At the final general assembly meeting of the semester, the Boulder Faculty Assembly engaged with campus leadership on issues related to final exams and the preparation for fall semester. It also approved a resolution that criticizes the University of Colorado Board of Regents on its handling of an open records lawsuit regarding CU’s presidential search last year.
BFA heard updates from CU Boulder Provost Russ Moore, Interim Chief Operating Officer Patrick O’Rourke, Associate Vice Chancellor for Integrity, Safety and Compliance Dan Jones, Executive Vice Provost for Academic Resource Management Ann Schmiesing and Senior Associate Vice Chancellor for Strategic Communications Jon Leslie. The latter three are leading the committee heading up the campus’sĚýtransition planning for AY 2020-21.ĚýĚý
Moore and O’Rourke said those plans are constantly evolving and, at present, are focused on finding ways to safely “conduct as many activities as we can on campus.”
“Our students are hungering for a campus experience,” Moore said.
Moore said the fall planning efforts are being guided first by “the health and safety of faculty, staff and students, then operating in the most robust way to provide the academic experiences everybody needs, and thirdly providing a high-quality experience for faculty, staff and students.”Ěý
O’Rourke said the fall transition group would give him, Moore and CU Boulder Chancellor Philip DiStefano recommendations for transition in the coming two weeks.Ěý
“It’s vital to maintain the physical health of the university community, and we’re not in a position to ask people to do anything unsafe to do that. It’s important to have options so that we can enroll a class and keep the university operational,” O’Rourke said.Ěý
Moore, in response to concerns raised regarding faculty representation in the planning effort, assured the group that faculty were providing input to the process and expertise to the campus in areas including health and safety issues, and said that involvement would continue through the BFA “along with every school and college and their shared governance groups.”Ěý
Other highlightsĚý
- Leslie said the open rates forĚýCU Boulder TodayĚýand COVID-19 planning updates were occasionally hitting 70 percent—a rise of about 20 percent over normal open rates. He noted the campus’sĚýĚýis among the top three sites now being visited and that its idea box had generated more than 300 submissions in its first week.Ěý
- Schmiesing reviewed how the transition team was interfacing with deans, who are gathering input on ideas submitted by faculty and others, and reviewed with the group the complexities the campus is working through, including how to achieve safe social distancing both inside the classroom and elsewhere on campus. Jones said he was focusing on a variety of health and safety issues, including having a fallback to remote learning in case there is an outbreak on campus, developing a plan to gradually transition to research operations starting with a small group of researchers returning to work and exploring testing the community for the virus.
Other BFA businessĚý
- The assembly passed a resolution expressing condemnation of the recent decision of the CU Board of Regents to appeal a court ruling that held that it violated state law in how it revealed finalists in its 2019 presidential search. BFA member Alastair Norcross of Philosophy, citing the resolution, said the board’s action violated “principles of openness and transparency and is an egregious waste of resources.”Ěý
- The assembly discussed and then referred back to the BFA membership a resolution calling for the CU Boulder administration to adopt a set of principles and policies to guide the campus’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic next fall. The membership will circulate the resolution with CU Boulder faculty colleagues for input before the BFA executive committee’s review on Monday, with a vote on the resolution by membership scheduled by as early as Tuesday.Ěý
- OIT’s Director of Academic Technology Applications and Design Aisha Jackson briefed the assembly on efforts to provide Proctorio to the campus as an alternative to the recently announced Examity, the onlineĚýexam proctoring software, that earlier this week suffered an outage and support issues. “That is unacceptable and not up to our standards,” Jackson said. “We’re licensing with Proctorio for faculty who do not trust Examity; it has been used by the Leeds School for many years and in computer science.” Jackson also said the IT Service Center is extending its hours this weekend from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. “to ensure our students will have access to technical support” as final exams begin. The help is available at oithelp@colorado.edu or 303-735-4357. Jackson said OIT is working on an integration of Proctorio with Canvas that would be available as soon as Friday.
- The assembly approved the creation of a new standing committee—arising from an existing three-year ad hoc committee—on climate science and education.
