Faculty Administrative Leadership Program - 2019-20 Projects
The Academic Personnel Office, part of Academic Affairs, is looking to launch a pathways to retirement program to support senate faculty who are considering retirement in the next 1-5 years, modeled after the successful program of the same name at UCLA. The Faculty Administrative Leader would help develop and set up the program. The goal is to ease the transition to retirement for both the faculty member and the department, which would free up FTE lines for new hires, while potentially keeping the retiree engaged with the department and campus in a meaningful way. In future years, the program would be run by a faculty liaison, who would be a part-time rehired faculty retiree. We envision that this emeritus faculty liaison would be available for individual consultations, and could help with personalized MOUs with specific plans for research, teaching, and service both preceding and following the move to emeritus status.
2. Office of Research
The Office of Research (OR) Faculty Administrative Leader would focus on faculty and staff outreach and communication. They would help define and/or improve OR’s mechanisms and channels for communication between the Office of Research and the campus research enterprise. They could also participate in our continuous process improvement program, helping us identify and prioritize areas for improvement in our research support processes and procedures and tools. They would participate in our weekly OR leadership meetings and assist with our newsletter and department / division visits.
3. University Relations
University Relations is pleased to offer three project ideas to choose from. Each of these can be customized to the interests of a faculty member.
- Alumni-Academic Engagement Opportunities
The more alumni engage with the campus, the more likely they will be financial supporters. Many alumni especially enjoy interaction with faculty and students. In recent years, alumni have been invited to participate in classes as speakers, as student mentors and, in a few cases, as lecturers. We would like to work with a faculty partner to explore ways that we can expand alumni engagement with academics at UC Santa Cruz. How successful have these examples worked? Are there other models that should be tested? How might successful programs be scaled up? How would we engage more faculty to consider alumni engagement in the academic process?
- Turning TAWGs into Big Ideas
The University Relations team is currently working with faculty who submitted proposals from the Themed Academic Working Groups as part of the Strategic Academic Planning process. We are helping faculty convert their academic papers into compelling cases for philanthropic support in both writing and speaking. Faculty engaged in the process are getting practice meeting with donors to talk about their ideas. The challenge is that the faculty involved tend to represent their individual projects rather than the collective TAWG. We would like a faculty partner to help facilitate faculty TAWG groups in conversation that go beyond just the collective ideas and interests of the assembled faculty but become "Really Big Ideas." Transformative ideas have the potential to attract big gifts and become themes of the next comprehensive fundraising campaign. A faculty partner would also have the opportunity to have discussions with donors about the big ideas.
- Develop Faculty Story Concepts
Currently, the campus employs only three public information officers (writers) to develop story content that covers the activities of the academic enterprise encompassing five divisions and some 600 faculty members. With such limited resources, we believe there are many stories about faculty scholarship that are not being told. These stories about faculty form the basis for international media exposure for the individuals and the campus. They also serve to educate development staff about worthy projects to introduce in conversations with donors. We would like a faculty partner to help inventory and capture snapshots of faculty work (in a particular division or throughout campus) that can help bring to light the best story ideas that are not being told.
