CAS Meeting Minutes
Friday, February 2, 2018
Dogwood Room
The meeting was called to order by the Chair, Prof.
Marti
LoMonaco at 3:32 p.m. There
were 49
faculty members present.
Proxies were
held for
Laura McSweeney by Shannon Harding
Amanda Harper-Leatherman by John Miecznikowski
Eileen Reilly-Wiedow by John Miecznikowski
1.
Announcements
from
the Chair and other Faculty
·
Prof. Schwab made the following
announcement:
“I am happy to announce that the School of Communication, Arts and
Media is organizing an Undergraduate Conference entitled, Converging
and
Emerging Media to take place on Saturday, September 22, here
at
Fairfield. We are delighted to share the news that our luncheon keynote
speaker
will be Savannah Sellers, co-host of NBC’s news program “Stay Tuned” for
the
Snapchat platform.
The Conference Planning Committee members
include:
Adam Rugg (Communication), Patrick Brooks (Visual and Performing
Arts), Michelle Farrell (Modern Languages and Literatures), and Matt
Tullis
(English).
The Preliminary call for Abstracts will go out later this month to all
colleges and universities in Connecticut and Westchester County. We will
encourage presentations that explore the connections within and between
the following
areas:
Communication, Strategic Communication, Media Relations, Public
Relations, Art History and Visual Culture, Film/Television/Media Arts,
Graphic
Design, Music, Studio Art, Theatre, Digital Journalism, Creative
Writing,
Professional Writing, World Cinema, Digital Humanities, Digital Essays
Preliminary Session Titles include:
1. The digital essay-moving papers from
the page to the screen
2. The power of podcasting
3. Truth, Fake News, and The Invisible
Hand of the Algorithm
4. Media/Art/Performance and
Technological Change
5. Global digital activism: Participation
or Passivity?
6. Meet me in IRL ;)?”
Preliminary
Session Titles with
comments:
1.
The digital essay-moving
papers from the page to the screen
-show
your
piece
-explain
your
process (story boarding, how did you do it, what did you do previously,
how did the digital essay change the conversation
2.
The power of podcasting
Digital
storytelling/
cinematic narrative
3.
Truth, Fake News, and The
Invisible Hand of the Algorithm
Trust,
Credibility,
Who do you trust and who do you listen to
Media
hybridity,
Cross platform and how bringing forms together what has changed
4.
Media/Art/Performance and Technological Change
Technologies
in
technology, Digital
platforms
and Augmented reality—their impact on creativity and the arts
5.
Global digital activism:
Participation or Passivity?
-New
Technologies
and democracies, online activism global, public spheres
-Algorithms
shape
which communities exist, which ones can form, they present an allusion
of
who they are
-Algorithm
shapes
taste, shapes
-Democracies
-Ethics-build
up
vs. the shred
-Virtual
Reality
and Building Community?
6.
Meet me in IRL ;)?
Online
public
sphere, gathering spaces, community through online spaces,
Is
participation
in media participation?
What does it mean to be completely
in a virtual space?
What does it mean for story telling?
FOMO, Presence, and Digital removal
Physicality and
Materiality
·
Associate Dean Petrino announced
the Fairfield
University Excellence in Teaching Award for Adjunct Faculty for the
2017-2018
academic year.
The Fairfield University Excellence in Teaching Award for
Adjunct Faculty is an annual award recognizing truly excellent teaching by
part-time faculty. The award
was
established through a gift from an adjunct faculty member (who is
ineligible
for the award).
This Teaching Award continues in Fairfield University’s
Jesuit tradition of academic excellence, critical thinking, and concerns
for
justice and the search for greater good.
It affirms the partnership that exists in the classroom between
students
and instructors helping each other fully develop their human potential.
In recognition of the differences between undergraduate and
graduate teaching, two award recipients will be selected – an
undergraduate
adjunct faculty member and a graduate adjunct faculty member.
Each award recipient will receive $1000 and
the honor of a joint reception with their department members, professional
acquaintances and family.
Criteria
To be considered for the award, adjunct faculty members must
have completed at least ten semesters of teaching at Fairfield University,
not
necessarily consecutively. They
must
display a passion for their material and a contagious enthusiasm in their
teaching. Their love of
learning and
seeking of understanding must be fundamental to their teaching style.
Nomination
Process:
1.
Department Chairs and adjunct
coordinators
submit nominations, in writing to their Dean.
