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President’s Blog, March 2018

Other articles in the March 2018 newsletter:

Dear Faculty,

We as a community continue to cope with the repercussions of the events that have taken place over the past year, and to explore ways to improve our culture and processes in a manner that will help move USC past these events and towards becoming the university we all want it to be. This year’s Joint Academic Senate/Provost retreat – an annual event that brings together representatives from the Senate and its committees, members of the Provost’s office, Deans, faculty, staff, and student officers – was constructed so as to provide an important step on this path. On February 23-24, 2018 we met to be informed, to discuss, and to brainstorm around three general topics inspired by themes in the interim report of the Task Force on Workplace Standards and Employee Wellness.

The first topic was Enhancing our Values and Culture, which focused on how to develop new core values for the university, what those values might be, how to leverage those values in changing our organizational culture, and how to sustain such a revised culture.

The second topic was Addressing Concerns of Community Members, focused on where we are now with respect to organizations and processes that support expressing, handling, and reporting back about such concerns, new organizations and processes that could help with this, and how all of the pieces, whether existing or proposed, might work together to provide a coherent and effective overall approach to addressing this need.

The third topic was Strengthening our Leadership Model, focused on what we expect of our leaders, how we appoint, evaluate and reappoint them, and how we share academic governance with them.

If you haven’t already, I strongly encourage you to take a look at the interim Task Force report plus the follow up provided by the links above to the three retreat sessions. Additional input on all of this is always welcome, and may help further guide how we move towards where we want, and need to be.

If you would like to catch up on some of the rest of what the Academic Senate has been working on, check out the records of our monthly meetings or follow us on social media. There is also substantially more going on in our committees and task forces that is not yet reflected in such material, but more will come out about these topics as the academic year progresses.

Your questions, comments and suggestions are always welcome. Feel free to either send them to the official Senate email address (acsenate@usc.edu) or to me personally (rosenbloom@usc.edu).  Or consider participating in one of our monthly Senate meetings.

To discuss, please go to our Facebook post.

Thank you,

Paul Rosenbloom
President of the Academic Senate
Professor of Computer Science, Viterbi School of Engineering
Director for Cognitive Architecture Research, Institute for Creative Technologies