February 3, 2023
Summary
I hope the first full week of the semester went well for all of you. A number of updates this week.
Full Description
Dear all,
I hope the first full week of the semester went well for all of you. A number of updates this week.
We in Ewell are very mindful that this semester, many of you are teaching courses that are larger than you hoped and expected this semester. For some of you, this will have required adjustments to syllabi and assignments. We are so grateful to you all for working with us to solve this sudden emergency and we know that there were many frustrations. For example, some of you added courses that then didn’t fill. Others had to shuffle schedules around. I wanted to express my gratitude to you all for being our steady partners in this endeavor and to share some information and ideas that we discussed at CCPD yesterday to circumvent this kind of last-minute scramble in the future.
First, we have reliable information from Admissions on targets for incoming student numbers for the foreseeable future. Each year, we will admit 1650 regular first-year students in the fall, 150 transfers in the fall, and 200 transfers in the spring. That means that we know NOW how many COLL 150s and 100s we will need in AY23-24. (Of course, these numbers are targets and the yields will not be exact. But we still have better data than we have had in the past.)
We will soon have access to detailed curricular maps which will enable us to predict student demand for course sequences; and we will also have access to great data on historical enrollments in particular courses, so we have additional data to support our predictions.
One of the problems in adjusting spring schedules to meet student demand has been that they are not finalized until just a few days before students register. For Fall 2023, we will reach out to Chairs and Program Directors for conversations about targeted enrollment adjustments to particular courses BEFORE the schedule goes live (ie in late February/March) to avoid the last-minute scramble and sledgehammer approach (ie all courses will have a minimum of 20 students, for example). We do not plan to use that approach again, but rather to build on the sustainable curriculum discussions to adjust only where our data tells us adjustments are absolutely necessary. And we are working to figure out a way to reduce the tight turnaround for analysis of spring courses.
I am delighted to report that Harmony Dalgleish, Associate Professor of Biology, has accepted the position of Faculty Director of the Joint Degree Programme with St Andrews University in Scotland, starting on July 1, 2023, when the term of the current Director, Marcus Holmes ends. Marcus has been doing a wonderful job and Harmony will continue that proud tradition. I am really grateful to her for accepting.If you are on the search committee for a Lecturer or Visiting Assistant Professor, or the Chair or Director of a unit that is hiring, please note that you need to attend one or both of the following charging meetings: for Lecturer searches: Mon Feb 13, 3-4 on Zoom: https://cwm.zoom.us/j/96555059827; for Visiting searches: Thurs 2/16, 2-3 on Zoom: https://cwm.zoom.us/j/91891496271.The two subcommittees of the Computing, Data and Applied Science Steering Committee (CDSAS) met this past week and started to plan their work. Watch out for multiple requests for survey responses, feedback, meetings, conversations on the topic of the proposed school. We have already posted a link to provide feedback (anonymous if you wish) on the CDSAS website. Other materials – including the charge to the committee from the Provost – will be added soon.Finally, this week we welcome to campus the external reviewers for the Linguistics Program. We look forward to meeting them and getting their views and advice on our excellent Linguistics Program.
I really hope you have good weekends and that next week goes well for you. I know you will impatiently await Friday and the arrival of another message from the Acting Dean. But for now, you’ll just have to continue to ponder this one, until the magic of Friday arrives again.
Very best wishes, Suzanne
Suzanne Raitt
Acting Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences
Chancellor Professor of English
Pronouns: she/her/hers
