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INSTAAR

Intro by Bill Kaempfer

• Intro on teaching and reaching visioning
• Laying out of fall work
• Role of Committee and Report

Comment: Would like to rethink a “campus core” given the activities in Arts & Sciences.  We want to remain a liberal arts university.

Comment: Non-tenure-track research (soft dollar) faculty are currently excluded from parts of the educational process, such as supervising undergraduate students and serving on certain committees.  We need to remove barriers like this to allow research faculty to fully participate in campus activities and provide additional learning opportunities for undergraduates.

Comment:  We find there are cases where “soft dollar” faculty want to do more teaching and tenure faculty want to do less teaching and more research.  Barriers exist to this type of arrangement.

Comment:  As a soft dollar scientist, we always face funding gaps, but we still need to pay our bills and support our families.  It would be nice to have something like a “salary bank” that we can pay into when we have funding, and withdraw from when there are gaps. 

Comment:  We are finding that students want some significant computer experience as part of their program (e.g., computer programming, data analysis), but end up having to get a double major which is not what the students want.

Comment: Students need to be allowed to drive data analysis, including using digital works and books.  Is there an expanded role for the library for research computing?

Q.  If major changes come out of the AF process, it will require a lot of resources to implement.  What are the conversations about how to find and provide resources?

A. Everything will be fed to the AF committee, which has good representation across the campus.  They will codify the 5 to 7 things that we want to take on as a university. Both the Provost and the CFO are willing to take a look at it from all levels.  We are not shying away from the conversations that need to occur.  We have a partnership with the administrative side of the campus.  We have a fiscal reality as a public university.  That said, we don’t want to be hampered by “no, we can’t afford it”, but instead look at it as “how do we organize so that we can do it”. Any ideas are welcome.

Comment: Is there a better way to utilize the Humanities to increase flexibility, entrepreneurship, and impact by the Humanities? It would be useful to think in terms of “Applied Humanities” to increase the value of the Humanities.  This should be a campus-wide conversation as it can be something that will attract students.

Comment: Geography is everything when it comes to bringing people together in the same creative space in an effort to push boundaries and look at teaching and research in new, creative ways.  We need intention around this to drive changes.

Comment: Being co-located here at INSTAAR is great, but it takes 20 minutes to get to main campus to engage with other colleagues.  Reducing the distance or time it takes to interact with other parts of the campus would help a lot.

Comment: We need a better reward system for interdisciplinary teaching.

Q. We need to have a focus on gender equity and diversity.  Is that a part of the current conversations? It always seems to come in 2^nd, 3^rd, 4th… place in the process, but needs to be a top focus.

A. It is part of the conversation, both as its own topic as well as part of other discussions.  Some of it is addressed by Inclusive Excellence, but not all. The AF committee will need to have some serious discussion on this.  There are models we can look at to accomplish this.

Comment: We need more transparency across the board on what funding departments and colleges get.  If we find that other departments are more efficient and effective than we are with less funding, we can go to them and find ways to improve our own department.

Comment: We need to have conversations about incentives.  There is internal competition for resources, and incentives impact faculty decisions.

Comment: We are facing incentive “whiplash” – just when we make long-term plans, they change.  This devalues our work even though it is still important.  Incentives change too rapidly.

Comment: We lack diversity of funding and this impacts both research and undergraduate education. We are good at getting NSF funding, but alternative funding (e.g., private donors, foundations) is difficult - our OCG is not set up for this. We sometimes lose out on funding due to barriers.