October 27, 2023

Dear all,

A sobering week for so many reasons, not least the injury to a student yesterday on Richmond Road. Our thoughts are with her, her family and her friends.

In other news:

This is Family Weekend, when friends, parents, guardians and family members come to campus to check on their kids and make sure they are eating their vegetables and not doing anything they shouldn’t (which of course they wouldn’t do in front of their parents anyway, or wait, would they?). Please welcome these important members of our community to our campus. I met with the Parent and Family Council last night and the most consistent message I got from them is how amazing our faculty are, how caring, how engaged with the students. So thank you. I basked in your glory.
I am pleased to announce that we have re-defined the positions of our two Assistant Deans for Undergraduate Education to clarify their different responsibilities, and they have new titles to match. Ben Boone is now the Assistant Dean for Educational Policy, and Shelly Laurenzo is the Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Education & Chief Transfer Officer. Basically, Ben deals with anything that’s faculty-facing – enrollment, scheduling, CLA, A&S data; and Shelly deals with everything that’s student-facing – Committee on Degrees, OUAA, trouble-shooting, Dean of Students – and so much more, for both of them. We are really lucky to have them in our corner (and it’s not the naughty corner, in case you were wondering).
A reminder that applications for the Plumeri Awards are due on November 1.
And applications for the position of Vice-Dean for Arts, Humanities & Interdisciplinary Studies are due October 31. Please see attached and consider applying.
We spent part of this week working on campaign priorities for Arts & Sciences in the next campaign, which is in the pre-planning stage. Thank you to CCPD, FAC and the Dean team for some great ideas; and thank you to all our faculty also, who spent time in their program and department meetings coming up with ideas that your Directors and Chairs could bring forward to a meeting last week and another this past Tuesday. Once we are a little further along in the process, I will share them with you.
A group of us, including Pam Eddy, Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs & Development, have been working on guidelines for press and social media for faculty and staff for the past few months. It’s a complicated time in our nation and in the world and we thought these might be helpful. Please see attached, and look out for further information in the Provost’s Five Things email on Monday.
I plan to spend part of the weekend developing a structure for a committee to guide our conversations about the future of Arts & Sciences. Look out for further announcements.

And now, if you dare….
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Today, I went on a train, which made me think about trains and the rich literary tradition of train literature, which notably is frequently for children. Here are some images from train classics, and a little video for your delight. Before we start, I would like you to know that my train was neither too squashy, nor too shiny, nor too rusty, nor too bumpy, nor too rough. It was, in fact, the perfect amount of glossy, and in addition it left from Ashland, where bizarrely you have to guess which side of the tracks your train will be on. How is that a good way to run a station? People running wildly all over the tracks looking for their train? It just can’t be right

It is a terrible thing to have squashy wheels.

All very well for the engine, but mostly, I can’t. Especially at the gym.

Described by Wikipedia as “an anthropomorphised fictional tank locomotive.” That’s about all that needs to be said.

Now have a good weekend!

Suzanne

Suzanne Raitt
Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences
Chancellor Professor of English
Pronouns: she/her/hers