Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a restful and restorative break that has helped energize us for our work in the new semester. In a prior newsletter, I introduced one of my key priorities: ensuring success for every UConn student. We have a responsibility to ensure that all students have the tools, resources, and connections to feel supported and be successful at UConn. This cuts across a wide range of areas: academic progress and degree completion, building skills to enable self-efficacy and lifelong learning, and cultivating community and wellbeing.
Last week we celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day with an extraordinary series of events through the week. I was privileged to attend the MLK Living Legacy Convocation. Dr. Eddie Glaude, Jr. gave an extraordinary talk about lessons learned from the later Dr. King, and his words were framed by beautiful musical performances from members of our community. Thanks to the leadership of our Office for Diversity and Inclusion, UConn is participating in the Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT) Campus Center Initiative, a comprehensive national and community-based process to bring about transformational and sustainable change by replacing deeply held belief systems that fuel systemic racism with ones that see the inherent value of all people. I encourage you to visit their website to learn more about how you can engage in this vital work.
UConn continues to be an institution where most of our students thrive in their intellectual and personal development. This is reflected in the fact that over 46,000 applications were received from individuals seeking admission for fall 2023, a new record! Recent outstanding successes can be seen in our national prize and scholarship winners. Nidhi Nair ’23 (CLAS) was named in December as the first Schwarzman Scholar in UConn history. Sarah Marze ’23 (SFA) has been named a 2023 Marshall Scholar, one of just 40 students nationally to earn the honor. Both were supported by the Office of National Scholarships and Fellowships. I’m happy to highlight the work of this office and the success of our students in this newsletter.
Academic advising is crucial to students’ success. Both our professional advisors and faculty advisors play important roles in nurturing students’ growth. Over the last few years, across our five campuses, UConn’s advisors have been working relentlessly to help students navigate a challenging hybrid academic experience, identify their multi-faceted learning and personal needs, connect to campus resources, and become a valued part of our community. The Office of Undergraduate Advising, led by Dr. Erin Ciarimboli, Director of Undergraduate Advising, is working to enhance and improve this work. You can learn more below and if undergraduate advising is part of your work, I encourage you to attend events in the undergraduate advising professional development series.
In fall 2022, our advisors were leaders across our campuses in improving student retention efforts. Due to their work, and through improved data sharing, even before classes began, fall to spring retention for first-year students has increased in comparison to the last few years of data and across our multiple campuses we are almost at our high, pre-pandemic retention levels.
Outstanding support is also provided to UConn students through the Institute for Student Success (ISS). With a growing number of services and a renewed commitment to educational equity, ISS has renamed the Center for Academic Programs (CAP) to the Center for Access and Postsecondary Success (CAPS).
Our efforts to support students are clearly moving us in the right direction, but we still have much more to do. I will be working throughout the semester to continue developing strategies and resources to close achievement gaps and improve overall student outcomes. Toward this end, I will be hosting a summit of university leaders in February to coordinate our student success efforts and develop new strategies, and I will report back to you on those conversations in the next newsletter.
Finally, I want to close by again thanking my friend and colleague Vice Provost Michael Bradford for his incredible contributions to UConn over a period of more than 20 years. Michael has exemplified what a UConn education can mean, coming to the Avery Point campus as a navy veteran and graduating with a bachelor’s degree in general studies. From this launching point, Michael pursued graduate education, became a nationally-renowned director and playwright, and returned to UConn as a faculty member. We wish Michael well as we see him take his UConn roots to ever greater success in California, and I hope that many of you will join me later today at his farewell celebration.
All best,
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Anne D’Alleva, Ph.D. Provost & Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
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Five Evidence-Based Strategies to Engage Your Students at the Start of the Semester
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1. Get to Know Your Students: Strive to learn your students (preferred) names and try get in the habit of using their names when you call on them or invite their participation. Take/track attendance, particularly in the first 2-3 weeks of the semester. Remember that UConn is not an attendance institution and By-Laws prohibit grading attendance, but there is nothing preventing faculty from taking and tracking attendance. Reach out to students who are on your class roster but who are not showing up to class and reach out to them to share your concern. In large courses consider having students submit minute paper exit tickets.
2. Establish and review your expectations for academic success. Highlight opportunities for active student-to-content, student-to-student, and student-to-faculty engagement. Communicate high expectations for learning together with available resources for support, including near-peer mentors, TA’s, Academic Achievement Center, Q Center, Writing Center, SHAW, academic advisors, and Dean of Students Office. Communicate your availability and purpose of office hours. Invite or schedule students to come to office hours individually or in groups.
