The below message was sent to faculty on Wednesday, August 21, 2024.
Dear Faculty Colleagues,
A note to greet you personally and thank you for the warm welcome so far. I intend to be a strong partner to you as faculty members and want to share a few thoughts as we get started this fall.
I came to higher education administration first as a faculty member and then as the Chair of the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program (now Department) at Brandeis University. I served in various other roles, most notably as the chair of the Faculty Governance Task Force. Our group of eleven faculty spent more than two years thinking deeply about shared governance, making a set of proposals (detailed in brief here) to our faculty colleagues, and ultimately working with the full faculty to pass all but one of them. The guiding principle, to which I remain deeply committed, was that “faculty be engaged in key decisions [for the university] while ensuring that faculty time devoted to governance is well spent and effective.”
Since my arrival, it has been a pleasure to learn about faculty, student, staff, Board, and institutional governance at Bryn Mawr College. As I continue to learn into the fall, I will be:
- Meeting monthly for an hour with Faculty Chair Lisa Traynor.
- Continuing the practice of joining the Faculty Advisory Council for the last 30 minutes of their regular meetings with the Provost (or more if invited).
- Continuing to host regular lunches with faculty to talk more informally. Please sign up here if you haven’t already. I will also host an off-campus event for faculty and their families each semester, with details to come.
- Asking each Department and Program to invite me to a Department/Program meeting so I can learn about your hopes, plans, and concerns.
- Inviting you to a faculty-only conversation later in the fall semester in which I will share some of what I am learning and ask for your thoughts about priorities.
With a preference toward working through established rather than ad-hoc governance structures out of respect for the principles on which they are based, I will also be meeting monthly with the Student Governance Association (SGA) and regularly with the Staff Association.
I am grateful for you and your work and look forward to our future collaborations. I hope to see you at the “Back to School” Town Hall on August 26th at 4:00 p.m. in the Great Hall, where we will talk together as faculty, staff, and senior leaders about our preparations for the fall semester before the students formally arrive later next week.
With thanks,
Wendy
P.S. Some of you have asked why faculty do not have magnetic nametags like those that staff wear to events. Any faculty member who would like such a name tag (that is completely optional!) should make their request here by September 30th for one free nametag courtesy of the President’s Office. Communications is working on an updated design, and your nametag will be delivered to your faculty mailbox within 4-6 weeks of your order.
**
President
Professor of Sociology
Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr, PA
(Pronouns: she/her - why?)
