From Patricia Price, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs:

Greetings, faculty colleagues!

I trust this message finds you reinvigorated and ready to begin the fall semester. As we commence our work together, I would like to share with you some updates and important information. Before moving on to your next task, please take a moment to read through this material. I want to ensure that you are set for success as we head into another year.

In the past months, several individuals have joined the college’s leadership ranks in key academic leadership positions. Simone Yearwood prevailed from a national search to be appointed permanent dean of the School of Arts and Humanities. Simone, a triple alumna of Queens College, served as the college’s chief librarian and most recently as interim dean of Arts and Humanities. John Chin, who has served as the interim dean of the Asian American / Asian Research Institute (AAARI)—a CUNY-wide institute based in Manhattan and administratively housed at Queens College—was selected from a national search to become permanent dean of AAARI. John’s leadership will be pivotal to elevating the scholarly status of AAARI by tapping the strength and diversity of scholars around the CUNY system whose research focuses on topics germane to the institute. 

This year will see the conclusion of the search for the founding Ally Bridge Dean of the School of Business and searches to replace vacancies in the roles of chief librarian and associate provost for Innovation and Student Success. With respect to the vacancy in the associate provost’s office, I am incredibly proud of Nathalia Holtzman who, after over four years of service in the role, has been appointed to serve as the interim provost at the College of Staten Island. Though we are sad to see her go, she is more than ready for this next step. It is the fulfillment of my highest purpose to mentor emerging leaders. I am confident that Nathalia will bring her ethos of service, student-centeredness, and innovation to this next step on her professional journey.

We welcome several new department chairs this year: Emily Wilbourn (Aaron Copland School of Music), Seongyeon Ko (Classical, Middle Eastern, and Asian Languages and Cultures), Zadia Feliciano (Economics), Emily Drabinski (Graduate School of Library and Information Studies), Antonio Donato (Philosophy), Peter Liberman (Political Science), and Terry Gurl (Secondary Education and Youth Services). The following chairs are returning to their positions after an academic leave or have served as department chairs in the past and as such are technically not “new”: Christopher Winks (Comparative Literature), Gregory O’Mullan (School of Earth and Environmental Sciences), Drew Jones (European Languages and Literatures), Barbara Simerka (Hispanic Languages and Literatures), and Shige Song (Sociology). Mathematics will elect a new chair in the fall due to John Terilla’s transition to the Graduate Center as executive officer, and Simone Yearwood will serve as the interim chief librarian for this semester. Department chairs have a special place in my heart as they hold the most challenging academic leadership role—but also in many ways the most important—as their work makes such an appreciable positive difference for their students and colleagues.

There is one new provost’s faculty fellow beginning their project this year: Tina Pagano, who is a lecturer in the Department of Psychology, has been appointed the provost’s diversity faculty fellow. They will work with the QC Transfer Team along with department chairs and advisors, as well as with the Central Office, to elevate the transfer relationship with our partner institutions Queensborough and LaGuardia Community Colleges. The college benefits mightily from the work of the provost’s faculty fellows, and I want to thank outgoing fellows Terry Gurl (Secondary Education and Youth Services), for her work on addressing disparate student grade outcomes, and Peter Liberman (Political Science), whose work on revising the student evaluation of teaching has yielded a revised tool to be launched this fall. The new student evaluation instrument will gather better data about teaching effectiveness and reduce bias. Peter worked closely with the Academic Senate and the Office of Institutional Effectiveness to develop, test, and approve this instrument.

This year, you can expect positive forward movement on a number of important initiatives in Academic Affairs. Updates on these initiatives can be found on my webpage under the “Initiatives” tab.

Transfer students continue to be the focus of much of our collective effort across the college and with our partners, LaGuardia Community College and Queensborough Community College. Advocacy for a new bus route connecting Queensborough Community College and Queens College resulted in the June launch of the Q74 route, dubbed “the Success Express.” See Frankly Speaking for a video produced in celebration of this service in support of our transfer students.  

During National Transfer Week in October we will host a ribbon cutting ceremony for the new Transfer Hub on the lower level of Frese Hall. This will provide a dedicated space for our transfer students to receive academic support, financial aid, advising, and just hang out with fellow transfers. We will have a QC advisor presence on both partner campuses to ensure that community college students are thinking early about transferring to Queens College and taking courses that will propel them toward timely completion of their four-year degree. 