3. Make learning experiences active and varied. Build in more opportunities for active learning. Emphasize reasons for students to become and stay engaged in your course and stress the many ways your course is relevant to their aspirational success. Vary your instructional techniques with a mix of lecture and discussion, and individual and group work. Utilize discussion boards and other tools in HuskyCT to create continuity between asynchronous and synchronous learning opportunities.
4. Seek out real-time data to inform and improve your teaching. Real-time data can come from formative assessments of student learning and formative assessments of teaching. Provide students with examples of high-quality student work from your previous classes to help them generate realistic effort-performance-outcome expectancies. Consider sharing selective data from previous classes as a means to demonstrate that you care about student feedback and to model your willingness to change practices based on that feedback
5. Show students that you care. Consider the relevance of an oft quoted phrase---students don’t care what you think until they know that you care. Acknowledge anxiety and stress and be sensitive to those periods during the semester where it is particularly acute for students.
If you would like to further develop your teaching practice, we encourage you to sign up for some of the many workshops offered by the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL).
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Reminder of Pass/Fail Deadline Change
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In April 2022, the Pass/Fail (P/F) academic regulations in the UConn Senate Bylaws were amended as detailed below, to be implemented for the 2022-23 academic year. These changes apply only to undergraduate students.
The two Senate-approved changes include:
Students with fewer than 26 credits earned can now place one class on P/F per semester. Students who are on scholastic probation remain ineligible to place a class on P/F.
All students are now restricted to one P/F course per semester. Note: We understand there may be situations in which advisors may want to advocate for students who would have previously qualified (those who have earned 26 or more earned credits) to have an exception to this policy for the Spring 2023 semester only. In these cases, students should contact their Advising Directors/Deans for review/discussion.
Changes to the bylaws can be found on the Senate webpage, including the full text of the bylaws.
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Sharing mid-term grades with your students is another important part of reviewing student progress, which can have positive impacts on your students’ engagement in coursework. University Senate By-Laws state that by the end of the sixth week of the semester, instructors shall submit midterm grades for students in 1000- and 2000-level courses who have earned a grade of less than a C or U, or an N grade up to that point. Mid-term grades are due February 24th.
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If you are not delivering a final exam in Spring 2023, we ask that you fill out a brief form to notify the Registrar that you are opting out. We are asking for those who use another method of assessment (portfolios, projects, etc.) to let us know so that the room and/or time may be available for other instructors during the assessment period. It is also important that instructors recognize that due dates for these alternative forms of final assessment should not fall on days designated as reading days. As always, all due dates should be indicated on the syllabus at the beginning of the semester.
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Class Absences due to Illness
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At this time of year, and considering the lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, we would like to remind faculty that students are not required to provide “sick notes” or “medical excuses” when they miss classes, and such excuses should not be requested from them. More generally, per the university Senate By-laws, student grades should not be reduced because of a student’s absence. Please exercise flexibility and understanding for students who may miss class or classwork due to illness. Faculty should also exercise caution in attending class if they are feeling sick. Our community’s health and wellbeing remains a priority of the University. If any other COVID-related questions or issues arise during the remainder of the semester and academic year, you may find our COVID-19 FAQs for Academic Operations to be helpful, but as always, you are encouraged to reach out to our office directly at [log in to unmask] if you would like additional support.
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UConn is following Department of Administrative Services (DAS) guidance that State buildings located in counties with high COVID community levels are to post notice that people entering the facility are “strongly encouraged to wear a well-fitting mask that completely covers the nose and mouth." All UConn campuses (except UConn Health) are strongly encouraged to post CDC masking signage on any screens/monitors in campus buildings. Masking is strongly recommended. The Provost’s Office regularly updates our COVID-19 Academic FAQs to include most recent University policies and recommendations.
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Spring 2023 Pop-Up Courses
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Why the Jews? Confronting Antisemitism
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Exploring the Entrepreneurial Perspective
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Assessment Faculty Fellows
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The Internship on Scholarship Program offers on-campus and virtual internships for UConn students hosted by UConn departments and supported via scholarship funds. This initiative is grounded in UConn’s commitment to provide every student with a life-transformative education. Departments may now begin offering internship opportunities to students using the Internship on Scholarship website.
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Internship on Scholarship Program
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The Internship on Scholarship Program offers on-campus and virtual internships for UConn students hosted by UConn departments and supported via scholarship funds. This initiative is grounded in UConn’s commitment to provide every student with a life-transformative education. Departments may now begin offering internship opportunities to students using the Internship on Scholarship website.
