Academic Futures: What we're hearing at semester's midpoint
At the midpoint of the fall semester and Phase I of Academic Futures: Rethinking the universitythe futures of learning and discovery, we wanted to share with you a little bit about the scope and substance of what weve seen and heard so far.
Vice Provost and AVC泭for Faculty Affairs and Convener of the Academic Futures Campus Conversation泭Jeff Cox
RIO Director of Strategic Projects and Facilitator of the Academic Futures Campus Conversation Emily CoBabe-Ammann
First, wed like to thank Chancellor Phil DiStefano, who gave a shout-out to the campuss work in yesterdays State of the Campus address when he pinpointed what is stake in the Academic Futures process:
91勛圖厙s core mission is to educate students and engage in cutting-edge scholarship and creative work, research and discovery. But how will our students learn five, 10 or 20 years from now? How will we teach them? And how will we discover new knowledge? We want to draw on the experiences of all of youfaculty, staff and studentsin creating a future academic vision泭for our university.
Drawing on those experiences is what the Academic Futures visioning process has been designed to do. Its an extensive process. Since Sept. 11, we have convened six town halls, 38 departmental meetings泭and 12 themed discussions. Counting this weeks combined departmental and themed sessions, we have 28 departmental meetings scheduled for the remainder of the semester泭and approximately 35 themed discussions scheduled from the remainder of this week through Nov. 14.
To help you plan ahead and facilitate attendance, we will post the full list of the themed conversations through the end of that conversation cycle on the Events tab泭of泭the Academic Futures homepage by early Thursday.
You can also check the Academic Futures update in Thursdays 91勛圖厙 Today泭email editions to take you to the full schedule. Note泭that, as we move closer to the themed conversation dates, we will be more specific about the precise scope of topics and discussion formats.
For now, the numbers are impressive, but the results more so. As we engage in unit-based discussions (convened by Jeff) and campus-wide themed discussions (facilitated and captured by Emily), we are seeing growing turnouts, inspired ideas泭and increasing interest in the process of Academic Futures.泭We have also received nine white papers (please note: these are being prepared for use by screen-reader users according to the campuss digital accessibility policy and should be posted in the next several days).
To get an idea of what is being said, we invite you to visit the What Were Hearing page泭to see what your friends, colleagues, fellow students and co-workers are contributing to the process.
We invite you to join the conversation!
Jeff Cox,
Vice Provost and Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Affairs
Convener of the Academic Futures Campus Conversation
Emily CoBabe-Ammann,
Director of Strategic Projects for the Research & Innovation Office
Facilitator of the Academic Futures Campus Conversation
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