Nominations should include a letter of endorsement detailing why
the
nominee is worthy of this award. In
addition,
the nomination needs to include complete student evaluations for the
most recent four semesters; the inclusion of student feedback and other
forms
of recognition of excellence as a teacher is encouraged.
2.
Deans will then write a letter of
support for
the nominee and forward the nominations to the AVP for Academic Affairs.
Malone@fairfield.edu,
CNS 300, by March 31, 2018.
3.
The selection committee will then
review all
nominations.
Selection
Committee:
The Selection Committee comprises of the Associate Vice
President for Academic Affairs (Secretary to the Committee), a Director of
the
Center for Academic Excellence, winners of the award from the previous
year,
one Associate Dean and one or two faculty member(s) from the Faculty
Committee
on Non-Tenure track Faculty.
Award Recipient
Notification and Recognition:
The Award winners will be notified in April 2018 via letter
from the Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs.
The recipients will be recognized by a joint
reception in May 2018.
·
The Arts and Sciences Planning
Committee wants
to remind all College Faculty about the College-wide Student Awards.
The
College-wide
awards will be given in four categories (Humanities, Natural Sciences
and
Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Visual and Expressive
Arts). All entries
are due on Monday, March 26th.
The CAS Student Awards
Ceremony is
scheduled for Tuesday, April 24th at 6 p.m. in the Barone
Campus
Center.
·
The Archery Club is in need for a
faculty
advisor. If you are
interested, please
contact Prof. LoMonaco. The
Archery
equipment is in the bike room in Mahan Hall.
2.
Approval
of
the December 13, 2017 Meeting Minutes
McClure/Van Dyke.
No corrections were offered.
42 in favor.
0 against. 7 abstained.
3.
Introduction
of
Assistant Dean Saadia Rafiq
Dean Greenwald introduced Saadia Rafiq, who began as an
Assistant Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences on January 3, 2018.
She joins us from Long Island University
where she worked as an Academic and Career Counselor.
Before that, she worked as an Assistant
Director of Student Employment at New York Institute of Technology, Old
Westbury Campus.
Saadia holds a
double Master of Arts in Politics & International Studies and World
History
from Long Island University, and a Bachelor of Arts in History and
Journalism
from the State University of New York of New Paltz.
Saadia has
experience in student counseling, faculty and staff training, career
development and program planning. She
is
already handling student crises and advising students in the Dean’s
office.
4.
Research
Minutes
Elizabeth
Boquet:
I
am a Rhetoric and Composition scholar,
which is a sub-field of English Studies. A through-thread for my
research involves
considering the relationship between language and power, specifically
literacy
and power. Much of my work follows from the premise that literacy serves
a
gate-keeping bureaucratic function and does not, contrary to popular
opinion,
necessarily support entry or access to information or opportunities for
disenfranchised populations. I look at the relationship between literacy
and
violences (both direct and symbolic), and I consider the ways that peers
especially can intervene as literacy brokers.
My
current research is in the emerging
area of the rhetoric of health and medicine, with a focus on the
rhetoric of
error in reporting catastrophic patient outcomes.
John
Miecznikowski:
I am an inorganic chemist.
Specifically,
I
am interested in preparing and characterizing metal complexes that have
the
potential to serve as catalysts for biologically relevant reactions.
I use clues from Nature when I design and
synthesize the metal complexes. One
project
I am working on involves synthesizing and characterizing a series of
copper(I) complexes. These
complexes
will be screened for moving an oxygen atom from one molecule to another.
I am currently writing a manuscript that describes
the synthesis, and characterization analyses of these complexes, which
behave
like a see-saw in solution. With
a
collaborator at the Rochester Institute of Technology-National Technical
Institute for the Deaf, we have computationally modeled these complexes
and
have a mechanism that supports how the metal complexes act like a see-saw
in
solution. Another project
involves
synthesizing and characterizing zinc(II) and cobalt(II) complexes which
function as synthetic models for liver alcohol dehydrogenase in humans and
animals. We are screening the
cobalt
complexes for the ability to catalyze specific reactions.
I
mentor undergraduate and high school students in my research. Since 2007,
I
have mentored 33 students in my research laboratory.
These students are involved in all aspects of
the scientific research process. Each
semester,
I work with 2-5 students as co-discovers in my research, and I work
with 1-3 students in my laboratory every summer.
Maggie Wills:
My
research
takes up various health related discourses that foster, or challenge
social,
physical, mental and spiritual wellness.
