may include a significant number of first-gen students or students who need different access to different intellectual and other resources?

Cara:

Right. I really appreciate this question and in so many ways, what this situation has resulted in, is a push for us to start doing things we've been wanting to do and really haven't had the time to get into place because there wasn't necessarily a sense of urgency. I don't mean that with respect to first-generation students and supporting them, I mean more broadly. So for example, you may have heard, because this came out in some university communication, that the New Student Orientation program, which is usually they come for like a day or two days, will be moving completely online. So this opens up an opportunity, in fact, to start really tailoring things and making it a stable resource for different kinds of students.

Cara:

I found out this morning through a contact that I have and in the NSO Office of New Student Orientation, that the Neighborhood Student Success group that Janine Royal runs out of the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education, is building specific NSO modules for first- generation students. So that's a really good start and that allows us to start thinking, "Okay, then what can we do, specifically, for our CAL students?" This does tie in lots of ways to what will happen with NSO, as I think everybody knows, our first-year students, all of our first-year students, are pre-enrolled in AL 101, which is the first-year seminar.

Cara:

With NSO taking on a different view, that also allows us to start thinking about, "Well, what will first-year seminar be?" Our first- year seminar is delivered by our outstanding advisors. They are also realizing that they've got to do some contingency planning about what first-year seminar will be in the fall too, so now we have a chance to say, "What can we anticipate?" If students disclose that they're first-generation, we can find out who they are and where they're at and all that kind of thing and we can start really thinking about how first-year seminar can be that welcoming that are all of our students need, but also provides different kinds of support for different sorts of students. So we're at a moment right now where we've got some time to think this through, to make sure that we're being really deliberate, and we're maintaining our commitments to health and safety, well-being, and student success at the same time.

Danielle:

Awesome. Thank you so much. Is there anything that we, and I mean this very royally and broadly, can do to help with online NSO, to help with the first-year seminar, the building of modules?

Cara:

If that's an offer, hey, if you want to do a little work, yeah. I've been working with some colleagues just because I've been interested in the first-year experience more broadly, both for our first-year students and for transfer students who come into the college, who might have already been Michigan State students or coming to Michigan State as second-years or juniors or something. With NSO, I've been trying to get Portia Watkins is the new coordinator for NSO, trying to get in there a little bit too, to see how can we be of help? In what ways can we bring the academic side to what these students are being introduced to? So I continue to knock on those doors. And yeah, if people are interested in volunteering. If they want to roll up their sleeves and help with that, that would be brilliant.

Danielle:

Wonderful. Thank you. That was not all of the questions that were posed through the Qualtrics link, but we do have, and we want to protect some time now for open question and answer. Before we toggle to that, does any panelist or cohost, want to offer any additional comments or follow-ups about some of the questions that were just asked?

Chris:

So I guess I want to follow up on that question, which I do see in the Q&A from our senators, and circle back to the question of the 0% raise. I was under the impression that that was a recommendation made by the faculty senate, but I'm being corrected, rightly so, that it may not have been that there was a vote not to support the request to have a 4% raise for faculty. It was a narrowly, or it was not unanimous of that vote to not to support that, so that is true. It was my understanding that the senate had recommended that. But one of the things that I think is pretty clear is that the Board of Trustees is very much concerned about the budget and I would be very surprised if they supported a percent increase for salaries.

Chris:

There is a question also around market retention raises and the deans and provost pools. Nothing has been said to us about that. In fact, we are going to have our budget meetings with the provost I think in the next few weeks, although those that hasn't been scheduled yet, at least that I can see on my calendar. But I would anticipate that there would not be much in the way of resources for that. I will say that all of the retentions that we've made and all of the commitments that we made, we will honor. So that's an important component of this. But in terms of doing a lot of moving forward, we're going to be in a challenging situation. I do, myself, take a little comfort from the fact that I don't think a lot of our competitors are going to be hiring at the moment, but still, this is going to be a tough period with respect to salary increases and salaries in general.

Danielle:

Thank you. Danny, Brian, are there questions from the Q&A feed?

Brian:

Hi. So yeah, the Dean just answered one of the first questions, and maybe you addressed this one, but just in case, I want to make sure it gets answered. Another one is, what about faculty that have had successful research years with 0% raises? How or if those accomplishments will be recognized in the future?

Chris:

Yes. I think that's an important question and I think some of what Sonya had talked about it a little bit is related to this. We're going to ask people to make sure that they make note of all of their accomplishments, and we're going to have to keep all of that in mind as we review one another's work in the years to come, recognizing that everybody's work was impacted by this situation. And so, my thought is that we would wrap all of that into conversations about salary increases as we move forward when we get to a place where we can do that. Sonya, I don't know if you had any thoughts about that, with respect to how to process that?

Sonja:

No, I don't at the moment, but will continue to think about it.

Danny:

Hi Chris. The next question is asking for an update on AAAS.

