
Faculty Administrative Leadership Program
The Faculty Administrative Leadership Program (FALP) provides professional development opportunities for Senate faculty who are interested in exploring campus administration and leadership. Participants gain hands-on experience as faculty administrators, so they better understand the many roles of faculty leaders and have an opportunity to assess their interest in pursuing further opportunities in academic administration.
This program is currently on hold. Please check back for updates on when/if the FALP program will be relaunched.
Summary
Participants will have the opportunity to be mentored by a principal officer over the course of an academic year, joining selected meetings, meeting regularly with the principal officer, and completing a project under that leader’s supervision.
Objective
The Faculty Administrative Leadership Program (FALP) provides professional development opportunities for Senate faculty who are interested in exploring campus administration and leadership. Participants gain hands-on experience as faculty administrators, so they better understand the many roles of faculty leaders and have an opportunity to assess their interest in pursuing further opportunities in academic administration. Participants will learn about administrative processes, explore the different dimensions that impact decision making, and gain new insights into the operations and policies of the university. While gaining valuable experience, participants will have the chance to serve their colleagues, our students, and the broader community, as well as to support the mentoring administrator through a meaningful project and by providing an additional perspective for the mentoring administrator in their work.
Details
A call will go out in winter quarter for participants for the following academic year. Principal officers in the central administration who volunteer to be mentors will provide a brief description of the intended project. Faculty may apply to one or more of the available positions, providing a ranking of their preferences. Each principal officer will independently review the applications for their position, and then all participating principal officers will confer and agree upon the project assignments for selected faculty. Each selected participant will receive one course release funded by the CP/EVC.
In consultation with colleagues, the mentors shall determine to which meetings their mentee will accompany them. The mentors are responsible for engaging with meeting hosts prior to inviting their mentee. During this year and beyond, participants are bound to the same ethical standards, including confidentiality, that guide all principal officers. The CP/EVC expects meeting hosts to support this program and the participants, but understands that ethical or legal considerations may prevent participants from attending all meetings. Participants are expected to maintain other regular faculty commitments, including teaching any remaining classes and attending their own department meetings and other service commitments.
It is expected that the participants will spend 8-10 hours per week on activities related to this program, including a weekly meeting with the mentor, attending meetings, and independent work on the project. It is also expected that participants will attend the Leadership Academy in winter quarter, unless they have previously completed it.
Eligible faculty are Senate members with tenure or security of employment.
2020-21 Academic Projects
FALP projects for the 2020-21 academic year have been cancelled to allow the project administrators to focus on business and academic continuity in the time of COVID-19.
1. Academic Affairs, Online Education – Digital Teaching and Learning at UCSC
Support for digital teaching and learning at UCSC is currently approached through a variety of efforts. Online Education creates online and hybrid courses; the Faculty Instructional Technology Center supports Canvas and other instructional tools; the Digital Scholarship Commons provides access and support for emerging technologies; the Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning promotes inclusive and engaged teaching (occasionally in digital formats); divisional IT liaisons support faculty directly with the use of technology; many faculty and graduate students experiment with digital teaching on their own; and so on. With this rich assemblage of support or effort spanning almost every major division on campus, Academic Affairs seeks a FALP fellow to explore digital teaching and learning at UCSC with the purpose of creating greater coherence for faculty, students and staff. The fellow will work closely with leadership in Academic Affairs and will be placed in Online Education, a unit within its division.
The fellow will be responsible for exploring and detailing the landscape of digital teaching and learning at UCSC and within the UC system. This research will involve interviews, communications and collaborations with unit leaders on campus and outreach to other UC campuses. Campus leaders include VCIT Williams, Librarian Cowell, faculty and staff stakeholders, as well as VPAA Lee, AVPTL Greene and Director Tassio. The fellow will also bring together the campus groups that support digital teaching and learning through regular meetings with the purpose of creating a consortium of units that is more agile in promoting and supporting instructors and students. The fellow’s work will culminate with a report, or a plan of coordination, to the campus administration.
2. Business Administrative Services – Applying Faculty Research to Campus Operations
Faculty choosing to work with the Vice Chancellor for Business and Administrative Services (VCBAS) will have an experience tailored to their interests. The BAS division is a diverse one that includes functions such as Human Resources, Financial Affairs, Housing, Construction, Facilities, Sustainability, Athletics, Recreation, Dining, Transportation, Emergency Management and Police. The following is a proposed area of focus, but can be adapted to take advantage of the skillset and interests of the selected faculty member.
Linking Faculty Research to Campus Operations. UC Santa Cruz is at the forefront of groundbreaking research that is aimed at tackling some of the world’s greatest challenges. The division of Business and Administrative Services (BAS) would like to work with a faculty member on a project to identify how to find linkages between campus operations and faculty research to advance the model of our campus as a living laboratory. This project would involve identifying areas where faculty research aligns with operational areas, resulting in the potential for faculty to partner with BAS to apply their research in solving campus challenges. Whether it is Economics faculty partnering with Financial Affairs, Engineering or Physical and Biological Science faculty partnering on new water treatment plants planned for campus, Sociology or Psychology faculty partnering on housing or employee engagement, the opportunities are many. This model could result in meaningful research projects for students in these departments and, where appropriate, might even result in grant opportunities.
3. Information Technology Services – Cross Divisional Scalable IT Support Model
The goal of the project is to work with ITS Leadership, the Office of Research, Planning and Budget, Academic Divisional Deans and the Academic Senate to come up with a proposal for a scalable cross divisional scalable IT support model. The model would differentiate between at least four types of support areas research, instruction, theater/performance/exhibits and basic technical support (i.e., basic computing). The proposal would contain a mechanism for scaling allocation of resources in each of those areas to support growth, a recommendation on appropriate funding models for each and a recommendation around the location of staff for each. We hope that the faculty administrative leader will be able to provide a faculty voice, help make connections/coordinate focus groups with other faculty members for feedback and help to draft the report.
2019-20 Academic Projects
1. Academic Affairs
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.
Fellow: Adrian Brasoveanu
Professor, Linguistics Department

Professor Brasoveanu is a formal semanticist and a computational psycholinguist. The two main questions driving his research are: (i) What is linguistic meaning? (ii) How does the human mind grasp it? He builds evidence-based, mathematically and computationally explicit theories of natural language meaning (product) and interpretation (process) that try to answer these two questions.
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.
Fellow: Heather Shearer
Professor, Writing Program

Professor Shearer’s areas of expertise include: technical communication, rhetoric and composition, curriculum development, and program assessment. Her areas of interest include: rhetoric of intentional communities, organizational communication, activity theory, composition studies, technical communication, and Peoples Temple.
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.
Fellow: Melissa L. Caldwell
Professor, Anthropology Department

Professor Caldwell’s research and teaching focus on the everyday lived experiences and politics of poverty, welfare, and charity, with particular emphasis on state socialist and postsocialist societies. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Poverty and Inequality, Poverty and Welfare, Social Justice, and International Development Aid.