In
my
published edited volume, I proposed a model of health communication
inclusive
of the spiritual, and each chapter examined a particular healthcare
concern and
the way in which mindfully tending to spirituality promoted healing.
Another
project
focuses on chronic Lyme disease and co-infections. In this work, I
engaged in ethnographic research of The Greater Hartford Lyme Disease
Support
and Action Group. I conduct ongoing interviews with patients, activists,
and
medical professionals to unpack the complex discourses in play. Those
affected
by this devastating disease seek validation of their struggles, and work
to
effect change through communication on a personal level, and at the
local,
state and national levels.
Most
recently,
my work focuses on my service-learning course, Alcohol, Addiction and
Culture. Forty students, mainly communication majors, engage with forty
senior
high school health classes and 500 students in all. I’m analyzing the
way in in
which an animated community partnership is transforming discourses
related to
alcohol use and abuse not only for the high school seniors, but for our
own
Fairfield students.
5.
Remarks
from the Dean
The Dean welcomed everyone to
today’s meeting.
We are seeing a pattern in the research minutes and that is
students
are really engaged with faculty on research projects.
The Dean is mindful of the time that is
needed to carefully mentor students and is appreciative.
There are several items the Dean wanted to share. First, the
Dean is working with Advancement to produce a detailed list of funding
opportunities for the College. The
College,
as far as the Dean knows, never had a funding booklet that they can hand
to a
donor or the major gift officers. The
College,
therefore, has missed out on a lot of opportunities. The Dean is
meeting with several donors and he is hopeful that we will be seeing
results
soon—as alumni love Fairfield and the College.
In addition, the Dean has been meeting with program officers at
foundations.
The Dean’s office will be asking faculty to submit updates
on their activities. Specifically,
faculty
will be asked to list their presentations, academic conference papers,
published research articles, submitted grants, and funded grants. The goal
would be to create an internal newsletter so we get to see what is
happening in
the College of Arts and Sciences. The Dean would like the important
research
faculty do to not be hidden.
The Dean’s Office is working on
yield efforts. The University admits a large number of undergraduate
students,
but the yield is not as high as we would like to have, especially in the
natural sciences. The
students who
choose other schools over Fairfield have expressed one reason for this is
that
we don’t offer undergraduate research opportunities.
This isn’t really true. But, as there is no
place on the College of Arts and Sciences website that talks about
research
opportunities with Faculty one can understand. Therefore, we are working
to
solve this by making such efforts more visible.
The College of Arts and Sciences needs also to increase the
support for undergraduate research. We
need
to extend faculty mentoring undergraduate research beyond the sciences
into to the arts, social sciences and the humanities.
In order to accomplish this, the College will
need more money, more resources, and more space.
Many Faculty in the College are already
mentoring undergraduates in research projects.
The College of Arts and Sciences is working with marketing to
develop a series of videos to highlight student research opportunities.
Potential students check videos posted
on-line on college websites. The
College
of Arts and Sciences wants to make sure that potential students are seeing
the
best version of what is happening in the College of Arts and Sciences.
The Dean wants to send video film crews to
tape live action shots of students working with faculty.
In order to potentially increase the admitted student yield,
the Dean will be speaking at several admitted student events on campus.
The College of Arts and Sciences wants to ensure that
offices, spaces, and laboratories will be refurbished in the next phase of
renovations that will be happening on campus.
There is also conversation of having a new academic space on
campus.
The Dean has been meeting with groups of students.
The CAS students have a sense that the
student support areas such as the Office of Career, Leadership and
Professional
Development and the Career Fairs that are held on campus are meant for
students
in the professional schools. The
Dean’s
office is working on a series of things to enhance and customize the
career
events for CAS students. The
perception
is that the Career fair is not for students from the College of Arts and
Sciences. This is a false
perception. The
College did not develop the skill sets needed for students to take
advantage of
the career fair. There will
be
customized resume and Linked-In workshops available for students in the
College. We need to remember
that
accounting firms have Communications Departments and hire Communications
majors. The
Assistant Deans in the
College of Arts and Sciences will support this important work.
Many students complete internships in the College of Arts and
Sciences. Each Department
handles
internships in a different way. We
need
to determine how the Office of Career, Leadership and Professional
Development
will deal with the logistics of the internships and how Faculty can deal
with
the academic side of the internships.
