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Greetings, faculty colleagues!
I trust this message finds you emerging from various winter activities and ready to begin the spring semester. I do hope that you found moments to reflect and reconnect with people, places, and traditions that serve to center you. As we commence our work together this spring, 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. We want to ensure that you are set for success as we head into another year.
In the past months, there have been important additions to the college’s leadership ranks. Maria DeLongoria has been appointed in the permanent position of associate provost for Academic and Faculty Affairs and dean of Graduate Studies. Maria prevailed from a competitive national search, and we are incredibly fortunate to add her to the senior leadership team in the Office of the Provost. Mary Ann Watch has been reclassified to a full HEO position and holds the title of director of Operations in Academic Affairs. Her previous role with the Academic Affairs budget process has been expanded to include other dimensions of divisional operations, such as space planning and development of standard operating procedures. Three academic dean searches are well underway, and I expect a successful conclusion to each of them by the summer of 2025: the permanent dean of the Asian/Asian American Research Institution (AAARI), the permanent dean of Arts and Humanities, and the founding Ally Bridge Dean of the School of Business. I thank the search committees and everyone else involved in these searches for their tireless efforts on behalf of the college.
We welcome Stephen Pekar as interim department chair in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences (SEES) and thank Jeff Bird for his lengthy service in this role. 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.
The college continues to benefit from the renewed vigor of the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Leadership (CETLL). Chris Coleman has joined the CETLL team and will soon be joined by additional QC professional staff, who together will constitute a critical support nexus for Academic Technology located within CETLL. Under the excellent leadership of Director Soniya Munshi, the Academic Technology team will provide our faculty with the much-requested robust suite of training, troubleshooting, and technological enhancement for our core business: teaching and learning.
Shifting gears, I want to ensure that you are aware of several new or revised policies and processes now in place, as well as remind you of policies and processes that have been in place for some time. Please take a moment to review these documents and ensure that you are in compliance.
- Recently released CUNY social media guidelines govern use and engagement for official CUNY social media accounts. CUNY has required all campuses to provide social media guidelines for its colleges and schools communities by January 25. Most fortunately, Queens College has been working for many months with faculty and staff from several departments, programs, and administrative offices to prepare what is needed on a timely basis. The Office of Communications and Marketing is overseeing an ongoing process of consultation, especially in light of continuing changes within social media platforms. The guidelines are available here.
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CUNY has rolled out an online system for student accommodations: CUNY Accommodate. The communications workflow for students needing accommodations in your classes is different, as it is now fully managed via this electronic platform. If you haven't done so already, please carefully read Interim AVP for Student Affairs Sean Pierce's recent QC mailer about this transition.
- CUNY has recently launched an Online Education website, including information on how to secure funding to develop new online courses. Consider registering for the upcoming CUNY Faculty Webinar Series for Online Instruction. On that note, I’d like to announce that several QC faculty from across the schools have been awarded funding to develop or convert Pathways courses to fully online asynchronous courses, under CUNY’s Online Excellence Initiative.
- As of Fall 2024, CUNY has adopted a revised uniform grade glossary, an updated camera policy for online and hybrid courses, and a policy governing the use of our new learning management system, Brightspace.
- On August 14, 2024, CUNY Executive Vice Chancellor Wendy Hensel issued a letter about compliance in academics with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
- You can expect a separate communication soon about grading, including the new online change-of-grade process taking effect this semester. Please ensure that you are conscientious in reporting the Verification of Attendance (VOA) information for your sections by the stated deadline, as this is vital to ensuring continuity of students’ financial aid.
We have worked diligently to ensure that the Provost’s Office web pages are updated and as user-friendly as possible. The above-mentioned documents are housed there under “Resources,” along with news on major academic initiatives, a repository of past communications, and other items. Please take a moment to consult the repository of resources for full- and part-time faculty, as well as department administrators. Our current QC guidelines governing teaching and other academic matters are found there. Do let us know if you encounter a broken or outdated link. Please also check out student-facing policies and processes housed on the Dean of Students web page.
Allow me to bring you up to speed about a few of the priority initiatives underway in Academic Affairs this year. Our Better Neighbors Initiative strives to improve the relationship between Queens College and our primary feeder community colleges in the borough: LaGuardia and Queensborough. I am happy to report that we have successfully applied for and received a $170,000 grant from the Heckscher Foundation for Children, in partnership with Queensborough Community College and Ithaka S+R. This generous support will facilitate vertical transfer between our institutions, focusing primarily on increasing the proportion of QCC courses that fulfill major requirements at QC, thereby reducing credit loss and time to degree for QCC transfers. In addition, we were accepted into a highly competitive national Transfer Student Success Equity Intensive (TSSEI), together with Queensborough and LaGuardia Community Colleges. We are one cohort among only 10 selected to spend this calendar year together, learning from one another as well as from the national facilitators at the Aspen Institute and the American Associate of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), which host the TSSEI. This spring, President Frank H. Wu and LaGuardia President Kenneth Adams will celebrate the launch of the STEM Academy, a formal transfer agreement between our institutions arising from funding received by Associate Provost for Innovation and Student Success Nathalia Holtzman. In the coming fall, Presidents Wu and Adams will hold another event on the Queens College campus. On the transfer horizon, we are working hard to identify space and funding to build a transfer student lounge and a transfer student support office. We are also exploring the development of an Education Academy between Queensborough Community College and our School of Education. Finally, we are identifying a funding source to provide scholarships for transfer students that is significant enough not only to support traditional transfers from Queensborough and LaGuardia, but also to expand our transfer student base into Long Island and Manhattan. Stay tuned for more good news on this vital student front.
