Hello all --

(emailed to the faculty on 3/9/12)

Apologies for the long gap between communications from your faculty chair!  And apologies for the length of this message.  You can also read this message, and other musings, at the faculty chair blog, http://www.sonoma.edu/senate/chair/

Lunch conversations about SSU's academic identity:  The February 24 lunch was canceled in favor of an open forum with the visiting CSU Faculty Trustee, Bernadette Cheyne of Humboldt.  We had a good conversation about challenges facing the CSU in general, and tried to give her a feel for the characteristics that make SSU stand out.  She was grateful for all the feedback she received during her 2-day visit.

No drop-in lunch March 12: We had scheduled a lunch for this Monday, March 12, but we are canceling it in favor of the Access and Equity presentation, "Remediation as a Civil Rights Issue," in Schulz 3001, noon-1:30 p.m., Monday, March 12.  The Provost and I both feel that this is an important event for us to attend.

Lunch schedule for the rest of the semester:  All drop-in, bring-your-own-food, noon-1 p.m., in the Faculty Center, Schulz first floor; hosted by Provost Rogerson and me (* indicates that the President plans to attend):

• Friday, March 23*
• Tuesday, April 10
• Monday, April 23*
• Monday, May 7

Topics:  As we continue to try to flesh out the ideas of collaboration and leadership that emerged as central to SSU's identity in Fall conversations, we'll have more specific topics for this semester's conversations.  The February 10 conversation was about collaborative educational spaces; look for an email soon outlining a project growing out of that conversation.  One or two of the remaining lunches will focus on issues of accessibility to educational materials, encompassing both disability questions and affordability.  Others will feed into feed into Senate Budget Subcommittee discussions about creative ways to build our vision of learning at SSU, even in the face of the State budget.

Budget:  The State budget situation continues to be clear as mud.  The governor's January budget proposal for 2012-13 includes a flat budget for the CSU (making permanent the $100 million "trigger" cut that happened this year, as well as the original $650 million cut) as a best case scenario; in his proposal, if voters don't approve a tax measure at the ballot box in November, the CSU would be cut by an additional $200 million. 

The additional $200 million, on top of the $750 million total cut this year, would be undeniably disastrous.  Many of us believe/hope that the governor is trying to focus the pain of the budget mess in areas that people who vote will notice, in order to build the case for fixing the "structural" problems with California's budget. 

My understanding, from the President's comments at Senate and Executive Committee, is that all campuses have to submit plans to the Chancellor's office to implement the full cuts - $650m + $100m + $200m - but the implementation of the last $200m would likely begin in Spring 2013.  This would mean a Fall 2012 semester roughly similar to Fall 2011.

The legislature is beginning its work on the many pieces of the budget, but it probably won't be in the news much until the governor releases his "May revise" budget, after which the full legislature will take up the budget in earnest.

In the meantime, count on many doom and gloom scenarios being floated.  Also count on - and participate in - lots of political action to try to produce a better budget outcome.

The Provost has asked the Senate Budget Subcommittee (augmented by two department chairs) to hold broad conversations and provide him with "guiding principles" to use in making budget decisions in Academic Affairs.  The Committee is taking up this task, trying to figure out the type of "principles" that would be most helpful to the University.  The first one, of course, is that all decisions should rest on the University's sole mission of preparing students.  Watch for and participate in these discussions.

Green Music Center  The GMC's opening classical music season was announced at a press event at noon today, and should be listed soon at http://gmc.sonoma.edu/ .  Tickets go on sale March 25; students will have a 50% discount, and faculty/staff a 20% discount.  Subscription tickets to the Santa Rosa Symphony are already available.

The GMC Advisory Board meets today as well, and the University Affairs Committee has a proposal on the agenda to add substantial support for the academic program associated with the GMC to the Advisory Board's list of fundraising priorities.  To date, fundraising has all been aimed at construction and, more recently, operating costs of the Center.

Elections  You received notice of the election results in the Spring 2012 faculty governance elections; I'd like to thank those who stepped forward to help guide us all through tough times and exciting re-imagining. 

If you haven't voted in the constitutional amendment ballot, please do so! (Sign in to moodle, choose Academic Senate Elections as the course, and it'll be obvious how to proceed.)

Commencement  Watch for a separate email about participating in commencement ceremonies.  It really means a lot to our students for us to be there on their big day.


If there are topics you'd like to see addressed in these infrequent emails, please let me know!

Ben Ford
2011-12 Chair of the Faculty

Welcome to the Spring 2012 semester!  I hope your classes are getting off to a good start, and that your students are engaged and excited.

