January 13, 2011
Faculty Governance News, v. 5.4
January 13, 2011
From the UNC Office of Faculty Governance
200-204 Carr Building
UNC-CH Campus Box 9170
Contact: Anne M. Whisnant (anne_whisnant@unc.edu)
Faculty Council meets tomorrow (Friday, January 14); will discuss IT changes and challenges with CIO
The Faculty Council will meet tomorrow, January 14, from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. in the Hitchcock Multipurpose Room of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center. All faculty members are invited to attend.
The meeting will include updates from the chancellor and provost and the annual report of the campuswide Committee on Appointments, Promotions, and Tenure. A full hour will be devoted to a conversation between faculty and Mr. Larry Conrad, Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and CIO, about recent IT-related changes and challenges affecting faculty. This discussion is being shaped partly by the questions Faculty Council members generated for Mr. Conrad at the December Faculty Council meeting. As a prelude to the discussion, Mr. Conrad has prepared some written responses to some of those questions, which may be found online here.
The full meeting agenda is available here.
February Faculty Council meeting is February 18th; agenda items should be submitted by February 7th
The February Faculty Council meeting is set for February 18, 2011. The Faculty Council Agenda Committee will meet Monday, February 7 to plan the meeting. If you have issues you would like brought to the Council’s attention, please contact Anne Whisnant in the Office of Faculty Governance at anne_whisnant@unc.edu or 919-962-1671 in advance of the Agenda Committee meeting.
Faculty elections season opens soon; faculty interest survey forthcoming
With the dawning of the spring semester comes the time for nominations for candidates for the standing faculty committees and the Faculty Council. These bodies are the backbone of campuswide Faculty Governance here, and their duties are spelled out in the Faculty Code of University Government.
The nominations process begins with our annual survey asking faculty members to indicate their interest in serving on one of the committees or the Council. All members of the Voting Faculty will receive the survey by email in the next few weeks. Your responses to the survey will help to the faculty Nominating Committee (made up largely of current chairs of the standing committees), which will put together a slate of candidates for all offices in February. The faculty elections will take place (also via electronic survey) in April.
If you have questions about the faculty elections process or want to discuss what’s involved in serving on a committee or the Council, please contact either Secretary of the Faculty Joe Ferrell (jsferrel@email.unc.edu) or Anne Whisnant (anne_whisnant@unc.edu) in the Faculty Governance office or call 962-1671.
In the 2010 faculty elections, 833 of 3468 eligible faculty members voted, for a response rate of 24%. Although this level of participation has held steady in recent years, we hope to encourage even greater participation this year!
Nominations for 2012 honorary degrees due January 21st
The faculty Committee on Honorary Degrees and Special Awards invites nominations for people to be considered for award of an honorary degree at commencement in the spring of 2012. The deadline to submit a nomination is January 21, 2011. A maximum of five awards is authorized (six if the Commencement speaker is included).
Honorary degrees recognize people who have rendered outstanding service to humanity in the world arena, in our nation, in the American South, or in our state of North Carolina; people who have made outstanding contributions to knowledge in the world of scholarship; people whose talent and creativity in the world of the arts has enriched our lives; and people whose devotion to and support of our University merits our highest recognition.
UNC Habitat for Humanity “Build a Block” project invites faculty to join “blitz build” this weekend, January 14-16, 2011
UNC Habitat for Humanity’s “Build a Block” project will hold a “blitz build” this weekend to reflect Martin Luther King Jr.’s ideal of service. UNC students, faculty and staff will come together to build two Habitat homes from foundation to roof during the weekend. There is a suggested donation of $25 but the organizers would be happy to have members of the Carolina community come out and build homes for deserving UNC employee families. If you’d like to volunteer, you can sign up online at http://bit.ly/hKGuNm .