To that end, I want to thank the department chairs and department advisors who are working with my office to convert as many courses as possible from “499s”—general electives—to course equivalencies in the major. This will ensure that transfer students do not needlessly repeat courses for which they have already acquired competencies and can generally make timely progress to their degree. Finally, I’d like to give a shout out to the Academic Senate, which voted to remove a major barrier to transfer students in the spring: our 45-credit residency requirement. Established in 1978, this made sense at the time but had fallen out of step with our competitor institutions, all of which have a 30-credit residency requirement. This change modernizes our practices and demonstrates the power of partnership in our shared governance structure.

Queens College is squarely in the accreditation cycle this year. Don’t miss the upcoming town hall meeting on September 17 which will be led by President Wu and faculty and staff members of the Self-Study Steering Committee. Join us for lunch and learn more about Middle States Commission on Higher Education institutional accreditation, read the draft Self-Study Report and provide feedback, and have your questions addressed. RSVP here. Our peer evaluator team chair, President Lamont O. Repollet of Kean University in New Jersey, will visit on October 7. Watch for opportunities to engage with him during his all-day visit to Queens College. In March 2026, the seven-member peer evaluator team will visit Queens College over a three-and-a-half-day period. These are high-stakes visits that happen every eight years, so it’s vital that we come together as a community and showcase our good work. We have much to be proud of!

The Academic Renewal Initiative is in full swing this fall. A working group of 11 individuals was appointed by President Wu in the spring and were charged at their first meeting on September 3. Participating faculty members range from junior to senior ranks and represent all our schools. This is essentially an academic master planning exercise that will form the foundation of our upcoming college strategic plan. In Spring 2026 this group will provide a report and recommendations to President Wu and me advising on the shape and scope of our academic programming going forward. It is important to note that institutions of higher education normally undertake such holistic reviews on a regular basis. Establishing this tradition at Queens College will ensure that we are actively engaging our community in proven best practices in higher education.

It seems hard to believe, but this fall marks the three-year anniversary of the widespread availability of generative AI. A recent article titled “How Are Students Really Using AI?” shares data from across institutions of higher education about how students vary in their utilization of programs like ChatGPT. Though some use the technology to cheat on assignments, others use it the way you and I might: to develop an outline, generate rubrics, synthesize data, check grammar, and so forth. Students are not aligned in their embrace of large language model programs. Indeed, some are deeply skeptical, fearing that their learning is being shortchanged by the ubiquity of these tools. The article emphasizes the importance of providing clear policies and guidance. Our Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Leadership (CETLL) has produced an admirable suite of opportunities for faculty to engage deeply in AI’s role in pedagogy through their 2024-2025 Generative AI in the Classroom Faculty Fellowships. One outcome of this year-long immersion is the publication of Generative AI in the Classroom: Best Practices – a CETLL Guide. As 2025-2026 unfolds, stay tuned for additional significant developments on this and on the academic technology support front more generally.

Enrollments are an ongoing challenge at the top of our shared agenda. Queens College is a tuition-dependent institution, so we must strive to reach our enrollment targets. Most faculty and staff hiring is paused for the time being, and the few positions that are approved will fill vital student-facing roles or are necessary to keep programs in compliance with accreditation requirements or to staff mandatory initiatives from the CUNY Central Office. Over the course of the coming year and under the guidance of our new AVP for Enrollment Management Vivek Upadhyay, Queens College will make significant strides in recruitment, retention, and growing transfers, all of which contribute positively to enrollments. Here is an encouraging piece of good news on the faculty hiring front: Proposals in photonics, astrophysics, and urban AI garnered three-and-a-half funded faculty lines for Queens College. As previously announced, thanks go to Dean Dan Weinstein and the faculty in these areas who developed competitive proposals that were submitted to the Graduate Center for funding through the Martin S. Spergel Initiative in Computational Science.

In an effort to focus our limited resources—the most valuable of which is the effort of our people—we are paying very close attention to scheduling and the allocation of discretionary (administrative) reassigned time. I want to thank the department chairs and deans for their remarkable discipline in budgeting and ensuring that our 2025 and 2026 course schedules adhere to new CUNY scheduling requirements regarding staffing prioritization and section fill rates. You can read about this under the “Communications” tab on my webpage in a posting dated August 26, 2025.

Colleagues, I thank you for your time, attention, and partnership as we strive to make this the best Queens College we can be.