RECAST | Fall 19 | Week 4 | Provost Note
Hi all,
As we near the end of week 4, you are all in full swing and there is much to report! In addition to all of your usual awesome work, here are five highlights:
The Children’s Center was recently awarded two grants totaling $109,000 that will reduce the cost of childcare for low-income student parents and provides professional development for staff to enhance the overall quality of care.
This year’s faculty meetings will begin with a five-minute Ignite Talk that showcases faculty intellectual life. Carri LeRoy launched the series with a presentation entitled “Rapid stream evolution – volcanos and willows.”
Our fall athletic teams – including men’s and women’s soccer and women’s volleyball – recently made Evergreen history by having a perfect six for six weekend! You can follow all of the athletic teams at www.gogeoducks.org.
Five faculty colleagues – Dawn Pichon Barron, Tara Hardy, Catalina Ocampo, Suzanne Simons, and Sandy Yannone – shared from their recent publications at the evening event, Not a Luxury: Raucous Poetry by Womxn Faculty.
The Evergreen Art Lecture Series continues to offer biweekly opportunities for the community to engage with a broad range of artists, writers, scholars, and activists, most recently Klara Glosova, a Czech-born visual artist.
With the 10th day of fall quarter now behind us, the Campus Leadership Group recently received enrollment and budget updates from Eric Pedersen and John Carmichael which I’m briefly recapping below. We’ve exceeded our fall enrollment projection by six students, with a headcount of 2,854 students that includes 750 new undergraduate students (35% first-year, 59% transfer, and 6% returning). While this is positive news, shortfalls in non-resident and graduate student enrollments contribute to a revenue shortfall for the current year. We do not plan mid-year budget adjustments to address this shortfall, but the core budget team is asking budget managers to watch spending closely and is looking for other saving opportunities, such as delaying refilling vacant positions and further limits on travel.
This year we anticipate another graduating class that is larger than the next year’s incoming cohort. This suggests a need to address another projected budget shortfall in 20/21. Addressing this shortfall will probably require a reduction similar to last year. We also plan to follow a similar approach to decision making about these reductions.
In the meantime we continue to work on reducing the faculty line count through leaves without pay, redeployment of regular faculty to high demand areas of the curriculum and other ideas we are exploring with the UFE. We are also developing proposals for generating additional revenue to address the temporary bridging of reductions we made last year to the operating budgets in science, visual arts, media services, and the library. We will have more information about these later in the quarter.
What the enrollment numbers tell us, and what is true for colleges experiencing similar enrollment declines, is that we need to press forward with the initiatives we have underway and consider new offerings that will attract students who aren’t currently choosing Evergreen.
At yesterday’s faculty meeting, I presented a process we will use during this academic year to facilitate decision-making about the strategic direction and priorities for 2-3 “big bet” new academic programs, with a goal of substantially increasing our enrollment over the next 3-5 years. I am attaching an overview of this work here. There will be more to share on this soon.
Of course, there continue to be many events to look forward to over the upcoming weeks, including the 39th (!) annual Harvest Festival at the Organic Farm this Sunday October 29 from 12-9, the next PLATO Lecture as part of a series exploring the digital humanities by Dr. Eric Gonzaba on November 1 at 4:30 in Purce Hall 7, the first Evergreen Talks public lecture on Tuesday, November 12, 6:30-8:00pm. at Lord Mansion by Vice President for Indigenous Arts and Education Tina Kuckkahn-Miller and Senator John McCoy, and the Equity Symposium: Transforming Dialogue into Collective Action on November 14 & 15.
About a dozen of us spent a lovely evening together at 3 Magnets last week. If you’d like to participate, there is one more social events this quarter:
- Off-campus after 5pm at Three Magnets (faculty sign-up here and staff sign up here)
Best,
Jen
New Academic Program Development Process for 19-20 handout
