January 27, 2023
Summary
It was a pleasure to welcome so many of you to our welcome back gathering on Wednesday. It was wonderful to see so many faculty and staff in attendance and we’re really grateful to you for warming things up before the semester’s cold hands really take a grip on us all. I hope the first day of classes went well for you all.
Full Description
Dear Colleagues,
It was a pleasure to welcome so many of you to our welcome back gathering on Wednesday. It was wonderful to see so many faculty and staff in attendance and we’re really grateful to you for warming things up before the semester’s cold hands really take a grip on us all. I hope the first day of classes went well for you all.
This week, I’m going to spotlight just two things that are going on and in which I think many of you will be interested. First, the steering committee for the Computing, Data and Applied Sciences Initiative. The committee met with the Provost for a charging meeting on Wednesday, and she will shortly be posting the committee charge to the website. When you read it, you will see that the committee will be divided into two subcommittees to do the main bulk of its work. The first subcommittee, chaired by David Yalof, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, will “assess the operational requirements of the proposed new school, including possible structure(s), financial and HR needs, and corresponding academic and implementational implications”; the second, which I will chair, will “assess how the new school is expected to function within the broader context of W&M’s academic mission, collect feedback from departments and programs that are particularly interested in collaborating in more depth with the new school (opportunities), identify broader issues that may result from the establishment of a new school (challenges), and propose mechanisms to pursue these opportunities and address the challenges.” We will be meeting weekly for the remainder of the semester, and issuing a report by the end of May.
The committee will be reaching out in the next week or so to as many interested campus groups as possible to meet with them and hear their thoughts; we will also invite any group of faculty and/or staff, or individuals, to request a meeting. Finally, we’ll create an anonymous online form to collect your candid feedback. Keep an out for all those calls. The main task of the committee is to identify and analyze the different possibilities for a more autonomous unit for Computing, Data and Applied Sciences, which will also include researching different structures for A&S (including a discussion about which units fit best where).
The second issue I want to update you on is that we will be forming a working group to study the way we are assigning and using teaching assistants in A&S. More on that soon.
Have a wonderful weekend!
Best wishes, Suzanne
Suzanne Raitt
Acting Dean of Faculty for Arts & Sciences
Chancellor Professor of English
Pronouns: she/her/hers
