November 17, 2023

Dear all,

Some excellent news: no Friday message from me next week, and I hope none of you will be sending any work emails on Friday either. A reminder that the university is closed all week, with the exception of remote synchronous or asynchronous classes on Monday and Tuesday. This has been an intense semester (maybe they all are), and I hope all of you will be able to disconnect for a while and enjoy some unstructured time. And remember, those of you who take pictures, these lines by poet Wendell Berry from the poem “The Vacation” (2012): “He showed | his vacation to his camera, which pictured it.” I love this.

A few things to ponder:

As you all know from the Provost’s messaging, the Board of Visitors approved the creation of a new school at W&M at their meeting today. It was exciting, to tell you the truth. The President and Provost contextualized the new school as an evolution of the liberal arts & sciences model that shapes our work, and the Board was eager to be reassured that undergraduates would continue to have the same, or even easier, access to courses and majors in the new school as they do now. A transition/implementation team appointed by the Provost will start its work next semester with plenty of input from A&S on how to align operations in the two schools (new school, and A&S).
The BOV also approved two new degrees in Health Sciences, and the retirement of the current degree in Kinesiology, with no comment other than excitement at the new opportunities opened to students interested in health by this change. Kudos to Brennan Harris, Sarah Menefee and their colleagues in Kinesiology for all the work they did to make this process run so smoothly.
Invitations went out today to prospective members of the Future of A&S coordinating committee. That committee will start its work (see attached charge) early next semester and deliver a report on May 31, 2024. I’m excited about that, too. We will get going with a webpage etc once we have confirmed membership of the committee. I hope all of you will engage intensely in these conversations. This is how we will shape our future as an educational and research community. Let’s do it together (to quote Leisa Meyer).
We will not be having a holiday party in A&S. Instead, we’ll do what we did last year and host a Welcome Back party at the beginning of the spring semester. Everyone’s tired and busy right now, plus if we wait till then, it will be one year since a small Dean plopped down into the Dean’s office, feeling slightly surprised. She’s actually still quite surprised.
I don’t know if you have heard of the Office of Internal Audit, but part of their job is to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of internal processes. In Spring 2024, they will be exploring whether or not the operational processes that A&S controls (funding requests, search authorizations processes etc) are serving the needs of our community and whether we could improve them to help make your work easier. So stand by for that.
We have a strong pool of finalists for the position of A&S Director of Development. When we make that hire, Gerald Bullock will no longer be the sole advancement officer in A&S. Given that he has been our only development officer for several years, it is nothing short of a miracle that A&S received $6.56 million in gifts in FY23. Every single dollar can be attributed to Gerald’s hard work, and that of his exceptional colleague, Susan Adams.

And now……

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It turns out that some of you actually read and even remember what’s below the line. I had forgotten that I went fishing, for example, but I did. I am uncomfortably aware that I lean very heavily on the Queen, though. Since I want to be certain that you all understand that the UK is more than its royalty, here are some other UK people to contextualize the royal experience. Some are more recent than others.

This is no longer the way we live, if we ever did.

We still like wearing these, though sometimes we wonder why.

Some of us like doing this, and this man eats 1 kilo of Marmite per year.

These are hedgehogs, which you don’t have.

Goodbye, everyone. And remember – take some time off work this week.

Suzanne

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