Strategic Planning, UPE, Budgeting, Digital Gallery - Lots going on!

Thanks to everyone who attended last week's school meeting. We will all need to work together to redefine and refocus our school and I appreciate your support in the days ahead.

A few things of interest:

• The Strategic Planning Committee is meeting next week to put the final touches on a draft that will be circulated to the community for discussion and comments. We will then focus our School's strategic plan on the goals in the University's strategic plan.

• Monday at the Graduate Center at 5 PM we are inducting students into Upsilon Pi Epsilon, the international honor society for the computing and information disciplines. Please plan to join us as you are able.

• Ivan Seidenberg will be meeting with the Computer Club and the Seidenberg Scholars at the New York campus on Wednesday during common hour.

• The budget process is beginning. The University Budget Committee has been meeting. Dan Farkas, Fred Grossman and I serve on that committee; we also serve on subcommittees. The Budget Committee includes representatives from each location council, and I believe that those representatives will be reporting at the location council meetings.

• It's not too soon to prepare for the Middle States accrediting team visit, March 22 through the 25. You can find the self-study document here. Please make sure that you are familiar with what's in the document, particularly those sections that refer to our School. Members of the team might want to discuss the document with you.
  

In preparation for next year's budget, I'll be circulating materials to faculty for our annual self-evaluations next week. I will be scheduling meetings with each faculty member to discuss this year's accomplishments and goals for the next academic year.

I haven't finalized next week's schedule yet but I know I'll be in Pleasantville Monday morning and at the Graduate Center on Monday afternoon. I'll be at the New York city campus part of every day next week except Monday. I will be attending the Digital Gallery presentation-hope to see some of you there.

September 13 - 19

This has been a particularly busy week as far as meetings go. (And so this is a really long post-you can just skip to the bottom if you just want to know my schedule).

The academic department chairs (Dan, Narayan, John, Sotiris – Nancy had a family emergency and couldn’t join us), program chairs (Fred and David) and I met for a couple of hours yesterday and agreed that our number one focus needs to be on our curriculum. We’ll be meeting with the curriculum committee chairs to map out a plan for curricula revision.

I attended the Middle States Town Hall meeting in Pleasantville on Tuesday. The preliminary visit will be on November 17 and 18^th. Please read over the Middle States Draft

I also attended the beginning of the Service Learning meeting. I’ve asked the faculty working on service learning courses to identify courses that might be of interest to students in other schools in the university. I’ll be working with the Deans and advisers in the other schools to make sure that students in all schools are aware of the fine service learning courses that we are offering.

I’m pleased to be able to tell you that Provost Geoff Brackett will be sending out a call for proposals for ThinkFinity grants to faculty and staff. These grants will provide a wonderful opportunity for us to develop courses across disciplines and schools; I encourage everyone to be creative and apply. How do I know this? I had a meeting with him.

Joe Malerba has been in contact with Mike Gargano’s widow Phyllis, and she asked that we not plan a memorial for Mike until after the middle of October. Jonathan Hill will be organizing this event on the downtown campus and we’ll be working with folks in the Math Department to coordinate this event. Please make sure to let Jonathan or me know if you want to be involved.

I had an opportunity to attend the Westchester Fairfield Chapter of SIM (Society for Information Management) meeting along with David Sachs, who has been representing the Seidenberg School and serves on the chapter’s board as the Academic Liaison. For many years SIM sponsored the top journal in information systems research, MIS Quarterly. Coincidently the speaker was Jeffrey Hutchinson, a second year student in our DPS in Computing for IT professionals. Jeffrey is the CIO of Group Danone, the French company that owns Dannon yogurt. I met him last year when I gave my qualitative research lecture to the first year students. Jeff said wonderful things about our program during his talk-approximately 50 IT executives heard him. I felt very proud of our school and I was reminded again of how important our work is. Everyone with whom I spoke was surprised to hear that enrollment in schools of computing is down. These executives are concerned about a looming shortage of IT professionals – now if we can just get the word out to guidance counselors, parents and talented prospective students….

Which is a nice segue to remind everyone that we will have two open houses this Fall-November 9 in Pleasantville and November 16 in New York. Faculty, please make sure to attend at least one open house this year (and more as you are able). Make sure that your chair knows your plans so that we know when to expect you.

If any of you want to see my calendar on Outlook, send me a “sharing” note and I’ll be glad to share it with you. Here’s how the next couple of weeks look:

The week of 9/22: Monday and Friday I’m in Pleasantville; Tuesday at the Graduate Center, and Wednesday and Thursday in NY.

The week of 9/29: Monday and Friday I’m in Pleasantville; Wednesday I’m in NY. Tuesday and Thursday are open at this point.

The week of 10/6: Monday and Thursday, I'm in Pleasantville, Wednesday, NYC and Friday I'm at the Graduate Center. I believe that Jim has set Friday October 10 as the date for the Seidenberg Faculty Council meeting.

Finally, congratulations to Darren Hayes and his family who welcomed Shay Darren Hayes, who weighed in at 7 1/2 pounds on Wednesday. Shay joins Nikolai, Aine and Fiona. Mother Nalini and baby Shay are doing fine.

There are many, many things going on - post a comment and let us all know what I've missed!

Enjoy the weekend, and happy fall-Monday is the Autumn equinox.