Faculty Forum Day
On the Existence or Non-Existence of Faculty Forum Day
Colleagues:
As of today, the last day of 2008, there is NO Faculty Forum Day in Spring Semester 2009. This is because there is no duty day designated as “Faculty Forum Day” in the “new” Academic Calendar framework. The last Faculty Forum Day, which was a duty day, occurred in Spring Semester 2008.
Think of Faculty Forum Day, “as a duty day without classes”, as an extinct phenomenon. It has gone the way of the Raphus cucullatus.
The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) has had nothing to do with either setting or planning the calendar. CETL coordinates the activities and events planned by faculty, staff, and administration during the four “convocation” days at the beginning of Fall Semester and the four “workshop” days at the beginning of Spring Semester, and remains eager to assist you in planning, strategizing, and/or making arrangements for programs and events that would address your interests and needs as teachers, scholars, and creators within the academic calendar as set through the MnSCU-IFO Agreement.
I hope you will begin to think of CETL as a resource. The strategic planning process, accelerated under the leadership of President Potter, has resulted in new connections between and among departments, units, and colleges. Consequently, there are a number of needs, issues, and activities toward which CETL’s budget and creative power will be directed. The priorities for the use of CETL’s resources arise primarily from faculty in their striving for excellence within a broad understanding of teaching and learning as scholars and teachers in their disciplines, interdisciplinary work, and community service.
Faculty Forum Day had symbolic significance, for it put the institutional machinery on idle in order to collectively honor, and perhaps remember, the life of the mind as vital to a culture built around learning. Its disappearance also has symbolic significance. CETL welcomes your ideas about how we might preserve the value behind, if not the practice of a Faculty Forum Day, the calendar notwithstanding.
Further inquiries about the design and decisions around the new calendar and why it does not provide for a Faculty Forum Day in Spring Semester should be directed to the Provost and the FA President.
All the best.
Daniel Wildeson, Ph.D.
Director, Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning
Professor, Department of Communication Studies
Phone: 320.308.5282
