Faculty Leadership Institute launches faculty lunch series

Building faculty community is an ongoing topic on this campus. Building such a community requires multiple approaches and dedication at many levels of the university, including time and effort by the faculty. 

Faculty offices, labs, conference rooms and lounges are spaces that generally reinforce silos rather than transcending them, as these are associated with individual faculty, units, or schools rather than the faculty as such. The result of this separation is that there exist few opportunities for interaction among faculty across the Boulder campus. The continuing expansion of the university to East Campus and potentially to South Campus adds further complications in terms of bringing faculty together.

As part of the effort to bridge these gaps and build greater faculty community, the Faculty Leadership Institute is launching a monthly lunch series open to all faculty on campus. The basis of the effort is the idea that a monthly lunch series around a combination of socializing and discussing topics of importance to faculty will begin to bring faculty together on a regular basis and begin to build the community that many feel is lacking on the campus.

Each lunch will have a format that includes socializing for the first half hour, topic discussion at individual tables for an hour on issues related to faculty concerns (optional—people are free to continue socializing) and a final half hour of free discussion and socializing. In this manner, the lunch series will serve both as an opportunity to interact with faculty from across campus as well as an opportunity to exchange views on topics of interest. The format is intentionally flexible to allow for the building of community as the first objective.

The inaugural lunch will be held from noon to 2 p.m. (come for all or part) on Jan. 26 in the Center for British and Irish Studies, Norlin Library, 5th floor. We hope you will join your LI colleagues for this inaugural Faculty SPACE (Shared Perspectives and Community Engagement) lunch. Lunch will feature tapas and sandwiches from A Spice of Life, along with lively conversations about issues of importance to faculty.

Lunch is limited to 150, so please RSVP and reserve your space.

The Faculty SPACE steering committee, which thanks Faculty SPACE participants for supporting the community building effort, includes Irene Blair, Paul Chinowsky, Ginger Ferguson, Mark Hoefer, Heather Lewandowski, Shelly Miller, Steve Vanderheiden, Gabby Wiersma, Phoebe Young.