Fall 2021 Recap from Dean Button

Fall 2021 Recap from Dean Button

Due to the Tornado Warning at the start of the fall faculty meeting on December 15, 2021, the dean’s regular semester updates were not provided. The following items constitute the updates that had been prepared for the fall faculty meeting.

Let me begin by expressing my profound gratitude for your continued resilience, hard work, and dedication to our mission in the college. The contributions of our faculty and staff continue to be extraordinary and inspiring.

We continue to deliver the most courses and generate the most student credit hours at UNL, mentor undergraduate and graduate students to academic and career success, submit and receive the most external grant dollars of any college at UNL, and achieve at the highest levels of university, national, and international recognition for our research and creative activities. And we continue to do all of this amid the persistence of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We offered 1,383 courses fall 2021 (91% in person) and had 220 new CAS graduates celebrate commencement with us last month. In addition, 81 graduate students celebrated graduation in December: 66 master’s degree students and 15 PhDs.

The faculty have submitted 138 grant proposals to date totaling $64.1M, with $26.3M awarded so far. Additionally, CAS faculty and staff are leaders across campus on many important fronts, from institutional anti-racism, to preventing sexual assault and harassment, to designing and implementing a new budget model for UNL.

Spring 2022 Campus Operations Planning

We have sent out guidance related to the process for requesting that face coverings be required in instructional spaceswhether for certain types of courses (such as labs) or for the well-defined need of an individual or student (Request To Require Face Covering Form - the deadline for individual instructors to submit this form to the college is January 10). This guidance is very similar to what we have followed for the fall semester. Please contact the Dean’s Office directly if you have any questions or concerns about this process.

CAS Strategic Plan Implementation

Experiential Learning
I want to highlight that a key priority of both the university and the college’s strategic plan is to ensure that by 2025, every student has had some experiential learning prior to graduationwhether in the context of an existing course, through a research experience, field work, an internship, or study abroad. We know the transformative value of these experiences and their importance in employer hiring decisions. We also know that these experiences are often not available to all students on an equitable basis.

We don’t want resources to deter students from pursuing these experiences and we know we will need increased staffing to help support and facilitate this initiative in the college. Supporting and funding the experiential learning initiative is a key target of our comprehensive campaign and I am pleased to report that we will soon be announcing the details of a $1 million lead gift to support experiential learning in the collegewith funding that will start spring semester (2022).

This funding comes at a critical time for the college. As we begin to emerge out of COVID-related budget reductions at the end of FY 2023, we will need to be able to address faculty hiring needs throughout the college. We have covered Year 2 of the 3-year budget cuts due to COVID; next year we face another $1.4M in cuts. VSIP retirement lines were a core part of our response to these cuts (nearly $6 million in total), which has impacted many operations in the college, especially faculty hiring.

The college’s Alumni Advisory Board has also contributed the funds to enable the college to join Husker Connectmaking it possible for our students to expand their professional networks with other UNL alums across the country at no charge to them. With the support of generous friends of the college and in combination with our success in student enrollmentwe are making great and rapid strides in meeting our vision of promoting access to a comprehensive liberal arts education with a focus on experiential learning. In this context, I am pleased to note that the college has already achieved a 15% increase in first time freshman since 2019—with 704 first time freshman in the college this fall. We will be looking to sustain and grow that number in the years aheadand with several exciting new academic programs in development, I am confident that we will do so.

CAS UP
By now all units in the college have submitted their plans as part of CAS UP: Challenge for Achieving Success in Undergraduate Programs. Our central focus with these plans is to identify appropriate unit-specific strategies for improving student retention and graduate rates and reducing equity gaps in the college for URM, First Generation, and Pell eligible students.

DEI and CAS Cares
These important efforts are also a core part of our multi-pronged emphasis on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Strategies that are already being implemented here include new additional funding for CAS Cares that will enable us to create a permanent endowed fund in the college to help address the financial needs of undergraduate and graduate students at risk of leaving the university. This semester we have allocated over $49,000 assisting 18 UGS and 31 graduate students. With recent commitments in the last several weeks totaling $100,000, CAS Cares will now be a perpetual endowed fund in the college. This matters because our first-year retention rates dropped for the Fall 2020 cohortas they did in every college at UNL (overall drop of 5.3%). At the same time, the college had a historical high in our six-year graduation rate in fall 2021 from 55.5% to 65%.

We are committed to being a leader in Inclusive Excellence and Diversity and we strongly support the UNL Commitment to Action Towards its Journey of Anti-Racism. This includes our ongoing support for the Institute for Ethnic Studies and the development of a new program in Asian-American studies in the college. We have also dedicated college resources to support and encourage research dedicated to anti-racism and racial equity in our new CAS Strategic Priorities grants. Additionally, we have updated a variety of search-related processes with a particular focus on diversity, which includes the development of an expanded template for unit Diversity Recruitment Plans and added additional levels of guidance and review by the Dean’s Office to support our efforts to ensure diverse faculty and staff candidate pools. We are actively involved in the iChange initiative of the APLU to increase the recruitment and retention of diverse faculty and students in STEM. This initiative is already improving our practices in the college within and beyond our STEM disciplines.

Compensation
A significant part of recruiting and retaining outstanding faculty is providing nationally competitive compensation. As you will recall, the collegein partnership with the EVCwas able to address the compensation and work conditions of lecturers last year.

This summer, in close coordination with our chairs and directors, we implemented the first phase of the National Faculty Salary Competitiveness Initiative for tenured and tenure track faculty. Our salary analyses and recommendations considered:

  • merit and evidence of achieved excellence over time
  • peer salary averages (both internal and regional peers)
  • salary distributions across ranks within the academic unit

Based upon President Carter’s plan, we anticipate a second round of salary reviews will take place this spring/summer for implementation in AY 2022-23. We look forward to addressing some continuing competitive gaps in the college and proactively addressing compensation for our high performing faculty.

Additionally, with multi-year, one-time funding support from the EVC Office, we will undertake a similar compensation review process for other regular faculty ranks, including professors of practice, in January 2022. Once again, consideration will be given to expertise, credentials, level of experience, and achieved performance over time. Approved salary recommendations will be implemented August 15, 2022 for academic year contracts. Related to this, we have begun discussions with the college’s Executive Committee related to an update of Professor of Practice Guidelines and will be bringing relevant groups of faculty together this spring to seek input and feedback about these guidelines. We anticipate initiating a similar process with research faculty this spring or summer.

The college is also in the process of completing the first stages of a Staff Compensation Equity Review to address staff compensation by Job Title Code and using benchmarks from UNL, the system, or statewide benchmarks for specific job titles. We anticipate that the first phase of approved staff equity adjustments will be implemented during this fiscal year. In combination with our recent review and approval of AWS/FLEX plans for staff, we think these steps are the right thing to do to retain the talented and hardworking staff who are critical to all aspects of our mission.

Budget
Finally, we are planning for transition to the Incentive Based Budget Model and we are coordinating several budget-training sessions for chairs and directors and for business staff. The new model will go live on July 1, 2022, and we will have an opportunity to justify next year’s budget to the EVC in the spring.

Thank you for all that you are doing to advance the critical educational, research, and engagement mission of the College of Arts and Sciences. The college is poised for ongoing success in the months and years ahead due to the talent, dedication, and resilience of our faculty and staff.