First, a few links from the Spring University Retreat:  The Clay Shirky TED Talk we watched pieces of is "Institutions vs Collaboration," and the poem with which I ended the retreat is Marge Piercy's To Be of Use.

I didn't manage to keep up with blogging in the second half of the Fall semester - still trying to figure out what this medium feels useful for - so I'll try to catch up a bit here.

In asking us to engage this year as a University community in a conversation about SSU's academic story, I wondered if we would be able to identify and agree on any central identifying elements that might distinguish SSU from so many other 5-10,000-student underfunded state universities.  One framing for those conversations was "what does/should make SSU distinctive as an academic institution?"  It was remarkable to me how many faculty, students, and alumni independently led with some version of "close faculty-student working relationships."  Many other ideas were floated as well, of course - student scholarship experience came up a lot, for instance - and Debora Hammond suggested at one of the lunches that "collaborative education" seemed to encapsulate a lot of what had been coming up.

"Collaboration" strikes some as vague and perhaps not distinguishing enough; the word is certainly not a pithy encapsulation of a story all by itself.  We'll need to flesh it out this Spring as we explore how we might "build collaboration into the infrastructure," as Clay Shirky puts it in the TED talk above.  I want to talk here about why I think it can be the basis of something distinctive and meaningful, by talking about the various ways in which collaboration might shape what we do - all of which came up in conversations this Fall. 

First, collaboration as a tool/setting for student learning:  Most of the time, I feel like my students learn more when they are working together on problems or projects than they do in any other mode. I would love for my students to arrive with the expectation that this is what it means to learn at SSU, and to have similar experiences in most of their classes.  This model does not fit society's standard (but no-longer-relevant, I argue) model of a class as information transmission from instructor to students, and so this understanding of collaboration could give us some real distinctiveness, both externally and in driving our internal discussions about teaching.

Second, collaboration across disciplines and across other traditional university boundaries:  There are so many great contexts for learning all over the University, and so many benefits to the University overall of situating learning in those contexts.  Internships offer a small way to take advantage, but I'd love to explore this much more broadly.  The stretch English program is using service writing assignments for the SSU preserves, for example; Associated Students Presents is doing outstanding work to help tie co-curricular and curricular efforts together. I'm sure we could be doing so much more - if we could figure out how to remove barriers that make it so hard right now.  An story of collaboration across the entire university in creating our students' education would be quite distinctive in the current hyper-disciplinary higher ed world.

Collaborating with colleagues to improve my teaching:  We still have way too little collaboration among ourselves as teachers, I believe.  I spend a fair bit of time in K-12 schools.  I was part of a research team visit to the Bellevue, Washington school district some years ago, and I have never seen a more engaged, involved teaching group (district-wide).  Teachers were in and out of each others' classrooms; hallway and lunch conversations were often about ideas for how to approach certain ideas or certain students.  Teaching does not have to be as solitary an endeavor as it often is for us.  I feel like I become better at it when I get out of my stand-alone box and work with colleagues to examine it carefully.

Community-engaged partnerships are a powerful form of collaboration about which much has been written.  Lots of research demonstrates the motivating and outcome-improving effect of situating learning in a meaningful community context.  How do we make it easier and part of the normal course of things?

Finally, collaboration as a skill that our students are known for:  In most careers/life endeavors, the ability to work with others to accomplish goals is a hugely important skill.  How could we make it the case that the world in the future knows our graduates to have this skill?

Conversations about SSU's academic story - the story we tell ourselves, our students, and our community about the role of SSU in the world - have been very exciting.  Ideas are more consistent and coherent than I expected, and many people seem very happy to have an opportunity to talk with colleagues about why and how we do this work.  I know I sure enjoy them.  Since I last wrote, we've had a lunch or two and a breakfast session at North Light Café and Books; 12-14 faculty members have come to each lunch, and about 8 to each breakfast so far.

I think I've written before that ideas around collaboration seem to resonate with a lot of participants as capturing much of what is true and is wished to be true about SSU:  Close faculty-student interactions; interdisciplinary efforts; coherent GE efforts; community partnerships; and more.  "Collaborative" also describes a characteristic that many of us want our graduates to have; it's one of the critical skills mentioned by Richard Thornburg in his address last week.  Another theme that some have mentioned is leadership.

