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Monday, June 6, 2022

News


Commencement Information

Commencement exercises will be held outside on Saturday, June 11, on the lawn west of Hulings Hall. There will be unlimited seating available. The academic procession will assemble on the sidewalk along side of Laird by 9 a.m. and will begin processing (in pairs) toward Music Hall at 9:20 a.m. Please see the commencement diagram for processional and recessional routes.


Carryover Funds

Though availability of carryover funds is never guaranteed, based on FY22 budget projections and spending so far, we anticipate being able to fund a significant amount of carryover this year. Carryover for faculty Professional Development Accounts and endowed and grant funded budgets will be fully funded, but other carryover may be reduced in order to fund anticipated FY23 pandemic expenses. This applies only to excess unspent budget this fiscal year. Any carryover from previous years would remain.


Tenure-Track Hiring Approvals

The following tenure track positions have been approved for undertaking a national search within the next two years:

  • American Studies–Indigenous studies
  • Chemistry–open field
  • Computer Science–computer systems
  • Environmental Studies–environmental justice
  • Religion–Islamic studies
  • Sociology-Anthropology–cultural anthropology

In addition, tenure track searches for previously-approved positions in the following departments and programs will take place next year:

  • Asian Languages and Literatures and Asian Studies–Japanese
  • Political Science–American politics

ITS End of Academic Year Support and Summer Changes

As our academic year and spring term are ending, please note these reminders and opportunities for end-of-term use of academic technologies, summer updates, and getting ready for the next academic year.

Managing Access to Course Content after Final Exams

By default, Moodle courses remain accessible for students who were enrolled in a particular course. If you want additional security for the materials (quizzes, assignments, lecture notes) of a concluded course, please check out Moodle: Options for restricting student access with suggestions for hiding your Moodle course or making specific parts of your Moodle course invisible for your past students.

Getting Ready for the New Academic Year

July 15: Deadline for changes/additions to software in classrooms and computer labs. Please submit a Helpdesk ticket before July 15. Any requests that come in after July 15 may need to be delayed until Winter term, especially if the request requires purchasing and/or extensive testing for new software applications.

August 1st: We will delete the oldest courses from the Moodle server. This year those are courses from the 2016-17 Academic Year. If you would like to save a copy of your course materials, we recommend that you create a backup file of your course and download that to your favorite file storage location. Instructions for how to create a backup file are available in this short video or this Knowledge Base article.

  • We are also upgrading Moodle to 3.11 during the first week of August. The exact date will be announced well ahead of time. This upgrade will make the following possible:
  • New options for customized display of completion criteria and completion dates
  • New profile fields can be displayed in participants page (e.g. pronouns)
  • Customized permission overrides can now be included when importing a course to a new site
  • Word limit settings on the Essay Question in Moodle Quiz
  • New quiz settings to all a read-only view for students
  • Google Drive plugin now supports Shared drive files

Ally for Moodle: We are adding Ally to Moodle. Ally is a tool that checks Moodle content, including individual files, for their level of accessibility. We hope that this tool will help all of us recognize where we can proactively improve access for our students so that their experience with Moodle materials is even better.

If you have COVID equipment (ipad, camera, microphone, etc.) that you no longer use, please consider returning it to the ITS Helpdesk – other colleagues may benefit from having this equipment available to them.

Summer Break and Planning Fall Courses

During summer break, we will have limited Drop-In hours to ensure summer events have support. We will be online 10-noon for
• APSI: June 21-24
• Summer Liberal Arts Institute: July 10-29

The AT team will also be available via email and through the ITS ticketing system throughout the break. PEPS will offer support by appointment only; send an email to peps@carleton.edu.

If you want to have longer conversations around the pedagogical strategies of your 2022-23 classes, please consider reaching out to Victoria Morse, Director of the LTC or Wiebke Kuhn, Director of Academic Technology.

Stay tuned for more opportunities in August when everyone is starting to think about what technologies may be useful for fall term. This will include more opportunities to learn and practice with classroom technology.

For more details on final exams and quizzes, and learning resources and instructional technologies for planning your Fall courses, visit our end-of-year blog post.