Chris:

Absolutely, so we are very happy to have Ruth Nicole Brown who has agreed to be the incoming chair of the department and she is coming in the fall and my last communication with her was very positive. I've been trying to keep in touch with her. We also have Tamara Lomax who is coming in as a tenured faculty member this fall. So our commitment to the department and our work in creating that department remains a top priority for the college part of our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion generally and to the intellectual and engage life that the vision for that department is articulating.

Chris:

So we're very excited about that. We are definitely working with the university around issues associated with space for the department as well as what it will mean for possible hiring, moving forward. We do have commitments from the provost's office, so the fact that they are continuing to require a 1% give back to the university makes me hopeful and confident that those commitments that they've made to us will continue to be forthcoming. So that department is moving along and I'm very excited about it.

Brian:

The next question I have is, will CAL be fielding a Dragon Boat team this year?

Chris:

I should put the background with the Dragon Boat. Awesome. Well, it would be fun. I don't think we will have the resources on the college to pay the fee for that, so we may have to come together if we want to do it. So however, I will say that the lessons we learned in the gold and bronze metals that we've won in the Dragon Boat around being coordinated, being a team rowing together and recognizing that it's not necessarily how quickly you paddle, but whether how synchronized you are in the paddling. Those lessons stick with me and I think in a situation like this, when we're all exhausted and when we made a mad dash, everyone did, to do remote working and remote teaching and learning, we have to remember that this is going to be a longer process and that we're going to need to support each other and get the rhythm of our rowing in order so that we can row a long way and as quickly as we can.

Danny:

So the next question is to what extent have there been talks of layoffs, furloughs, and pay cuts for faculty?

Chris:

Sorry, Dan. I got distracted by the texts, so sorry. Say that again.

Danny:

Sorry. To what extent have there been talks of layoffs, furloughs and pay cuts for faculty?

Chris:

So the conversations around pay cuts and furloughs have not been explicit conversations that I've had on the dean's council and the provost save for the articulation of everything is on the table with respect to trying to address the issues that we're dealing with. I know the university is in conversations with the unions, and those decisions around furloughing and potentially laying off people off are associated with those. They need to be run through those union contracts.

Chris:

What I said earlier continues to be my take on this, which is that we're going to keep... We're going to do everything we can to protect people and to protect the livelihood that everyone relies on to support their families in this difficult period. So, one thing I do take some heart in, with respect to our college, is that we are at the heart of the mission of the university, and so much of our staff, our faculty, are committed to doing exactly that work.

Chris:

There's a number of other elements of the university around the residence halls, the food services, and things like that, where it makes it very difficult to actually do the work when students aren't on campus. And so, there may be some issues associated with that. We will have to look at that, at everything. And I think there's going to be... I don't think it's going to be in the college's hands to decide about furloughing and those sorts of things. That's going to be something that's going to be done at the university level, and I will be advocating as strongly as I can for making sure we're taking care of all of our people.

Brian:

So, this next question is a follow-up regarding AAAS. How many meetings with black faculty staff and students were scheduled with the new hires during their visits on campus?

Chris:

Yeah, we had a process that was led by the team in AAAS, a team of faculty in AAAS, and they ran that process through the faculty handbook and all of that. And so, we had the candidates meeting with faculty, and with staff, and with the Dean's Office as well. So that, I think, Denise's question goes to a concern that there were not maybe as many faculty as she would have liked to meeting those candidates, and I take that point.

Danny:

So, the next question, I think, Bill, might help with this question. Has there been any indication from the graduate school at this time in both in graduate student research funds next year?

Bill:

Yes. We've had a kind of statement of priority from Thomas. We have two bits of guidance that are working for us right now in the budget area. So, one was affecting recruitment generally and appointments for next year and, happily, that guidance did not alter our plan in any way because it was in line with what we normally do, which is a point about the same number of people last year as this year. We've been doing that for some time because that's part of our sustainability plan that all the graduate programs do. So, we don't have big fluctuations year over year. Not because we dictate a number to you, but because you run your programs that way already, which is great.

Bill:

We also have received guidance from Thomas that, wherever possible, he will absorb cuts to his budget in what are called Graduate Office Funds so that there may be less money for him to work with in implementing his strategic plans, but he will try to keep the program and college allocations the same.

Bill:

So, typically, in a normal budget year, those GOF allocations don't fluctuate by much, about 5%, plus or minus. And we will... If they hold steady in that range, then we think that the money that we give to programs over and above the appointment money that folks get for a graduate assistantship or a TA, we call those research enhancement funds as a bucket. We think that, right now, we aren't anticipating a reduction. So, let's keep fingers crossed. But, so far, so good, and in part, this is in credit to the work that the graduate directors have done over the last year. And someone asked us in the chat, so I referenced it. We changed dramatically coming out of the 2008-2009 period. We changed the philosophy with which we operated graduate program, and that's helping us right now.

******************************************

Complete transcripts available:
transcript.pdf
transcript.txt