CUNY continues the staged transition from the previous Learning Management System (LMS), Blackboard, to Brightspace. Queens College was in “Group One,” which implemented the new LMS over the summer of 2024, so by now all QC courses should be taught using Brightspace. By all accounts, Queens College’s transition to Brightspace has been remarkably smooth, and I would like to recognize the partnership between CETLL and ITS in ensuring that our faculty were —and continue to be—well supported in this important change. I encourage you to visit the LMS transition web page regularly to identify upcoming training opportunities and familiarize yourself with applicable policies.
It is important to note that using platforms other than Brightspace is, in almost every case, unacceptable per the CUNY LMS policy as we cannot ensure the security or accessibility of third-party platforms. Equally important, sticking with one system is important for students, who have expressed challenges with being expected to master multiple platforms and who benefit from the enhanced accessibility features offered in Brightspace.
Please note: Whether you teach in-person, hybrid, or remote courses, use the LMS at minimum to house your course syllabus and to utilize the gradebook to keep track of student grades as the semester progresses. If an instructor becomes ill or otherwise unable to continue teaching, having these two items available helps to ensure that students are credited fairly for the work they have completed.
Queens College continues our journey toward reaffirmation of our institutional accreditation by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE). Preparation for the arrival of our peer evaluator team, who will conduct their site visit in Spring 2026, is a multi-year collegewide effort. This winter, department chairs, deans, professional staff, and members of the administration have gathered and submitted thousands of pieces of evidence required by Middle States in order to document that we meet their rigorous standards of accreditation. Chapters of our Self-Study Report, which is the centerpiece document produced by the college community, will be prepared over the spring semester by the seven working groups who will analyze the evidence submitted for their standard. My sincere thanks to the working group co-chairs and members as well as the Operational Excellence team (over 80 people in total!) for their continued dedication to support this mission-critical institutional priority.
Readying the institution for reaffirmation of accreditation has provided an opportunity to rebuild the institution-wide structure and practice of planning, assessment, and reporting. To that end, we have established a college-wide Assessment Council as well as a General Education Council. I thank the faculty co-chairs and members of these important institutional effectiveness structures as well as the Academic Senate. Faculty accreditation liaison positions have been created and housed in every academic school to support the ongoing assessment work of the chairs and the deans. Finally, the academic program review process, stalled during COVID, was restarted. All QC departments and academic programs will undergo periodic self-study, external peer review, and develop an implementation plan on a seven-year cycle. Resources have been developed for departments to conduct effective program review and to ensure that this process is meaningfully incorporated into continuous institutional improvement. Allow me to acknowledge the leadership of Associate Provost for Institutional Effectiveness Rebekah Chow and Faculty Liaison for Assessment and Evaluation Christopher Hanusa for their work on behalf of the college in this space.
College finances continue to be a challenging topic. Spring enrollments are, as of this writing in mid-January, trending slightly downward from the same date last year. Queens College is a tuition-dependent institution, so when we miss our enrollment target the negative financial repercussions are unavoidable. Faculty and staff hiring for the upcoming academic year will be very limited, and the academic deans as well as overarching college priorities will determine the hiring for the coming year. To focus our limited resources—the most valuable of which is the effort of our people—as we continue to meet the needs of our students, we are paying very close attention to course scheduling and the allocation of discretionary (administrative) reassigned time. The Budget Committee of the college P&B, with the assistance of the Office of Institutional Effectiveness and Associate Vice President for Finance and Operations Joe Loughren, has made impressive progress in building data dashboards for department chairs. The data dashboards display key program metrics and develop a comprehensive break-even model for better understanding the costs of operating a program and what that translates into with respect to revenues generated by a program. When these projects are completed, we will proceed to review in earnest the distribution and scope of our academic offerings, in alignment with the elected faculty leadership and our existing governance structure, to ensure we are meeting the needs of current students and prudently managing our limited resources.
Lastly, there are significant changes to the structure of Summer 2025. First, summer session registration will open on March 10, later than the November registration opening in past years. This better aligns Queens College practice with peer CUNY institutions. We realize that most students aren’t actively thinking about summer—nor do they know with any certainty how they will fare academically in their spring courses—until the spring semester is well underway. In addition, by opening registration at a later date we hope to limit changes to the summer schedule, which were significant in past years, largely because the summer schedule had to be set so far in advance. This allows students to plan more effectively. Second, we have streamlined the summer sessions, moving from four sessions (two 4-week sessions, one 6-week session, and one 10-week session), to three sessions (two 4-week sessions and one 7-week session). Doing so reduces scheduling conflicts for students by eliminating overlapping sessions and simplifying the bell schedule; lightens the scheduling burden on the Registrar staff; and is more straightforward for faculty to prepare because they can simply divide a standard 14-week course in half to fit neatly into the 7-week summer session. Academic deans will be engaged in targeted outreach to different summer student populations: students admitted in the fall who wish to get a head start; students needing to make up courses; students from other institutions who are spending the summer home in Queens and want to accelerate their academic progress; and students who wish to avail themselves of the marvelous lab and performance facilities and experiential learning opportunities offered by Queens College, among other target groups of summer students. You can expect more communication about Summer 2025 in the coming weeks. I encourage you to offer one or more courses in the summer.
Colleagues, thank you for your time and your partnership as we strive to make this the best Queens College we can be.
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