COVID Recovery


Advising


New Courses from Daniel Williams, who returns to Carleton in Fall 2022

AFST 120 Race and Racism Outside the United States

In this course, we examine the ways that race structures difference and inequality in non-US contexts with varying degrees of racial “diversity.” As a construct fundamentally grounded in white supremacy through encounters between Europe and its “Others,” race from its inception has been a global construct for organizing and stratifying human difference. Yet the specific ways that race is constructed varies across societies, with ethnicity and other related concepts of difference substituting for race. Foundational to this course will be how the notions of blackness and whiteness figure into the creation of racial categories, boundaries, and inequalities. Course topics include skin color stratification, “colorblindness,” ethnicity and nationhood, migration and citizenship, media representations, anti-blackness as a global phenomenon, transnational and global flows of racial ideas and categories, and social movements for racial justice.

SOAN 214 Neighborhoods and Cities: Inequalities and Identities

Inequalities and identities are well understood yet too often disconnected from the context of space and place. In this class, we discuss the ways that neighborhoods and cities are sites of inequality as well as identity. Neighborhoods are linked to the amount of wealth we hold; the schools we attend; the goods, services, and resources we have access to; and who our neighbors are. Neighborhoods are also spaces where identities and community are created, claimed, and contested. They can also be sites of conflict as they change through gentrification or other processes that often reflect inequalities of power, resources, and status. In this course, special attention will be paid to how race, gender and sexuality, and immigration shape inequalities and identity in neighborhoods and cities. This course will also include an academic civic engagement component, collaborating with local communities in Minnesota.

Prerequisite: The department strongly recommends that Sociology/Anthropology 110 or 111 be taken prior to enrolling in courses numbered 200 or above.


Advising Assignments

All departments and programs have been asked to provide advising plans regarding how many liberal arts advisees could be taken by particular members of each department/program. If you have a good idea what the availability of advising slots to serve the incoming Class of 2026 will be, please fill out this Google form by 5 p.m., June 15, 2022. These data will give us a timely sense of the number of advising slots that departments prefer to allocate to liberal arts advising. This is not a binding number, just a useful guide. The Director of Advising will then be able to follow up with departments and individual faculty concerning their advising load. These data will also help to allocate advising load more evenly across eligible advisers.

Departments and programs will still be able to make changes between June 16 and July 15, but all such changes should be communicated to the Director of Advising via email. After July 15 and up to September 1, departments and programs will not be able to change advising assignments without first consulting with the Director of Advising. This “advising allocation freeze” will allow the Director of Advising to reassign sophomore advisees (following sophomore, junior, and senior registration in early August for fall term courses) and determine advising assignments for the Class of 2026.

In calculating the number of available advising slots, the Director of Advising will take into account known factors such as OCS and A&I teaching, the distribution of major advisees and total extant advising load (as of July 15), and cohort and extra advising commitments (Posse, Focus, etc.).

Outgoing chairs should be sure to pass on this information to incoming chairs. Of course, if a change-of-chair/director is forthcoming, it is wise to have the incumbent chair settle up on all advising assignments prior to July 1.

Should you or your assistants have questions, please contact Al Montero. After July 1, Professor Yansi Pérez, will follow up at different points before July 15 to make sure that we have all of the relevant information needed to support your academic advising in AY 2022-23.


Advising Quick Links


Grants and Fellowships


Fall External Grant Opportunities for Humanists

The fall brings multiple external grant opportunities for humanities faculty at Carleton. Each program is unique: NEH Summer Stipends, ACLS Fellowships for untenured faculty, Guggenheim Fellowships, and residential fellowships at the National Humanities Center and the Stanford Humanities Center, all with deadlines in September and October. If you are looking for support for sabbatical time during 2023-24, now is the time to begin planning your fall applications. Please reach out to the Grants Office — they can help determine which programs might be the best fit for your work and assist with the application process.

Conferences and Workshops


Institutionalizing Community-Based Pedagogies in the Liberal Arts

The ACM is hosting a workshop on Institutionalizing Community-Based Pedagogies in the Liberal Arts at Lake Forest College on Thursday and Friday, July 14-15. This workshop is part of a larger three-year initiative funded by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation. The workshop highlights a set of broad themes and specific issues related to community-based pedagogies that emerged from the high-impact practices survey ACM disseminated last fall. It is designed for faculty and staff who are interested in exploring the ambiguities the survey revealed about these community-based pedagogies and identifying strategies for enhancing their place on and across our campuses. Carleton may designate up to four faculty and/or staff to participate. If you are interested in attending, please contact Peggy by Wednesday, June 8th.