Dear Faculty Colleagues,
Below, you will find the remarks I shared at Wednesday’s meeting of the University Senate. I also want to reiterate what I said in my message last week. As with every semester during this pandemic, you may encounter teaching and learning situations that haven’t come up before. If the challenges you are facing feel too large for you to manage on your own, please make your chair or dean aware of your situation so we can see what can be done to help you. Our deans know that Academic Affairs is available to help find solutions to any unusual issues that might emerge as we navigate the beginning of the semester.
Sincerely,
Gretchen Ritter
Vice Chancellor and Provost
Remarks from Jan. 26, 2022, Meeting of the University Senate
Good afternoon. It’s good to be with all of you today.
Let me begin my comments by expressing appreciation. From the time winter break began in December until now, so many people have worked hard to help keep us safe and healthy as we commence this spring semester. This includes not only the public health team and all the folks managing our testing lab and staffing our health center. But it also includes the student experience staff, the staff in ITS, auxiliary services and facilities.
I am also grateful to the staff, deans, department chairs, advisors, students and faculty who have adjusted their teaching and learning plans for the spring, managed challenges and new expectations, and tried to be supportive and helpful to students, peers and colleagues as we navigate our way through this latest surge of COVID. I know that this has been taxing for everyone. But this University and community have much to be proud of for handling the challenges that COVID has brought our way while keeping people safe.
We have consistently focused on our mission of advancing knowledge and understanding while providing superb educational opportunities to our students. Staying focused on our mission—advancing academic excellence at a university that is welcoming to all—is a good way to ground ourselves as we begin this new semester. This is, after all, why we do what we do—so we can equip and enable talented, ambitious students from all backgrounds as they pursue their dreams for making this world a better place. And so we can support our amazing researchers, scholars and creative artists on this faculty as they press forward the boundaries of knowledge and human understanding. We press forward with this work, especially at this moment, because our students need us, our colleagues need us, and the world needs us.
Before turning to questions, let me provide updates on a few topics, beginning with COVID management.
Let me begin by reminding everyone that the best and most accurate source of information is the Stay Safe website, which provides detailed guidance on everything from testing, to masks, to isolation and quarantine. Our COVID decisions continue to be informed by the latest public health guidance, specifically from the CDC, the state department of public health and the county department of public health. And it’s guided by our community’s public health experts, which include several members of our faculty.
As you know, one of the reasons that Syracuse has been able to manage COVID as well as we have is because of our strong and early commitment to having a fully vaccinated campus. All employees of the University are required to provide documentation that they have been vaccinated and boostered (if eligible) by Jan. 31. We know that some folks have found the process of uploading vaccine documentation challenging. If you need help, there will be drop-in help desk available at Goldstein Auditorium from 9 a.m. – noon on Jan. 28. In addition, your department’s IT person can assist you, or you can contact the ITS helpdesk at help@syr.edu.
Among the areas that I watch carefully, there are currently fewer than 60 faculty who have yet to provide us with documentation that they have been vaccinated. Our goal is to reach 100% compliance for all employees on these requirements by the due date. If you are having difficulties with this process, we’re here to help.
Two other items I’ll mention in relation to COVID management—one concerns contingency planning for schools and departments, and the other concerns masks. We now know that the number of daily cases for the omicron surge peaked in New York State about two weeks ago, and we have done a great deal to mitigate its spread with our testing, masking and vaccine requirements. But we should still anticipate that we will have positive cases on our campus. And, while many will be asymptomatic, we should expect some students, staff or instructors may need to be absent at some point in the first few weeks of the semester. To the degree that staff are impacted by COVID related absences, that may mean that some things take longer than usual. Our staff are working extremely hard in support of the academic mission—please be patient, supportive and understanding about these challenges.