I've discovered that, while "collaboration" is meaningful to me, it needs some explanation to some who haven't been in the conversations.  Here are pieces of what it captures for me: 

• Collaboration as a way to "do" education: Student-faculty collaboration; students collaborating in teams on projects; faculty collaborating across departments
• Collaboration with our community to situate our students' learning in this amazing place and community
• Collaboration as a learning objective, as a critical skill for our students in almost any career they choose

One challenge for me is seeing how these conversations lead to some kind of motto or tag line or motto, if such a thing would be useful (as I think it would).  The usefulness would depend on a balance between having some real meaning, and being broad enough to frame most or all of the ways we want SSU to be a force in the world.  The two examples I cite a lot are Cal Poly SLO, which uses the standard polytechnic "Learn By Doing" to great effect, both internally (as a way of structuring education) and externally (corporate recruiters talk about Cal Poly graduates' ability to hit the ground running); and Evergreen's "Let it all hang out," which also tells you something about how education works there, and what you might expect of a graduate.

Conversations are broadening:  Representatives from development and public relations, along with two deans, participated in the last lunch gathering, and the student government cabinet is coming to this Wednesday's lunch.  Hope to see some of you there!

Conversations about SSU's academic identity continue in many forums.  We had another drop-in lunch on October 12 at the Faculty Center (about 10 faculty members and President Armiñana attended), and a breakfast October 21 at North Light Books and Cafe (seven faculty members and Provost Rogerson).  In the last few weeks, I've had conversations with the Library faculty, the Science and Technology Council of Department Chairs, the Professional Development Subcommittee, the Academic Coordinating Team (which consists of the Academic Senate leadership and the Provost and Deans and AVPs), and probably others.  I've got more scheduled.

In these attempts to identify the significant distinguishing feature of an SSU education, I'm surprised by how quickly conversations seem to be converging around some ideas about close faculty/student interaction, faculty caring about their students' success, and student scholarship experiences.  One phrase that captures a lot of this is "collaborative education," which seems to be a good fit for lots of people in lots of departments.

I hope you'll join us for continuing conversations.
 

On Wednesday, September 28, 14 faculty gathered in the Faculty Center for further lunchtime conversation about defining features of an SSU education. Joined by President Armiñana and Provost Rogerson, we had a great conversation about SSU's academic story.

There are many versions of the "question" I'm hoping we can answer.  Here are several of them:

• (My current version) What do you wish you could tell people about what Sonoma State is about, if only it were true? (or perhaps it already is true)
• (Provost Rogerson's) What makes or should make an SSU education distinctive?
• (President Armiñana's) What is or should be the "tattoo" of an SSU graduate?

One important note is that this is an aspirational discussion:  We have a great history to build on, but we don't need to restrict ourselves in our thinking about our story to things that perfectly reflect current reality.

I believe that a brief statement that expressed something meaningful about how we do education here would have a lot of benefits:

• It could help us structure curriculum decisions
• It could inform resource decisions
• Students would know something about what they're signing on for when they come here
• PR efforts could be centered around academics
• Governmental relations efforts could feature academics

I want to expand on the third item above:  I struggle in many classes with the divide between students who seem to "get" the opportunity to learn that I'm trying to provide - and thus take full advantage of it - and those who still seem to operate under the socially-dominant "school is to be moved through with the least amount of work possible" story.  I believe we need to do everything we can to get students to do the reflective work that will help them figure out their paths in life, and how they can take advantage of their time here to best effect.  This effort needs to be much more expansive than this "academic story" conversation - for instance, we need to figure out how to get students to make sense of their GE experiences to build connections, see themes across disciplines, etc. - but some prominent statement about how we do education could be a start.

As an example, Cal Poly SLO uses "Learn By Doing" as a mantra, and it really tells students something about what they're signing on for, as well as providing a structure for curriculum and resource discussions.

As before, close faculty-student relationships comes up over and over again in these conversations.  One idea that was raised at this conversation was the idea of "collaborative learning," which seemed to many of us to capture the desired faculty-student dynamic as well as lots of other ideas that have been raised (community connection, sustainability, connection to place, etc.).

In all the lunch conversations, people have commented that we need to find out what alumni/students/community members think an SSU education means or should mean.  Luckily, our conversations are happening at the same time that the divisions of University Affairs and Development are embarking on phase I of a "branding" effort, aimed at gathering just this information.  I'm sure that our conversations can feed into their data-gathering efforts, which will lead to information that is useful to all of us.

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I'm still struggling to figure out how to frame this conversation that I want us to engage in this year. In my last post, I put it "What is Sonoma State University, as an academic institution, beyond a collection of departments?" But I'm realizing, as I hear reactions to that, that it's not aspirational enough - I really want us to talk about what SSU should be, beyond a collection of departments. Perhaps the way I put it at convocation is best: What do you wish you could tell family and friends about SSU (not about your department), if only it were true?