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For those of you who are unfamiliar, ChatGPT is a Large Language Model tool developed by OpenAI. Released in November 2022, ChatGPT is a variant of Open AI’s GPT-3 specifically designed for chatbot applications. It is powered by large amounts of data (~175 billion parameters) and relies on deep neural networks to predict and generate text in response to user prompts. There is much debate about the quality of the text generated but there is both interest and concern related to AI-generated text. Based on conversations to date, our faculty are simultaneously interested in learning how ChatGPT and GPT-3 and similar chat bots might transform teaching, learning, and assessment in innovative ways, and concerned about students use of ChatGPT to answer test and exam questions and generate content for written papers and assignments.
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Institute for Student Success Updates
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Since 1967, UConn has formally provided access programming and support for underrepresented students.
With our growing number of services and a renewed commitment to educational equity, we renamed the Center for Academic Programs (CAP) to the Center for Access and Postsecondary Success (CAPS). Our new name better reflects our mission, purpose, and goals.
We are also making a change to Student Support Services (SSS). SSS, which has been a component of our department for many years, is a grant-funded program from the U.S. Department of Education. It has become the name by which we have come to know all of our CAPS college programming. However, to better reflect UConn’s role in supporting our traditionally underrepresented student populations across all of our campuses, SSS will no longer be the name used to refer to our department. Instead, we will use CAPS when referencing the general college support services of the department. All Regional Campus offices formerly known as SSS will now be referred to as CAPS as well. As we move forward, all students admitted to our postsecondary support system will be accepted into the CAPS college program.
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Provost’s Office Leadership Updates
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Michael Bradford, Vice Provost for Faculty, Staff, and Student Development and Professor of Dramatic Arts has accepted the position of Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Education at the University of California, Davis and will be leaving UConn February 3rd to begin this new role. While we are thrilled for Michael for this new opportunity, we are so sorry to lose a trusted colleague and friend who has shown such compassion, thoughtfulness and positivity to our community. On behalf of the Provost’s Office and the entire university administration, I want to thank Michael for his service to UConn in the more than 20 years he has spent here. There will be an event to recognize Michael’s accomplishments and impact on the UConn community on January 26th (Click here for more details).
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Humanities Institute Director Appointment
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Professor Anna Mae Duane has been appointed as the next director of the Humanities Institute (UCHI) effective August 23, 2023.
Professor Duane joined UConn in 2004 and is a professor of English. She served as the director of the American Studies Program where she developed extensive leadership and administrative skills that lead her to successfully develop curricular resources, engage in public outreach, and manage budgets. In addition to her UCHI fellowships, she was an invited scholar of The Great Stories Club, a NEH-funded non-profit in which scholars of children’s literature collaborated with librarians across the country to devise reading group curricula for incarcerated and at-risk youth. She is also an invited member of the Yale Future of Slavery Studies working group, which brings together an international panel of experts to engage the afterlives of slavery in the U.S. and abroad. Professor Duane is the recipient of several awards and grants including a Fulbright fellowship.
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Data Science Faculty Director Appointment
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Professor Jeremy Teitelbaum has been appointed as the director of the Master of Data Science program effective immediately. The program has previously been co-directed by Kent Holsinger, Vice Provost for Graduate Education and Dean of the Graduate School, and Peter Diplock, Associate Vice Provost for the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. I extend my gratitude to both Kent and Peter for their willingness to supervise this program since its development in 2020.
Reporting directly to the dean of The Graduate School, Professor Teitelbaum will oversee the interdisciplinary 30-credit hour program which draws on courses and expertise from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, School of Engineering, School of Business, College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources, and the Neag School of Education. Professor Teitelbaum is a professor in the department of Mathematics and previously served as interim provost at UConn in 2017-2018. Before that, he was the dean of UConn’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) from 2008-2017.
Professor Teitelbaum is a number theorist and has worked on a range of problems related to elliptic curves, modular forms, p-adic L-functions, and p-adic analytic geometry. His current research is in bioinformatics, unsupervised learning, and in mathematical questions in machine learning.
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Effective undergraduate advising is a cornerstone of student success at UConn. National research has advanced the critical role of advising as teaching; the direct link between advising caseloads, student retention, and narrowing outcome gaps; advising and degree planning as equalizers for equity; and the role of advising in shaping both students’ satisfaction with their college experience and decision to persist.