We
also need to work with the Office of Career, Leadership and Professional
Development to develop a database of the mentors and opportunities are
available.
Students need to connect with alumni and learn about their
career paths. The College of
Arts and
Sciences will work with the Alumni Office to make connections with alumni
and
our current students. Departments
should
develop relationships with former students and invite them to return to
campus
to talk to current students.
6.
Budget
update from the Dean
The Dean announced that there will be changes going forward
with respect to budgets. The
quality of
education isn’t fully explained in the current budget process, rather, it
is
just a dollar amount.
The Dean is
having
conversations with the Provost regarding the budget for the College of
Arts and
Sciences. The College
submitted a larger
budget request for the 2018-2019 academic year, larger relative to the one
that
was submitted for the 2017-2018 academic year. We
made clear justifications and the budget
has a direct impact on recruiting students and improving quality.
These are investments, not expenses.
This year, there was a template request for new faculty
lines in the College of Arts and Sciences.
The Department Chairs had a conversation collectively.
The Dean then had a conversation with the
Provost and he made a case for his request for new lines.
There are lots of requests but only a finite
amount of money, but he is hopeful.
7.
Assessment
update
from the Dean
The Dean has been thinking a lot about assessment.
His
sense is that The College of Arts and Sciences did assessment only for the
NEASC Accreditation review. We
are
missing the opportunity to have meaningful assessment within the
disciplines. Some
departments have done complete revisions.
We need a way to capture these revisions that ensure that we are providing
instruction and education of the highest quality.
We will use the assessment results to request
resources and to improve and to deliver the education that is related to
our
mission.
We need to simplify assessment to make it manageable.
The Dean took a template used by a number of institutions
and customized it for our
institution. It is needed. When NEASC came, the reviewers asked for
assessment
data from the College the only way to see it was by reading the annual
reports
from the department. We
need to have better system to capture
assessment data. One way we
will use
assessment data is to define quality applications in each discipline.
Without having the
assessment data, we are
missing out on a way to sell the quality of our academic programs. We will
present this data to parents, and the finance office and potential donors.
The enrollments in the College
of
Arts and Sciences are in good shape.
We
are the largest enrolled unit in the University.
The Dean is confident that we will get good
proposals through the curricular innovation grant program.
The Dean then asked if anyone
had
questions.
Prof. Boquet stated that the College of Arts and Sciences
Faculty voted a year ago to establish the four schools.
Could you give us an update how the schools
are working, and whether there are things that will come to the faculty
with
regards to governance?
The Dean responded that he has been meeting with the
Directors of the four schools. He
finds it
useful to work with the schools.
The
schools are in the College governance document, but they don’t have power
to do
anything. What is the best
use of the four
schools? The Directors
gather ideas,
funding requests, space issues, facilities issues and work with the Chairs
in
their area. The directors
also organize
alumni events and conferences. Isn’t
the
college too small to have four schools? Do
the
faculty see that? Do the
departments
see that? Should we have
schools? Should we vote to
dissolve the schools? We have
to wait and see the how the schools
evolve as it is too soon to make decisions.
Prof. Epstein asked if we should think about preparing a
career fair that is meant for the students from the College of Arts and
Sciences and stressed graduate school opportunities.
The Dean
mentioned that the career fair includes Graduate Programs.
Some of the students the Dean spoke with thought
that the Career Fair was meant for students from the Dolan School of
Business. Some students do
not know
where the Office of Career, Leadership and Professional Development was
located. The Career Center
reports that
students go to the Career center too late and do not take advantage of the
Center
soon enough. The
College of Arts and Sciences needs to get
involved to help our students with Career planning in a more systematic
way.
Prof. Carolan
asked the Dean about President Nemec’s impression of the College of Arts
and
Sciences.
The Dean
responded that the President is optimistic about the College. He is
impressed
by the work that we do with students. And, he understands the issues we
face.
He has encouraged to think about ways to improve our programs, present our
successes and explore facilities need.
The Dean encouraged faculty to continue inviting the President to
events.
Associate Dean Sauer reminded everyone that the Curricular
Innovation Grants are due on February 21st.
He also reminded everyone that the “Art of
the Gesù:
Bernini and his Age Exhibit opened yesterday
at the Fairfield University Art Museum.
8.
Adjournment
Motion to adjourn (Carolan/Primavera).
4:42 pm.
Respectfully Submitted,
John R. Miecznikowski
Secretary of the College of Arts and Sciences