At the second open lunch (9/14/11) to continue this conversation, 13 faculty members and the Provost joined me in the new Faculty Center (1125 Schulz), in the back room - a nice collaborative classroom. There was lots of great discussion. Some pieces that came up:

• Is our mission to serve our service area, or to be a destination campus drawing from across California?


• SSU (perhaps the Academic Senate?) had an effort about 10 years ago do do a "meta-review" of program reviews and GE courses to evaluate how we're doing at meeting our mission.


• Speaking of SSU's mission, attendees seemed to feel that it was quite good, and the challenge is in figuring out what it implies for what we do here - how we do education. How do we make this mission drive our/the University's decision making?


• How do we get more junior faculty here - they'll have to live with the decisions being made now for a long time!


• We need to get student and alumni/ae voices in this conversation!


• We have fairly little cross-disciplinary curriculum. How do students learn to integrate ideas across disciplines? Do we have processes/structures that make cross-disciplinary curriculum difficult?


• Capstone courses, student portfolios (including extra-curricular learning)

For me, a summary of where discussions have been headed is:

1. What is the marker of an SSU education? (The mission tries to articulate this.)


2. How could we measure it?


3. How do we "do education" to be successful at meeting that mission?

Fruitful discussions! I hope you'll join me at others!

Laurel H posted a comment after my last entry asking for more explanation of the framing of the question, and asking what the small phrases in my bulleted lists were about. I attempt to address the framing above; the small phrases were just my condensation of what people talked about as (desired) identifying features of an SSU education.

Comments welcome! Click on the entry title, then at the bottom, leave a comment without signing in and it will wait for me to approve it to avoid spam, or use one of the sign-in methods (doesn't work with LDAP signin yet; you can use a google account if you have one) to post your comment immediately.

At the Fall 2011 convocation, I proposed a conversation among the faculty and the campus community at large about SSU's academic story for our second fifty years. I find that I'm thinking of this version of the question now: What is Sonoma State University, as an academic institution, beyond a collection of departments? There are outstanding programs and people all across campus, but what is our overall academic story?

I'm still working on how to engage in this discussion; so far, we've scheduled open faculty lunches (drop-in, brown-bag) with the Provost and President; and I've met with Senate committees.

Reminder: Other lunches, all in the new Faculty Center (1125 Schulz, noon to 1 p.m.) are as follows. Provost Rogerson will attend except as indicated; President Armiñana will be at about half of the lunches:

• Sep 14


• Sep 28 (with President Armiñana)


• Oct 12 (No Provost; with President Armiñana)


• Oct 26


• Nov 9 (with President Armiñana)


• Nov 30


• Dec 14 (with President Armiñana)

On Wednesday 8/31, about 12 faculty members (from 4 schools - Science and Technology, Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, and Business and Economics) took me up on my open lunch invitation. We met in the Commons, joined by Provost Rogerson.

After intros - it's surprising to me how many of us on the faculty don't know each other across campus - we had a great discussion about our ideas about SSU's academic identity. One theme that seems to come up over and over is close faculty-student relationships. Here are some other ideas that came up as part of people's ideas of central elements of our academic story:

• Accessibility


• Preparation for jobs


• Engagement


• Learning communities


• Civic engagement


• Creating the future


• Compassion


• Sustainability


• Globalization

I'm sure I've missed some; I wasn't trying to take comprehensive notes.

I've also met with all four standing committees of the Academic Senate (Academic Planning, Educational Policies, Faculty Standards and Affairs, and Student Affairs) to talk about this "Academic Story" conversation. The idea of suggestion boxes placed around campus has come up several times, and I've gotten a lot of other good suggestions for process and offers of help.

Hope to see lots of you at various conversations!

Welcome to the Fall 2011 semester!

I'll be using this space to keep track of faculty governance happenings during the 2011-12 year. Together with bi-weekly emails to the faculty, I'll try to let you know about major issues moving through faculty governance, statewide/systemwide issues of concern to faculty, and ideas surfacing in the faculty-wide discussion about SSU's academic story that I proposed at the convocation.

You can see my convocation remarks here. To move forward the academic story conversation, I hope many of you will join me at lunches in the new Faculty Center, 1125 Schulz, on the following Wednesdays at noon (second, fourth, and fifth Wednesdays). Provost Rogerson will join us except as noted, and President Armiñana will join us as noted:

• Aug 31 (Note: in the Commons instead of Faculty Center)
• Sep 14
• Sep 28 (with President Armiñana)
• Oct 12 (No Provost; with President Armiñana)
• Oct 26
• Nov 9 (with President Armiñana)
• Nov 30
• Dec 14 (with President Armiñana)

You can read a bit more about me at my Departmental web site, and I hope to get to know more of you throughout the year!