[Mathregionals] Chair's message

[Eisworth, Todd]

Hi everyone,

I think it is a tradition for the department chair to spend Labor Day in the office catching up with things after the first week of the semester.  As I sit here in relative peace, I wanted to send out a message concerning the upcoming year and some of the things we need to get accomplished.

The most pressing issue is that we need to respond to the budget cuts handed down last April to the College of Arts and Sciences.  We know that, effective Fall 2020, we have lost all of our Group IV lines as well as one of our Group II lines.    This is a significant reduction in our teaching capacity, and we will have to reorganize how some things are done. We also know that the college will experience similar cuts over the next two or three years; we should get a better picture of what this might mean for our department later this year as Dean Plassman becomes more familiar with the college's situation.  Part of our work will be to help support enrollment growth through program development of our own, as well as working with other entities on campus in their efforts.
The messaging from above (President, Provost, and Dean) is that solutions will need to involve RHE faculty.  I don't know what form our solutions will take, but we have a year to prepare.

Several of us are involved in aspects of the President's One OHIO initiative (the effort to strengthen ties between all of our various OHIO campuses), and the mathematics department (across all the campuses) is well-represented. This is a project on par with the switch to semesters, in that it involves almost every aspect of university procedures and governance.  My hope is that our department can continue to lead the way as a model of how resources can be shared, and that faculty and students distributed across the region can continue to interact fruitfully.  We've had a lot of success with experimentation over the past few years, especially in the delivery of on-line courses.   I look for these efforts to continue and grow.

General Education reform is in the air as well. There are pressing reasons (involving accreditation) why this is happening now, but there is also a sense that by acting straightaway we can come up with solutions that make sense in the context of One OHIO.  I've been involved with a small task force that met over the summer, and this work will continue on broader scale over the upcoming year.  This has repercussions for us, as the bulk of our student credit hours come from delivering general education courses.

On a personal note, I spent the summer months concentrating on my health.  Things seems to have resolved favorably, and now I weigh less than I did in high school and feel better than I have in decades.  I did not realize how ill I had been until I started feeling better last Spring, and that improvement has only accelerated through the summer.   All the health trouble and the corresponding side effects should be in the rear-view mirror now; I'll know for certain after several follow-up appointments scheduled in October.

Finally, things will be busy over the next year, and I suspect the service demands on faculty will be greater than at any time since the Q2S transition given all that is happening.  It's important that we stay involved and have our voice heard, as the actions we take and the choices we make over the next year or two will continue to have repercussions in the decade to come.  We'll get it done.

Best,

Todd

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