Published: Feb. 4, 2022

CU Boulder Chancellor Philip DiStefano on Thursday opened the February meeting of the Boulder Faculty Assembly’s general assembly with assurances that the campus would review how it partnered with the Boulder Police Department and communicated to the campus during the Feb. 1arrest of a UCLA lecturer wanted for threatening to commit acts of public violence.Ìę

DiStefano and members of his team also gave updates on campus financial issues and ongoing efforts to contain the omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus.Ìę

Arrest adjacent to campus

The chancellor told the assembly––meeting for the first time since last semester––that Boulder police, as “incident managers,” had control of the tactics and communications related to the arrest of Matthew Harris, formerly a post-doctoral student at UCLA and living in an apartment building directly across Broadway from the CU Boulder campus.Ìę

DiStefano said the BPD had good intelligence that Harris “was likely alone and unarmed” and the chancellor thanked the campus community for responding to police instructions and making “accommodations for students who were affected by shelter-in-place orders.”Ìę

Some students and other members of the campus community have criticized the university’s communications as being unclear and not sent to the campus early enough in the crisis.Ìę

DiStefano told the BFA that communications to the campus were controlled and approved by Boulder police as the incident commanders managing the arrest of Harris.Ìę

He pledged a full review of the procedures and communications around the incident––communications that one BFA member said were vague.Ìę

“We were told to avoid the area . . . are there any more plans to get more specific on ‘avoid the area?’” said Zach Herz of Classics.Ìę

CU Boulder Chief Operating Officer Patrick O’Rourke, to whom the CUPD reports, responded to Herz, saying the shelter in place order “was to keep people from going into the area around the apartment building (where Harris lived) itself.”Ìę

O’Rourke said the university’s challenge is that it must communicate to large numbers of people using the campus’s RAVE system, while the city can use an Everbridge system that targets much smaller numbers of people with safety instructions.

“That creates anxiety and confusion,” O’Rourke said.Ìę

He echoed DiStefano in telling the group that there would be a debrief with the city to address our concerns and try to improve how we can communicate when incidents impact our community.ÌęÌę

Marshall Fire impacts

In other safety matters, DiStefano said that 70 CU Boulder community members lost their homes in the Marshall Fire and that even more family members, “more like in the two-hundreds,” were impacted by those total losses, including, he said, Provost Russell Moore, who issued a thank-you letter to the campus Thursday that encouraged building a culture of gratitude.

DiStefano said the decision to delay the January opening of in-person activity on the campus was justified by the campus having to consider “the combined effects of both crises on our operations.”Ìę

“At the time, we knew that about 1,300 faculty, staff and students were in the fire evacuation zones,” DiStefano said. “The goal of delaying in-person instruction was to minimize the burden on our impacted faculty and staff, and to open in person at a time when we could provide maximum support and continuity to our students.”Ìę

Financial picture

DiStefano also gave a brief overview of financial matters, saying the campus’s financial picture is improving and thanking faculty for having “showed up strong during COVID” and staying “close to students.”Ìę

He reviewed the campus’s implementation of the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, saying “our priority as a leadership team has been to get the campus into compliance with the law.”

“I know that some of you have questions about this process. What I want you to know is that this was a dedicated effort, involving experts from our HR, legal and Faculty Affairs and Academic Affairs teams, working closely with our deans,” he said.Ìę

He said the process demanded “difficult legal parameters to observe, issues of privacy to maintain and a very complicated set of analytics to work out.”

“We made the conscious decision to keep the working group small in this phase of analysis, knowing that we would do an even more comprehensive salary analysis––which we are now beginning.”

Regarding budget issues, the chancellor said the campus had, during the initial COVID-19 wave, endured “over $200 million in revenue losses” with federal backfill funds being “far less than our losses.”

He expressed gratitude for “one-time funding that enabled us to get a one-time, one percent salary enhancement” and said that due to current revenues from this year’s enrollment “we were able to enact the three percent raise we have been notifying employees about.”

“We are proposing another three percent merit pool for the upcoming budget that will be presented to the Board of Regents next week,” he said.ÌęÌę

He also indicated, “I know this up-and-down, boom-and-near-bust cycle has been frustrating for you. . . I completely empathize with your frustrations.”ÌęÌę

In other meeting news

  • O’Rourke gave an update on the campus’s ongoing efforts to contain the omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus, telling the group the infection rate was falling dramatically, with a positivity rate as determined by PCR tests of 16%, down from 26% two weeks ago, and hospitalizations in Boulder County are down 30% over the last week. He said CU Anschutz’s School of Public Health is predicting that perhaps as soon as the end of this month, about 80 percent of the state’s population will have immunity against COVID-19 infection.
  • Chief Financial Officer Carla Ho’a, whose retirement from CU Boulder in November was announced Thursday, and Executive Vice Provost for Academic Resource Management Ann Schmiesing gave an update on the campus’s Budget Model Redesign project, which is in the second phase of a three-phase process. O’Rourke called Ho’a “a great CFO and an extraordinary leader” and pledged to seek faculty and other stakeholder input in the search for a new CFO.
  • Two academic matters were introduced for a vote of endorsement by the assembly:
    • Revision to the 2019 BFA approved grade replacement policy: The revision would automate the process of grade replacement, making it an opt-out choice by the student rather than an opt-in choice, and would lift the credit limit on theÌę number of classes that can be replaced. Other provisions of the policy would remain in place, including a maximum grade of C- for undergraduate students and C+ for graduate students to invoke the grade change, and grade replacement not being available if the original grade was the result of academic dishonesty.
    • Change the status of about 200 courses currently designated as being graded only Pass/Fail, to a designation as being graded Satisfactory (S) or Unsatisfactory (U). The move is part of a call by students to create a special designation for the courses – mainly experiential classes and thesis hours – to prevent a “pass” grade in one of those classes from being lumped into the “low pass” category of the pass+/pass/fail grading option that students may choose for most graded courses.
  • Two resolutions were introduced for discussion at the next BFA meeting (March 3):Ìę
    • One by the BFA’s Intercollegiate Athletics Committee that recommends campus create a policy to restrict CU Boulder faculty, staff and students from wagering on CU games (a policy similar to those adopted by Purdue, Villanova and St. John’s).
    • A second measure by the Grievances Advisory Committee that would update the current committee charge, notably to include a roster of neutral advisors on process with training in both mediation and the newly updated PRR.Ìę
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