Dear CLAS Staff and Faculty:
Thanks very much to all who participated in Monday’s Town Hall, either during the Zoom session itself or by submitting questions or comments ahead of time via the anonymous link.
Video: https://youtu.be/CJX53uS-cTY
You posed essential questions and issues to be discussed. These questions help me learn more about what is on your minds as we approach the Fall 2020 reopening of our college. I am hopeful that we can continue and enhance this dialogue. I regret not taking the opportunity to fully acknowledge and begin to address the structural racism and gender inequities that so many of us are struggling with and against, including here in our own college. These are important topics that we continually need to address, and I look forward to further opportunities for community-wide collaboration in doing so.
Approximately 150 questions and comments were submitted; many were very similar in content. Our Town Hall moderator, Nic Arp, selected a represented subset of questions, some of which were very challenging to answer. The result was 32 PowerPoint slides with one to four questions per slide. The questions and comments were posted verbatim. I received the questions briefly just before the forum, having time to quickly read through the slide deck once.
The Town Hall session lasted 90 minutes and consisted of a brief introduction and overview of the state of things, followed by rapid-fire reading of the questions by Nic, and then me answering those questions. As you might imagine, answering 50+ questions in approximately 80 minutes without a physical audience to read is a difficulty task. Well, it was for me anyway.
There are a number of questions for which I wish I had done a better job answering. In some cases I interpreted the question differently than other listeners. In other cases, I simply flopped, and I apologize for offending any member of our community. I do make mistakes and I try to learn from them.
We are fortunate to have a talented Senior Leadership Team helping me lead CLAS. They have identified areas where I need to do better personally and where we, as a college, need to do better. I look forward to working with all of you to make our college stronger and more inclusive, even while we deal simultaneously with the COVID-19 Pandemic, national protests over racial and social injustices, the highest unemployment and greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression, and a lack of national leadership attempting to unite our country to address these challenges.
The video of the session is ready for viewing at https://uiowaclas.wixsite.com/fall2020blog.
That is also our primary updates page, so please check back there regularly. I understand that some people had trouble accessing the shortened link we provided on Monday; my apologies for that.
We plan to hold a couple more of these over the summer, on July 14 and August 12. Additionally, we will be sending weekly email updates to all CLAS staff and faculty on Friday afternoons, beginning June 12. These updates will include CLAS's interpretations of central UI guidance and implementation plans, and other relevant information.
Please reach out any time with questions or comments:
Emails sent to clas-strategic-communications@uiowa.edu are routed to the appropriate Senior Leadership Team member or other personnel with relevant expertise.
This page includes contact information for the Senior Leadership Team: https://clas.uiowa.edu/deans-office/clas-senior-leadership-team-contact-information
This page has contact information for the elected faculty representatives on the CLAS Executive Committee: https://apps.its.uiowa.edu/dispatch/archive/coronavirus--reopening--ec-contact-info-0YKB51v
Contact your departmental HR representative: https://clas.uiowa.edu/human-resources/contact-us
Contact your departmental accountant: https://clas.uiowa.edu/finance/finance-business-operations-staff
All the best,
Steve
Steve Goddard, Dean College of Liberal Arts and Sciences