This research makes clear the essential connections between a Life-Transformative Education (LTE) and the role of academic advisors and mentors in UConn’s student success efforts. As Drake (2011) wrote, “We have long since left in the dust the notion that simply opening our doors to students is enough, that, once here, they can negotiate their own way through our often byzantine, labyrinthine curriculum, processes, and hallowed halls.” Simply put, quality academic advising must be at the core of UConn’s student success strategies.
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Office of National Scholarships and Fellowships
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Highlighting Interdisciplinary Scholarship at UConn
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For over twenty years, the UConn Humanities Institute (UCHI) has supported and promoted the study of all aspects of human society and culture. UCHI seeks to inspire scholars in the critical task of humanistic research, and to act as a voice for that research in local, national, and international arenas. Our annual fellowship program, the heart of UCHI’s mission, fosters an interdisciplinary space for UConn faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, and visiting scholars to think, collaborate, and create. UCHI also reaches beyond the walls of the Institute by funding humanities research and public engagement across the campus and beyond. Over the years we’ve brought luminaries to campus like Jill Lepore, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Toni Morrison, collaborated with universities worldwide, and engaged in large-scale grant-funded research projects, bringing in over $7 million in grants over the last five years alone.
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Academic Affairs Spotlight
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The Office of the Provost and the units that report in academic affairs are staffed and led by an outstanding group of talented and dedicated colleagues. This month we are spotlighting Sarah Croucher, Assistant Vice Provost for Academic Affairs.
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Prestigious Awards & Honors
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Celebrating UConn faculty through university awards and honors is integral to our success as a flagship university and information on current and emeritus faculty awards and honors are highlighted on the Office of the Provost Awards & Honors web page. If you are a recipient of a national or international award and would like to be recognized on this list, please submit this form. The database is updated bi-annually.
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CETL University Teaching Award Winners
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The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning University Teaching Awards are held annually to honor faculty and graduate students who show exemplary commitment to their teaching craft. The winners of these awards are leaders in their disciplinary pedagogy, innovation, and have an unequaled focus on student success. Congratulations to the 2022 winners.
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IMPORTANT DATES, DEADLINES & EVENTS
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Every February, we participate in the annual tradition of Black History Month. Inaugurated in 1926 by “The Father of Black History,” Dr. Carter G. Woodson, and made into a month-long celebration 50 years later, we use this month to raise awareness about Black and African American contributions to history. We recognize and celebrate the tremendous value these cultures have brought to the world, to our country, and to UConn. Though we believe that these contributions should be celebrated every day of the year, Black History Month provides an opportunity to reflect on our commitments to anti-racism and to renew our efforts. The African American Cultural Center (AACC) will be hosting a Black History Month Opening Ceremony on Thursday, February 2, at 6 p.m.
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January 22nd marks the start of Lunar New Year 2023, the Year of the Rabbit. Lunar New Year has been observed for thousands of years and symbolizes the welcoming of a new beginning and a time of reunion with family and friends. For the Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander community at UConn, it marks an occasion to celebrate cultural backgrounds, experiences, and identities. On Lunar New Year, we recognize and honor the rich culture, history, and experiences of the Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander community, which make up such a significant portion of the UConn community. Check out the Asian American Cultural Center for this year’s Lunar New Year Events.
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Timely Topics is a series of opportunities to engage with subject matter experts on topics relevant to those who support and advise graduate students and programs. Two tracks are offered for this series: one designed for faculty and one designed for faculty who hold an administrative role and staff, however every session is available to anyone interested in joining. All sessions will be held as a WebEx meeting. Links for each meeting will be sent directly to registrants and follow up materials will be posted on our website. Slides, recordings, and resources from past sessions can always be found at The Graduate School’s Timely Topics webpage.
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On February 10, the Provost’s Office will host a virtual town hall to offer a brief overview of the purchase of Interfolio’s Review, Promotion and Tenure and Dossier Modules and to answer questions from the community about the rollout of this new system. Please click here to learn more about this session, view recordings from the November 15th Info Session, and to learn more about Interfolio @ UConn. You can also submit questions for the Town Hall in advance using this form. Questions will be answered live and the session will be recorded.
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January 26: Celebration for Michael Bradford February 10: Interfolio Town Hall February 24: Mid-term grades due
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UConn is a great university.
But it's more than that. A top-ranked research institution, with campuses and staff across Connecticut, built to inspire the global community that is UConn Nation. UConn's talented students exceed expectations. Our expert researchers, faculty, and alumni drive Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship (CIE) for a better tomorrow. We fuel the State's economy and are committed to inclusion in benefiting the greater good. This is UConn.
STUDENTS FIRST. UCONN ALWAYS. HUSKIES FOREVER.
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