Library develops data management toolkit to help NSF grant applicants with new data management requirement
Beginning January 18, 2011, the National Science Foundation (NSF) will require all grant proposals to include a data management plan. Plans must conform to NSF data sharing policy and should describe what best practices or standards will be used to organize data and how data will be shared. The UNC Libraries’ Data Management Committee has created a Research Data Toolkit that explains the new requirements and provides guidance to UNC researchers on drafting a plan. More information about this toolkit may be found here, and the toolkit itself is available here.
Institute for Arts and Humanities hosts innovation conversation, January 27th : “A Strategy for UNC: What Makes Us Different from MIT and How to Make the Most of It”
On January 27, 2011 from 3:00 to 4:30 pm in the Hyde Hall Incubator, MIT Chancellor and UNC Trustee Phillip Clay will share his experiences at MIT to consider how UNC might approach innovation. The event will be followed by a reception. More information online at: http://iah.unc.edu/calendar/clay
Historical roundtable, January 24th: “Breaking Barriers – Making History: UNC Women in the Humanities and Social Sciences since the 1960s”
The UNC seminar and workshop series on “Gender, Politics and Culture in Europe and Beyond” will sponsor this roundtable to consider the history of women faculty and students in the humanities and social sciences at UNC since the 1960s. The event will take place January 24th from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. at the Institute for Arts and Humanities. Pre-registration is required. Full information is online at http://www.unc.edu/gpc/current.htm .
Other grant and award deadlines:
- 2011 Faculty Mentoring Awards, sponsored by the Carolina Women’s Leadership Council (deadline January 28th). Details at: http://news.unchealthcare.org/som-vital-signs/2011/jan13/facultymentoringawards
- 2011 APPLES Ueltschi Service-Learning Course Development Grants (deadline February 18, 2011). Grants for instructors to develop courses that successfully incorporate community-based service into the curriculum and promote the pedagogy of service-learning at UNC. Faculty members, adjunct faculty members, and graduate instructors teaching undergraduate courses in Academic and Health Affairs are eligible and encouraged to apply. Details at http://provost.unc.edu/announcements/2011-ueltschi-grants.html .
Faculty coffee hours at the Faculty Commons at the Campus Y: 9:00-11:00 a.m. daily!
The Office of Faculty Governance reminds you of the free coffee we make available each weekday for faculty and their guests at the Anne Queen Faculty Commons at the Campus Y. The coffee hours run from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m. The Faculty Commons is a beautifully renovated space where faculty and their guests can gather for impromptu get-togethers or conversations. The room is kept unscheduled each day until 1:30 p.m., but faculty groups can reserve the room for faculty-oriented programs in the afternoons. Please contact Anne Whisnant in the Office of Faculty Governance (962-1671) for more details or check out the room regulations, calendar, and reservation form online.
Faculty Governance Resource Room
Articles, books, reports, or other resources of interest to faculty. This week’s selections:
- “The Ivory Ceiling of Service Work,” from Academe Online, January-February, 2011. Tagline (from Academe Online): Service work continues to pull women associate professors away from research. What can be done?
- Versatile Ph.D. A new career planning resource is available for UNC graduate students in the humanities and social sciences. “Versatile Ph.D.,” a web-based community, includes discussion forums, networking opportunities, regular “career panel” discussions in which Versatile PhDs in various fields share experiences and answer questions from members, and a robust collection of first-person narratives written by PhDs who have established post-academic careers. Using their ONYEN for access, graduate students at UNC may get access to the Premium Content Area where those high-quality written materials are stored. Visit http://gradschool.unc.edu/student/versatilephd.html.
About Faculty Governance News
The Faculty Governance News is published approximately every two weeks throughout the academic year, and approximately monthly during the summer, by the Office of Faculty Governance. Archived issues and the publication schedule for 2010-11 are online here. Information to be considered for inclusion should be sent to Anne Whisnant (anne_whisnant@unc.edu) by Monday before an issue is schedule to appear. For more information on any of these items, please contact Anne Whisnant in the Office of Faculty Governance.