On contingency planning for teaching, we are encouraging schools and departments to develop plans for managing both student absences and the possibility of instructor absences. Even before COVID, we have managed instructor absences on a regular basis. How we’ve done that varies depending on discipline and class size. It varies based on whether it’s a lecture class, a lab class, or a performance-based class. As in the past, we will defer to the best judgment of the academic units to determine the best approach to managing short-term absences that are most appropriate for their classes. Faculty, please think about how to help your students keep up with the class if they cannot be there in person—with online assignments, video recordings, etc. Likewise, there are a variety of ways that we can work to continue instruction if a faculty member cannot be physically present for a few days—such as having another faculty member fill in, or providing pre-recorded lectures, or holding the class remotely. It is worth remembering that especially for those who have been vaccinated, the impact of omicron is typically quite mild, and both faculty and students can often participate from home while in isolation. That said, if you are experiencing symptoms, your first priority should be to take care of yourself and get well—you can rejoin your classes when you are able.
On masking, it continues to be the case that everyone is required to wear masks at all times while on campus. While no particular type of mask is required, well-fitted, high-quality masks—or double masking—are strongly encouraged. We are making KN-95 masks available to departments upon request and are providing surgical masks to our students. We are also making available surgical masks to instructors who would like to bring them to class to offer to students who have only a cloth mask with them and would like to double mask.
Let me also say a word about yesterday’s network outage. As many of you know, we had a partial outage of the network for almost three hours yesterday. I know this was inconvenient, as it made applications such as email, Blackboard, and MySlice, difficult to access for many on campus. It is important to put this in a broader context—ITS network services has a 99.9% uptime record, meaning over the course of the 12 months, there was only about an hour of unplanned downtime. While we are still investigating exactly why it happened, we now know what happened and the team in ITS is taking steps to ensure that this does not happen again.
Turning to other updates, I‘d like to address some of the questions we’re hearing about faculty space with the transition of Goldstein Alumni and Faculty Center to what will be our new university welcome center. We will convene a task force to help us design a state-of-the-art faculty center. We encourage all of you to give input to the task force on a new faculty center, which will be led by Associate Provost Jamie Winders. In the meantime, we want to make sure there is ample space on campus for faculty to convene. To that end, the faculty commons in Bird Library is opening this spring as a meeting and collaboration space for faculty. There are also various venues on or near the campus that are available for faculty dining—either by reservation for groups or individuals.
With regard to research and academic excellence, I want to share I have received the report by the working group that is evaluating our cluster hire initiatives and some of the things we might do to strengthen that initiative. They found that while this effort has brought excellent faculty to our campus, more needs to be done to focus and support the clusters so they will have real impact on research and creative excellence. I’ll be sharing more about their findings and recommendations in the weeks ahead.
I want to say a couple of words about enrollment. One of the bits of good news on the enrollment front is that we’ve set a record for applications. We have nearly 41,000 applicants for next fall at the undergraduate level. And what we see from those applications is that our overall trends for diversity as well as academic excellence are continuing. What we’re also seeing is that we still have a lag, particularly with regard to Chinese students in terms of international applications. On the graduate side, our applications for our master’s programs are up a bit, by almost 4%, but currently the applications for our Ph.D. programs are down by about 11%. And that too, we think is probably being impacted by this decline in international applications. Finally, for law, this year’s law application are down about 5%, but if you look at the trend over time, our law applications are still up from where they were a couple of years ago.
Turning to other good news items, we have a superb class of participants that we are sponsoring for next year’s ACC Academic Leaders Network—including Amy Criss, Julie Hasenwinkel, Melissa Luke, Gladys McCormick and Ryan O. Williams. This program, which is offered by the Atlantic Coast Conference, is designed to broaden participants awareness of some of the needs and opportunities facing higher education at this moment, and to prepare them for further leadership roles within the University. Let me add as an aside that I think some of the work that we need more of in academic affairs is to help provide these kinds of leadership training opportunities for our faculty.
Finally, earlier this week, we were very pleased to announce the Faculty Excellence initiative, which will be a focus of the University’s advancement efforts for the last part of the Forever Orange campaign. In order to increase the number of endowed faculty positions at the University, we are providing an incentive for donors who are ready to invest in faculty excellence. We will leverage donor funds with up to $20 million of University funds. This should help us to establish the endowed positions we need to recruit, recognize and retain distinguished faculty here at Syracuse.
And with that, I’m pleased to address your questions.