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Guest Speaker Presentation —

Nicole Hodges Persley

1. Office of DEIB is moving out of period of unstable leadership, along with many other areas of campus. Many of the DEIB efforts on campus have been regarding programming and outward-facing, rather than transparent and inward-facing. We are now seeing more of an institutional commitment to less performance engagements with DEIB and more holistic engagements; we are naming and identifying historic inequities and working on policy to fix them. Nicole hopes to use her platform to influence, advise, and counsel what actions are required to properly support campus constituents. We need to utilize the scholarship of peers in these fields.
2. What is DEIB? Provided definition from the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education. We’ve historically seen a conflation of DEIB with race-based engagement without intersectionality. We’re seeing a move towards intersectionality.
3. Office overview
   1. Very small office: Vice Provost, Assistant Vice Provost (also serves staff), 2 program coordinators, communications specialist.
   2. Equity advisors are onsite specialists working within units with research/activist capacity or deep commitments as allies. Many units are charged but not compensated to do this work, so we needed to rethink that. This is a pilot program currently, with the hope to fully roll out the effort in Fall 2023. Equity advisors would be appointed to these roles and receive training, support, and compensation from the Office of DEIB.
   3. Office also oversees other offices and roles to make sure that actions are efficient and guided.
   4. Office provides institutional and structural support, faculty, staff, and student support, and research and programming support. Created the Rapport program to support recruitment and retention for all campus constituents. An effort is also being made to take advantage of units that are already undergoing DEIB efforts.
4. RISE Strategic Priorities framework
   1. Way for us to question what excellence looks like for us as a campus. Designed to work with Jayhawks Rising.
   2. Provides framework for Office of DEIB to assist units with: recruitment and retention; community engagement and impact; education, research, and scholarship; and campus climate.
5. DEIB RISE toolbox
   1. Office of DEIB partnered with Center for Service Learning to develop set of tools for working on DEIB efforts.
   2. Provides units with resources and opportunity to share successful ideas between units. The hope is to make it easier and more feasible for all units and campus constituents to constantly engage with DEIB efforts.
6. Questions
   1. Concern that faculty of color are not represented amongst recipients of KU awards, including racial equity research awards. Feedback for unsuccessful applications is often biased, such as questioning the relevancy of non-white work or being overly critical of writing that is in a person’s second or third language.
      1. Need to make sure that faculty of color and other minorities are applying for these awards and opportunities. Office of Research is committed to prioritizing these equity issues. These specifics are a crucial observation (example of microaggression) and great feedback.
   2. DEIB offices have recently becomes targets of state legislation. Has KU’s office been targeted?
      1. Yes, there have been rumblings, even if we just look at the state legislature’s schedule. We need to be prepared, on both an individual and an institutional level.
   3. Neither Faculty Senate nor University Senate have Diversity & Inclusion committees. How might equity advisors support this?
      1. We would welcome this opportunity. The dream goal is to incorporate an equity advisor into the leadership of every department. Governance can appoint these roles and then Office of DEIB will work with them.
   4. Faculty and staff identity affinity councils are a little inaccessible currently, as people need to find them rather than them finding people. How can we fix this and rework them to better create community for individuals as soon as they start at KU?
      1. Unfortunately, by law we cannot reach out to faculty directly, but we are working on making the councils more accessible to campus in general.
      2. We are also working on making some of these elements more immediately accessible on the website. Working with HR to make a welcome packet for new employees.

Michelle Carney

1. Jayhawk Global is an education innovation center, promoting learning across a person’s lifespan. In addition to for credit programming, it contains several other training and certification units, including KS Law Enforcement Training Center, OSHA lifelong learning, and more. Some of it is online but other parts are in-person.
2. Some universities’ online learning programs are very separate from the traditional part of the university. Jayhawk Global is intended to be a more integrated part of KU. It is a support unit for academic units to get their programming set up online.
   1. Utilize market data to determine which degree programs are most suitable for the online format and most marketable for online/distance learners.
   2. Crucial for this to be a partnership between Jayhawk Global and academic units.
   3. Also provide instructional design support and financial support for creating the online programs.
3. “Quality Matters” is a tool that instructional designers utilize to make sure the online courses are up to the same caliber as other KU courses.
4. Have Guiding Principles to instruct how to go about expanding programming.
5. Programs that were within the College Online are currently still online, but other for credit programming will launch this summer. Social welfare, marketing, and engineering programs will be some of the first launches between summer and fall 2023.
6. Questions
   1. How many students do the degree-granting programs currently serve? What is the future projection? What is the potentiality of evening and weekend programming for also expanding accessibility? Will the Jayhawk Global experience be like this?
      1. The focus for the initial phase is professional and graduate degrees, so we do not have robust numbers for undergraduate programming. Some traditional programs currently have evening/weekend options, but Jayhawk Global will be focused on providing online-only offerings.
   2. If all online courses offered by a particular program are asynchronous, what is the quality of those courses? Personal experience with teaching online course causes concern for asynchronous learning.
      1. Many programs have a synchronous aspect to promote that sense of community, but we also have a great instructional design team whose expertise is making all kinds of online learning engaging and high quality.
   3. There has been concern during the development of Jayhawk Global that these online programs would supplant campus programming and campus instructors. It sounds like this is not the case, but can you clarify this?
      1. The goal of Jayhawk Global is meet the learner where they are, both lifespan-wise and logistics-wise. Had to build a small infrastructure to make sure all the existing resources and units would work together. This is all more about expanding and growing rather than contraction.
   4. How is the partnership initiated?
      1. Like any other program change, it must go through academic units with department chairs and school deans.

Student Senate Report

1. Required campus fee package for FY2024 was passed by Student Assembly. Waiting for final approvals.
2. Line and block funding processes will be continuing this week and voted on at the next meeting.
3. State Higher Ed day was successful. Connected with about 80 legislators.
4. Student Senate delegation will go to Washington D.C. next week to advocate for mental health resources.
5. Started hiring process for the vacant Chief of Staff position.
6. Allocated $19,628.19 from unallocated account to student organizations.
7. Question: Is Student Senate no longer funding recycling?
   1. We are hoping that we can share that financial burden with other entities, as Student Senate was entirely funding recycling.

Staff Senate Report

1. Staff Senate nominations are ongoing.
2. Working on developing a standing committee for survey responses. Meeting next week to discuss membership and structure. We have the support of the Provost.

Faculty Senate Report

1. Faculty Senate nominations are ongoing.
2. Working on COACHE process. We had a public forum with the Provost last week and public listening sessions are ongoing. We are gathering feedback and recommendations to present to the Provost.
3. Participating in the dean of Libraries search. Finished up candidate lunches today.
4. Working with groups looking at KBOR’s changes to the Gen Ed policy and how it maps with the KU Core. There will be some changes, but not many. We will be having an open forum about this.
5. The Provost will attend the next Faculty Senate meeting.

University Senate Report

1. We have had good conversations during the COACHE sessions. We have talked with around 100 faculty.
2. Faculty Senate will be voting on the Interim Leaders policy. We have the support of both the Provost and the Chancellor.
3. We will move discussion on the Academic Forgiveness policy to the next meeting.
4. The Provost will attend the next University Senate meeting.
5. As part of the KU Core alignment with statewide Gen Ed, we will be moving Goal 6 out of Core and into the USRR definition of the bachelor’s degree. University Senate will look at that at the next meeting.
6. The Shared Governance visioning event was successful. It was small but we had great conversations. We will draft the vision statement and then invite feedback, which will also provide accessible engagement. We will now work on the next charge of defining roles and responsibilities.
7. We have created an ad hoc group to re-evaluate University Senate representation to make it more equitable amongst the different groups, while maintaining faculty control over academic policies. This will also hopefully help with our issues maintaining quorum at meetings.