The below message was sent to faculty, staff, and students on November 4, 2024.
Dear Bryn Mawr Community,
Here are a few updates as we prepare for what is likely to be an emotional week. Please vote.
First, huge thanks to everyone who prepared for, participated in, attended, and celebrated last weekend at Owl’s Fest and the Inauguration. It was a joyous day for our whole community, and I have heard from people around the world sharing the love. It was a huge undertaking, especially for our staff, and I am grateful both personally and on behalf of the institution for everyone’s hard work. The Board of Trustees was also on campus just before the inauguration, and we will send a high-level report of their meeting to the whole community later this week. October was a full month, and there is more to come in November!
We hosted more than 70 people at the “Current Topics in Higher Education” session last month, which focused on campus finances. A detailed slide deck to help all of us understand how resources come in and go out is here. I have been working to understand the College’s annual budget process and to ensure that elected student, faculty, and staff representatives are fully included in related conversations alongside the senior staff. In that spirit, I have been working with Tijana Stefanovic to clarify the charter for this committee (which is an institutional committee). I welcome comments about the draft charter by email. I hope to have as many people as possible on campus understand how the budget works and the contexts in which we make decisions about it based on mission and strategy, as well as to gather feedback from students, faculty, and staff as we build the budget for each fiscal year. Please plan to attend the final session in the Current Topics Series on November 19th at 11 a.m. where we will focus on shared governance, which I view as the guidelines we agree to as we work together to make collaborative decisions. Register here.
I shared information in the inaugural address about my intention to accelerate the College’s work around sustainability and climate justice. We will hire a full-time staff member focused on sustainability to build the bandwidth needed to accelerate this work. We will share more about this at the December community coffee hour (alongside the Staff Association Holiday Fair) on December 5 at 9:30 a.m. and aim to post the position by the end of the calendar year. There will also be one or two listening sessions for the community in the coming weeks hosted by Sara Grossman, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies on the Johanna Alderfer Harris and William H. Harris Professorship in Environmental Studies, and Shannon Kearns in my office – details about those sessions to come. The College is committed to being carbon neutral by 2035 and has made important progress on this goal in many ways, including a large tree planting in western Pennsylvania. We have many more trees to plant, and the intent has always been to plant locally also, including in Philadelphia. If you know of places looking to plant trees, please share that information in this crowdsourcing form to help us with these next steps.
Work continues on two senior searches. The search committee for the Vice President for Finance & Administration (Chief Financial Officer/Chief Administrative Officer) is reviewing applications, and the search committee for the Chief Information Officer and Constance A. Jones Director of Libraries is collecting applications. In this process, we were advised that the current title for the Chief Financial Officer/Chief Administrative Officer is not in line with our peers, which could raise concerns for people looking for such positions. With support from the Board, we will be reviewing the current titles (not job descriptions) of all senior staff with an eye toward their peers as well as relevant DEIA issues connected to the use of the term chief.
In November, we will launch a student spaces project intended to renovate and make more available three to five spaces for student use by the time students return for Fall 2025. Students will co-lead these efforts, details about which will be shared soon. We also hope to pilot a testing center next semester where students with accommodations can take scheduled exams that meet their required accommodations. The Dean’s Office is currently reviewing student needs and gathering information about faculty needs for such a space. We also plan to conduct a full assessment of the student advising model at the end of this academic year, two years after a change was made. We continue to think through the feedback on the Time, Place, and Manner Policy and consider appropriate next steps, which I will have more to say about later this month.
Please do join us this Thursday at 9:30 a.m. for the November College Coffee focused on DEIA work happening in the Athletics department (“A Long Talk and Athletics”) and plan now to attend the town hall on December 10th at 4 p.m. where we will share the findings from the start, stop, continue survey completed this fall by faculty and staff. Additionally, Loretta Ross, Associate Professor of the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College, will come to campus on the evening of Monday, November 18th to speak about "Creating Connections by Calling Each Other In." I look forward to seeing you at these series of campus events for all members of our community.
Support is available all week as many community members exercise their right to vote. You can find program details here. If you have additional questions or concerns, you can reach out to Ellie Esmond, Director of Civic Engagement at eesmond@brynmawr.edu.
Thank you for continuing to be there for one another,
Wendy
**
President
Professor of Sociology
Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr, PA
(Pronouns: she/her - why?)
P.S. If you haven’t already, consider following my new Instagram account at @bmcpresident for fun campus updates.
