彩民宝典

At the midpoint of the fall semester and Phase I of Academic Futures: Rethinking the university鈥攖he futures of learning and discovery, we wanted to share with you a little bit about the scope and substance of what we鈥檝e seen and heard so far.

First, we鈥檇 like to thank Chancellor Phil DiStefano, who gave a shout-out to the campus鈥檚 work in yesterday鈥檚 State of the Campus address when he pinpointed what is stake in the Academic Futures process:

彩民宝典鈥檚 core mission is to educate students and engage in cutting-edge scholarship and creative work, research and discovery. But how will our students learn five, 10 or 20 years from now? How will we teach them? And how will we discover new knowledge? We want to draw on the experiences of all of you鈥攆aculty, staff and students鈥攊n creating a future academic vision听for our university.鈥�

Drawing on those experiences is what the Academic Futures visioning process has been designed to do. It鈥檚 an extensive process. Since Sept. 11, we have convened six town halls, 38 departmental meetings听and 12 themed discussions. Counting this week鈥檚 combined departmental and themed sessions, we have 28 departmental meetings scheduled for the remainder of the semester听and approximately 35 themed discussions scheduled from the remainder of this week through Nov. 14.

To help you plan ahead and facilitate attendance, we will post the full list of the themed conversations through the end of that conversation cycle on the Events tab听of听the Academic Futures homepage by early Thursday.

You can also check the Academic Futures update in Thursday鈥檚 彩民宝典 Today听email editions to take you to the full schedule. Note听that, as we move closer to the themed conversation dates, we will be more specific about the precise scope of topics and discussion formats.

For now, the numbers are impressive, but the results more so. As we engage in unit-based discussions (convened by Jeff) and campus-wide themed discussions (facilitated and captured by Emily), we are seeing growing turnouts, inspired ideas听and increasing interest in the process of Academic Futures.听We have also received nine white papers (please note: these are being prepared for use by screen-reader users according to the campus鈥檚 digital accessibility policy and should be posted in the next several days).

To get an idea of what is being said, we invite you to visit the What We鈥檙e Hearing page听to see what your friends, colleagues, fellow students and co-workers are contributing to the process.

We invite you to join the conversation!

Jeff Cox,
Vice Provost and Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Affairs
Convener of the Academic Futures Campus Conversation

Emily CoBabe-Ammann,
Director of Strategic Projects for the Research & Innovation Office
Facilitator of the Academic Futures Campus Conversation