Welcome Spring 2019!
January 28, 2019
Dear Faculty and Staff,
As we kick off Spring 2019 (welcome back, faculty colleagues!), I hope that you and those close to you enjoyed the holiday season and that you are looking forward to an engaging and fruitful semester.
Continuing the Year’s Momentum: Fall 2018 Highlights
Last fall saw many significant achievements and events at Baruch College.
Driven by the excellence of our students, faculty, staff, and academic programs, the College continued to earn high marks and national and regional recognition:
- Baruch was ranked #1 in social mobility by CollegeNET for the fourth consecutive year, honored for our ability to provide a high-quality education and the professional tools that propel our talented student body into the middle class and beyond.
- Baruch was named the #1 college in the Northeast in the 2019 Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education U.S. College Rankings for “environment,” a category that assesses the extent to which a campus environment is “diverse, supportive, and inclusive,” qualities of great importance to us.
- Also noteworthy were a Top 10 ranking by MONEY Magazine and a Top 25 ranking for front-office jobs at J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs.
The comprehensive list is too long to repeat here. Congratulations, all!
These affirmations arrived as Baruch welcomed its largest first-year class in more than a decade at Student Convocation 2018 and hosted its first-ever Faculty Convocation in September. Full-year celebrations continue in Spring 2019 and include Baruch’s 50th anniversary as a fully independent senior college within the CUNY system and the Austin W. Marxe School of Public and International Affairs’ 25th anniversary as a school within Baruch College.
Updates on Baruch College Self-Study 2020
Fall 2018 saw substantial progress on Baruch College Self-Study 2020 for the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE), the College’s accrediting agency. The Self-Study explores our compliance with MSCHE’s Standards of Accreditation and its Requirements of Affiliation.
During the fall, some 80 members of the faculty and staff researched and drafted preliminary versions of individual chapters. This winter, Cheryl Smith, PhD, associate professor of English and one of the Self-Study co-chairs, is leading the effort—alongside co-chairs Rachél Fester, PhD, assistant provost for assessment, accreditation, and institutional effectiveness and Middle States accreditation liaison officer, and Dennis Slavin, PhD, associate provost for teaching and learning—to create the first complete, integrated draft Self-Study report, to be released to students, faculty, and staff for comment in about six weeks.
Numerous opportunities for comment will follow, including online outreach and face-to-face community conversations. The Self-Study will undergo revision this spring and summer before it is submitted in September 2019 to the chair of the Middle States team that will be visiting Baruch in March 2020.
Also Upcoming for Spring 2019
Other notable activities this spring include:
- Work by faculty/staff teams on implementation of the College’s 2018–2023 Strategic Plan
- Workshops on assessment of learning and assessment of institutional effectiveness, open to all faculty and staff, from the Office of Assessment, Accreditation, and Institutional Effectiveness (sign on to the Confluence site to view the schedule)
- A survey soliciting feedback on a draft of the Baruch College Self-Study 2020 (to come)
Faculty, in the next few weeks, please:
- Order your textbooks via CUNYfirst (by Thursday, Feb. 14).
- Nominate colleagues for 2019 Presidential Excellence Awards for Distinguished Scholarship, Innovative Teaching (full-time and adjunct), and Service (by Tuesday, Feb. 19).
- Encourage students to submit their work (including papers for courses) for the Abraham J. Briloff Prizes in Ethics—or submit your own work (deadline for both: Thursday, Feb. 21). The prizes will be announced during Ethics Week 2019 (March 18–23).
- Update your Digital Measures profile (by Friday, Mar. 1).
Most important, of course, is your work—scholarship and professional advancement, teaching and supporting our students—and your overall experience at Baruch. I hope you have a wonderful Spring 2019.
Sincerely,
David Christy, PhD
Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs