Academic Organization, Structure and Rewards

The author calls for CU Boulder to pay graduate students a living wage for the Boulder market so as to attract and retain talented and diverse students.

The authors propose that the campus adopt a change model patterned on the Department Action Team (DAT) structure – a group consisting of four to eight faculty members, staff and and/or students designed to create sustainable change about broad scale issues.

The author proposes the campus significantly change the way departments reward faculty, with a clear emphasis on a department’s undergraduate educational effectiveness.

The author follows up his first similarly-themed submission with an outline of what concrete steps the university should take to create a clearer picture of the university’s fundamental mission and identity – rooted in a liberal arts education.

The author calls for the creation of a focused sense of identity and purpose, rooted in the Humanities and based on asking core questions about the liberal arts and their inspirational and functional roles at the University.

The author suggests a form and function for an honors college that would create a “new and exciting unit at the university that would provide our best undergraduates with an immersive academic experience,” creating a “showpiece unit” at CU Boulder.

The author proposes five infrastructure goals for Arts & Sciences that facilitate “a clear and crisp vision for the future and reiterate the importance of letting the mission of the colleges drive how infrastructure funds are invested.

The author envisions a way for to create a strategic plan for Mathematics that unites research in and teaching of mathematics in one Department of Mathematics while creating a Department of Statistics and Computational Sciences, among other recommendations.

The authors suggest that students should be empowered to take greater ownership for their educational experience and that this empowerment could lie in giving them more time to explore their passions, building a community more supportive of that exploration, and structures and policies that support it.

The authors argue for renewed emphasis on the service performed by instructors and for improving the contractual structures and work conditions of instructors to facilitate that service, all for the purpose of increasing student success.