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The Boulder Faculty Assembly’s March 7 monthly meeting—hosted for the full faculty senate (all members of the CU Boulder faculty with 50% or more appointments within ) and presided over by BFA Vice Chair Alastair Norcross—featured a series of important updates. 

Accreditation and Buff Undergraduate Success 

Vice Chancellor and Senior Vice Provost for Academic Planning and Assessment Katherine Eggert and Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Joe Thomas gave an update on accreditation efforts and on the Buff Undergraduate Success (BUS) project to improve retention and graduation rates for undergraduate students: 

• A draft of CU Boulder’s accreditation mid-term report, due to the Higher Learning Commission late this spring, will be released to the campus community within the next 10 days for a comment period.
• CU Boulder is slowly improving its six-year graduation rate among its AAU public university peers, but still remains more than 7% below the AAU public average for its 2016 first-year student cohorts.
• For first-time, full-time students from fall 2023 to spring 2024, the overall CU Boulder retention rate set a new record at 96.4%.
• Eggert outlined upcoming BUS projects.

Eggert and Thomas gave the assembly a list of recommended faculty actions for helping students persist: using course alerts; using Canvas to keep students apprised of grades; keeping abreast of forthcoming Canvas guidance and templates to give students a less confusing experience; and being aware of “high impact” courses at the department level that can either assist or stall students’ academic progress. 

IT decision framework model

Vice Chancellor and Chief IT Officer Marin Stanek updated the group on a new model of decision making that she said “is intended to provide increased collaboration among faculty, staff and students on IT issues and opportunities.”

Stanek acknowledged faculty frustrations with the current pace of IT changes on campus. The new IT decisions framework enhances shared governance structures that remain in place. She reinforced that technology accelerates opportunity, introducing complexity and risk at an unprecedented pace and raising questions for faculty: “How does this affect me?”, “What do I need to do?” and “Why do I care?”

Stanek also outlined how the future IT decisions framework would align processes to campus needs, improve efficiencies and reduce risk. 

Moving ahead, given we lag behind our peers, she said new IT initiatives would have “strong mechanisms” in place to enable rapid shifting and scaling of IT resources to meet demands, with benefits to campus being “improved transparency and visibility of IT initiatives” that would encourage innovation. 

In other BFA business

• Norcross apprised the group of the CU System Faculty Council’s process for updating the Faculty Senate Constitution on new instructor titles.
• He also updated the group on ongoing efforts to improve the proper departmental hiring and deployment of lecturers. 
• The assembly heard an update on changes to open access guidelines for faculty published work.
• The assembly heard an update from Norcross sent by absent BFA chair and Chancellor Search Committee member Shelly Miller on the chancellor search, which will have a candidate or candidates visiting the week of March 18. Norcross urged a strong faculty turnout that week for open forums, which will be held at 8 a.m. Finalized dates and times for the visits should be available soon.