Open discussion area for faculty meeting February 8, 2017

Please enter any comments, ideas, discussion, or feedback relevant to the February 8th faculty meeting below.

Cards left at the meeting:

In the past few faculty meetings we have spent a lot of time on early items on the agenda, which seem relatively insignificant (e.g. printers), which has cut into our discussion of the gen ed revision. This has frustrated me. I support doing anything possible to prioritize and centralize discussion of the gen ed revision. One possibility: place this item at the beginning instead of the end of future agendas.

 

Can we start with the most important topics? When we push them to the end, everyone who had daycare pickup gets excluded. The 5:15 (or 5:20 or 5:25) end time isn’t very family friendly.

 

When the podium is not going to be used, could you move it so those of us sitting behind it can read the screen? 🙂

 

It occurs to me that Quaker process is difficult to use in ranking candidates for anything. Also, rating and ranking multiple candidates has problems. See Arrow’s Theorem.

 

Any reason why people not standing up when speaking?

 

2 Comments

  1. I offer this note more as self-reflection than as commentary on LAGER’s work or our work as a corporate faculty.

    The more we talk about this curriculum revision, the less excited I am about it and the less I know how to contribute productively to the conversation (without repeating myself). I find myself becoming indifferent, which concerns me.

    One reason for this, I think, is that I am most excited about the content of our curriculum, and we have mostly been discussing its structure. There may be good reasons for doing it this way, but for me it is hard to talk about structure without talking about content too. I am passionate about the content of our curriculum and what I hope we are doing at Guilford: preparing students to be critical thinkers, responsible citizens (with citizenship broadly conceived), ethical members of society, and agents of good in the world. For me “agents of good” especially means agents of social and environmental justice, but this concept could have many other meanings as well.

    I would be excited about trying to come to consensus on what we are trying to do at Guilford (going beyond our mission statement) and then discussing how the curriculum can help us accomplish those goals—what students would need to do to reach those goals.

    I wonder if anyone else is having similar feelings.

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