coe-staff: COE Weekly Volume 1 Number 1

Wed Oct 7 13:33:59 PDT 2020

Dear Faculty and Staff,

Thank you for a great first week and a half of fall term. Knowledgeable of your innumerable demands, I have committed to reducing the number of emails sent via the coe-staff listserv by sending you a weekly email “bundle,” which includes emails from around campus and the college. I offer my apologies to the original authors of these emails for my editorial work. This weekly email will contain priorities, updates, reminders, notices of upcoming events and accolades. I hope that Amanda and I can save you some time sorting through emails to find the information most relevant to your work. We plan to deliver the Weekly every Wednesday. Of course, feedback is welcome.

Updates and Upcoming:

  *   At our COE Fall Faculty and Staff Meeting this Friday, October 9th from 1:30pm-3:00pm we’ll hear from our Provost, Patrick Phillips, get an update on student conduct and community standards, meet our new faculty and staff, and get a few important updates from some of your colleagues. Webinar info: https://uoregon.zoom.us/j/92198355261?pwd=cHgvdjFlV2pTa2luTTRPRmpHMmRHQT09 Passcode: 612809
  *   All are welcome to attend the SDS Network Invited Colloquium on Friday, October 16th from 1:30pm-3pm featuring Dr. Elizabeth Shriberg. Her topic will be “Deep Learning for Predicting Depression and Anxiety from Spoken Language. Please RSVP. <https://oregon.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bx4862NYcmcnNg9> Dr. Elizabeth Shriberg is a speech scientist with over 25 years of experience in the analysis and computational modeling of spoken language. She is currently Chief Science Officer at Ellipsis Health, a San Francisco start-up developing artificial intelligence solutions based on spoken conversation analysis, to advance behavioral health. She is also an Affiliate of Johns Hopkins University / HLTCOE in Baltimore, MD, and an External Fellow of the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, CA. Prior to Ellipsis she was a Principal Scientist at SRI International in Menlo Park, CA, leading data science and machine learning teams working on government and commercial R&D efforts in speech-based emotion and affective computing, health monitoring, speech understanding, dialog modeling, computational prosody, speaker verification, and modeling of speech disfluencies. Dr. Shriberg was also a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in Mountain View, CA, developing methods for natural conversation with machines.
  *   The Office of the Provost, College of Arts and Sciences, and the Office of the General Counsel invite you to a forum on “Academic Freedom and Vulnerability in the Era of Remote Teaching and the New Hong Kong Security Law.”   The forum (via zoom: https://uoregon.zoom.us/j/94010825940?pwd=eXk2RXZpWHovcGtCR3MvZXBKbGhKUT09 ) will take place Friday, October 16th at 3 PM. This forum is intended to support faculty and graduate students in instructional roles who face a new dilemma related to remote/online teaching on topics deemed sensitive by the Chinese government.  On the one hand, the UO treats academic freedom, especially in classrooms, as the cornerstone of our values and foundational to our educational mission.  On the other hand, we are also not naive in realizing that many international students self-censor in our classes for fear of reprisals from their home governments if they engage actively on topics those governments consider taboo or sensitive. Remote and online instruction increases the possibility for surveillance, multiplying considerably the stress and fear many students feel.  Moreover, since July 1, the new Hong Kong National Security Law<https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-52765838> actively and explicitly criminalizes, among other things, "undermining the power or authority of the central government” and “collusion with foreign or external forces.”  The chilling effect experienced by our students who come to the United States may now become the concrete threat of harm to all members of our campus community, especially those working or learning from abroad.As the Association of Asian Studies<https://www.asianstudies.org/aas-statement-regarding-remote-teaching-online-scholarship-safety-and-academic-freedom/> has noted, there are no easy answers to this dilemma.  As we seek to balance academic freedom with care for students, this forum will:
- allow regional experts to share their best understanding of the current context on Chinese government censorship;
- offer guidance from UO Information Services on the security realities of Zoom and other instructional platforms;
- bring in General Counsel to help frame both our institutional commitment to academic freedom and our attention to student and faculty vulnerability;
- permit academic leadership to work together with faculty and grad students to raise awareness about and provide support in light of these changes;
- answer, as best we can, your questions.

Reminders:

  *   All fall curriculum committee proposals will are due to Lillian Durán on November 13th by the end of the workday. The next college curriculum committee meeting will be on November 24th . Please email Lillian ahead of time if you plan to submit so that she can track the workload for this meeting. The directions for submitting a proposal are located on our governance page https://coedocs.uoregon.edu/display/governance/COE+curriculum+change+proposal+guidelines+and+template. Please reach out to Lillian if you have questions or need guidance. In addition, we currently have 4 very dedicated and hard-working members of the curriculum committee, but we need broader representation. If anyone is willing to step up and help with curriculum review and governance please let Lillian know.
  *   Last week the new Latinx Studies website went live. This is a new program at UO that will include programming related to Latinx Studies and serve as a resource for faculty and students who teach courses or conduct research on issues affecting the Latinx/a/o community. The most notable program that just launched is the undergraduate minor in Latinx Studies, which includes some COE courses and may be of interest to many of our COE undergrads. The page is located at:  https://provost.uoregon.edu/latinx
  *   Thank you to those of you who have reached out to indicate your interest in participating in the COE Ad Hoc Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. As promised, we are soliciting additional members moving into the Fall. Please nominate (self or other), using the following link: COE Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee Nomination<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/oregon.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_aY7KXQ1kODHQ4xT__;!!C5qS4YX3!UhuPDz-H_gKwE4o8ZM3UMBznFqdHzytV0GTFm9jpFq77sJ7aw5llkRA2V7XR024w3g$>. For this committee, we will not reach out to anyone who has not first indicated their interest in participating. If you are nominating someone other than yourself, in addition to submitting their name via the survey, please also let your nominee know that you are submitting their name so that they can submit this survey on their own behalf.

Accolades:

  *   Congratulations to the School Psychology faculty and staff for coordinating a virtual site visit this week with the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) Accreditation Board, which is evaluating our M.S. (equivalent of an Ed.S.) in School Psychology program. Thank you to all who have already or will participate later this week.
  *   I also offer my gratitude to the EMPL Faculty who attended (en masse) a curriculum conversation about school principal training with Drew Echelson from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. We have a second consultant, Soraya Sablo Sutton, from UC Berkeley, scheduled for Monday.

Enjoy these remaining sunny days,

Randy

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