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Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

Intro by Jeff Cox

• Intro on teaching and reaching visioning
• Laying out of fall work
• Role of Committee and Report

Comment: We need to teach students a variety of skills (such as computer skills), but there are barriers that prevent interdisciplinary teaching, and we cannot compete with other departments if we want to hire faculty to teach those skills.  We need to remove barriers and collaborate and cooperate across units.

Q: How will the ideas be prioritized?

A. The committee is still figuring that out.  Ideas that come up consistently across campus will certainly need to be considered, but any good idea will be considered.  The committee will be checking back with the campus to verify we heard things correctly.

Comment: We need flexibility when making teaching assignments for fall and spring, and give summer courses more consideration, especially for courses that would be better taught in the summer, such as those with field work.

Q: What is the best format for submitting white papers?

A.  We prefer MS Word documents over .pdfs when possible – the process to remediate the information for the visually impaired is resource constrained and is easier for Word documents. 

Comment: We need to look at graduate student funding – pay, tuition waivers, etc. – to attract and support our graduate students.

Comment: We need to address the transit modes on campus, both from a safety perspective (especially bikes vs. pedestrians) as well as ease in getting to the further parts of campus for both students and faculty.

Comment: We are living with 30,000 people in a space designed for 20,000.  We need a discussion about safety.  It seems like we have moved away from foot and bike patrols.

Q: In the end, AF will not be able to satisfy everyone’s ideas (perhaps not even the majority of ideas).  We see value in giving input, but we are concerned it will likely be either too specific or tangential and will be lost.  Are we setting ourselves up for disappointment?

A. We believe we will be able to address important items that have the potential to impact the campus in major ways.  We are using a transparent, collective process.  We will be clustering similar ideas and topics together to address. At the very least, we will have a record and archive of all the ideas that we can use in the future.

Comment: We need to expand how the university interacts with potential donors.