Director’s Report – September 22, 2006
Welcome back everyone. It was nice to see the new faces at the Faculty Governance Council on Monday. Thanks to our revised governance criteria we look forward to a broader participation.
For those of you who have been keeping up with the blog, you will see that we have been involved in a lot of activity over the summer. Committees continue to look at possibilities for program redesign, core course design and evaluation criteria. In the latter instance, Nancy Mathews presented a proposal at the Faculty Governance Council which generated a lot of debate. She will be circulating the whole report and I urge you to get comments back to her. We do need a mechanism for making judgments about performance that is interdisciplinary, and the committee in my view had some very rich discussions about a difficult topic. Nonetheless, establishing criteria even for merit evaluation is complex and it was obvious at the meeting, if not surprising, that people had strong views. I will work with Nancy to make sure a revised document gets back to you all in either the October 16 [2:00 p.m.] or the November 27 meeting. My hope is that we will have a set of criteria established (at least for merit review) before Christmas.
I mentioned at the Faculty Governance Council meeting that we are in the process of organizing another Nelson Institute/Madison Community event, this one a conference at Wingspread in January 2007. The conference is titled “Imagine Green Madison – Envisioning a Sustainable Environment and Community,” and the process will be a Future Search – a “whole system approach” designed to help communities and networks to build a future based on present common ground and ideals. The Future Search conference process was developed at the Tavistock Institute in England in the 1960s and has been used all over the world. If you are interested in the process, you can check it out at http://www.futuresearch.net. The conference will last 3 days and will involve participants from the Madison community as well as from the University. At the moment we are working with a design team to refine the theme and sub-themes and create an invitation list. Please let me know if you are interested in getting involved.
Incidentally, speaking to the Faculty Governance, I neglected to give due credit to the large team that redesigned our web page. In addition to Hope Simon, huge kudos are due to: Tom Sinclair, Carol Enseki, Sue Fafard, Justin Fiedler, Lewis Gilbert, Paul Gunther, Eileen Hanneman, Sara Lorence, Mark Marohl, Mary Mercier, as well as four colleagues at University Communications who worked with us on the design– Eileen Fitzgerald, Jenny Klaila, Nancy Rinehart, and Peter Weil. Thanks to all.
That’s all for now.
Frances
Filed under: Director's Reports, Faculty & Staff News by Andy Wetzel | Comments (0)