Provost Communication, Wednesday, January 17, 2024

Good morning and happy Wednesday. I hope your Spring semester is off to a great start. I wanted to offer gratitude to all of those who participated in the 5th annual MLK Day of Service on Monday. While I was not able to participate in those activities locally, I am grateful to be on a service learning study abroad trip currently in San Miguel de Allende with 19 students, one alumni, a faculty member, and a staff member. Our students are doing meaningful service at CRISMA, a rehabilitation clinic in the state of Guanajuato. I’m so very proud of our students. A special shout out to Mateo Dean, faculty for the course, and Donyet King, serving as our logistics lead. 

Academic Affairs Welcome Back

Thank you all for your robust attendance at our Academic Affairs Welcome Back held last Friday, January 12, 2024. It was wonderful to see so much engagement. You can access a copy of the Academic Affairs Spring Welcome remarks here. This captioned recording is about 40 minutes long and reviews progress toward our three priorities- enhancing a sense of joy at work, health academic programming and enhancing access to health care locally, and the graduate studies strategic planning work. It also outlines information about budget, and enrollment and provides an introduction to the low-degree conferring program work we have ahead of us this spring. A special thanks to Cyril Oberlander and Enoch Hale for organizing the World Cafe that allowed us to collect feedback about the low-degree conferring programs at Cal Poly Humboldt and associated challenges, opportunities,  evaluation criteria, and metrics to consider. 

Thank you also to Stephanie Burkhalter, Bethany Gilden, Jim Graham, Frank Herrera, Su Karl, Michele Miyamoto, Fernando Paz, Kumi Watanabe-Schock, and Jeanne Wielgus for acting as facilitators during the World Cafe. Your facilitation allowed many voices to be heard in this important engagement. 

And finally, thank you to Taylor Sorrels, Patrick Malloy, Julie Stewart, Lauren Lynch, Deborah Ketelsen, and Michel Sargent for their setup and technical support.

The feedback gleaned from the World Cafe exercise will be available next week and included in a provost communication. If you were not able to attend the Welcome Back, there will be additional opportunities to provide feedback through January and into the first week of February so please be on the lookout for those opportunities. 

Lastly, attached to this email is also a copy of the Academic Master Plan (AMP) that was submitted to the Chancellor’s office in January. This AMP includes the current list of low-degree conferring programs for transparency.

Well Done: Blue Dot: A Range of Biodiversity: the Klamath Mountains Pt. 2

I wanted to shout out to Lucy Kerhoulas and Rosemary Sherriff for their work captured in the podcast entitled: Blue Dot: A Range of Biodiversity: The Klamath Mountains Pt. 2. You can view the podcast here. The podcast highlights the applicability of their research to climate change adaptation. Well done!

Have a wonderful rest of your week and I will see some of you when I return to campus at the end of the week. Thanks for the work that you do.

Jenn Capps

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Jenn Capps, PhD 

Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs 

Cal Poly Humboldt