University Senate Discuss Faculty Seminar Series & New Dashboards
By Tyra Watts | Published October 28, 2022
A lot has been discussed at Kean University’s senate meeting that took place on Tuesday, Oct.4 via Zoom.
At the beginning of the meeting, the members of the Senate agreed to the motion that Craig Anderson, who currently works at Kean’s Learning Commons at the Nancy Thompson Library, be Vice Chair for the senate this year.
According to Sucheta S. Ahlawat, Ph.D., a member of the Senate, and professor in the school of management and marketing, the senate meeting transitioned to the task force on advising, which was previously discussed at the senate executive meeting twice. Members of the faculty wanted the senate to discuss this issue.
Ahlawat decided to not work on this issue because she noticed that a lot was going on in terms of the members and sub-committees.
“Maybe we will ask the co-chairs of the presidential task force to come to the senate at some point with the feeling that they have made enough progress, probably at the end of October or beginning of November,” Ahlawat explained.
Her reasoning for this was that there wasn’t an opportunity for the faculty to share before the decision was made.
Despite this, David Farrokh, who is the assistant Dean of the College of Business and Public Management, spoke on this issue.
He stated that he has one of the sub-groups on advising structure and models and that the sub-group is made up of a representative body of faculty, students, staff, and administrators.
“It is a pretty diverse group,” Farrokh said. “So faculty input would certainly be encouraged in the sub-group, and I think for each sub-group, there is faculty in each of those areas, so if people have certain comments or suggestions, they could get that to those sub-group leaders or co-chairs.”
Later in the meeting, Dr. Dean Casale, associate professor in the English studies program, presented to the senate a presentation about the faculty seminar series of 2022-2023.
According to Dr. Casale, the seminar series is in its 22nd year and was initiated by Dennis Klein, a history professor and director of the master of arts in holocaust and genocide studies as well as the director of the Jewish studies program.
“It usually functions as a reading discussion group that centers on a particular theme, issue, or problem,” Casale stated. “Some of the past issues have been the diaspora empire and cultural conquest and recently we’ve been thinking in a more metacritical way about the university in itself.”
Since Klein is on a sabbatical, Casale was asked to run this year’s faculty seminar series. The theme for this year’s event is authenticity and care in the contemporary research university.
This theme is in connection with Kean University President Lamont O. Repollet, Ed.D.challenge to the stakeholders of the higher education community, students, faculty, administration, and staff to “reflect, reexamine, and re-imagine” the practices of Kean culture.
This year’s faculty seminar will consist of shared readings and discussions regarding the aspects of the 21st-century public higher education experience in America.
Casale explains that they will be focusing on a lot of issues and questions such as identity politics and the challenges of inclusion, as well as intellectual labor and intellectual capital.
The seminar will also look into the monetizing of knowledge, the university’s role in shaping, determining, and hosting public discourse, and much more.
After Casale’s presentation about the Faculty Seminar Series, English Professor Daniel Gover, Ph.D. asked if Dr. Casale is going to focus on the university and its issues concerning authenticity and care.
Casale confirms this by stating that authenticity and care are very powerful ideas that you can investigate.
“You can investigate institutions, you can investigate the sense of the trajectory of yourself as a human being in some way,” Casale said.
Casale uses the issue of care as an example, and how he began to think of himself as a professor and how his students are within his care.
He explained how he would take into consideration how his students feel that they are in his intellectual care and what it means to be authentic in that particular relationship.
Ahlawat then decided to make the motion that the senate should co-sponsor and support the Kean faculty seminar series for this year with the Center for Teaching & Learning, and as a result, the majority of the members motioned to agree.
After the motion, Ahlawat passed the attention to Dr. Michael Salvatore, senior vice president for administration. Salvatore presented to the senate a presentation on strategic analytics and related dashboards.
Salvatore stated that the reason behind the dashboards was that a lot of people were misquoting data and did not know where to find accurate information about their department, college, and the university as a whole.
“So over the past year, multiple units have worked together and come together to form a new division,” Salvatore said. “These are not new units, but they have a new landing place.”
This new division is called strategic analytics and data illumination, also known as SADI for short. It is easily accessible to everyone. When you go to the Kean website, you can search SADI and the first result comes up. You would need your KeanNet ID to sign into the SADI Data Hub.
According to the data hub, its mission is to provide transparency through data visualization and strategic analytics that support excellence, equity, and research.
Salvatore gave credit to the Association of Institutional Research for their work on most of the dashboards and the research being accessible.
“They’ve been working hard over the past twelve months to create data in a visually appealing way, so you can access and ask questions about it,” he said.
One of the interesting features of the SADI data hub is that you can look at the Kean student success dashboard and data, as well as submit a data request form. The data hub states that it will take 48 business hours for the team to review any requests.
With the student success dashboard, Salvatore explains that it is a collaboration with California State University. Kean is one of four universities in the country to visualize data according to equity gaps.
Every couple of weeks, the data hub will add a new dashboard until they reach 28 full dashboards. At the time of this meeting, there have been around 8 dashboards uploaded.
Salvatore showed one of the dashboards during the senate meeting titled, “In Which Courses Do They Struggle?”, which showed courses that students might have had difficulty in.
You can sort this data based on the college, department, major, and academic year.
“It allows us to see opportunities by identifying which courses children have not been successful in the past by any particular college,” Salvatore explained. “This is not to pick on any particular college.”
For example, based on the dashboard, it has shown that the top three courses that students have not been successful in the college of business and public management are business law I, principles of accounting I, and principles of marketing.
Another dashboard that Salvatore highlighted was titled “What Are Our Historical Graduation Rates?”. Just like the “In Which Courses Do They Struggle?” dashboard, you can also sort out the data. It is based on the status of the graduating class and the year of retention.
Salvatore highlighted a third dashboard called, “Which Early Academic Behaviors Help Most With Closing the Gap?” It is important to note that the Data Hub mainly focuses on data at Kean campuses in the United States, and does not include the Wenzhou Kean Campus.
To wrap up his presentation, Salvatore showed a dashboard that related to the topic of institutional research. It is sorted by categories such as student enrollment, employee data, degrees awarded, graduation, and retention trends.
He also wanted everyone to know that the data hub is more than just a tool for individuals to see data; it is more so a source for you to start analyzing it.
“It’s for you to start analyzing some of our data, to ask big questions about your department, the success of students in your particular area, and to start setting goals or conduct some research to dive deeper into potential problems, or even more important, potential solutions,” Salvatore explained.
Later on in the meeting, Ahlawat brought up the topic of having the senate meetings in person. She explained that some members felt lost that the meetings were not in person, since they are currently held online.
Robyn Roebuck, director of operations at Kean Skylands, stated that she would be the only person that’ll be affected if the Kean senate meetings end up in person.
“I am the only person that’s on the Skylands campus full-time,” Roebuck said. “That’s my only issue, but that shouldn’t impact what the rest of the group feels or does.”
Matthew Halper, DMA, one of the senators who is also a music professor, suggested making a motion that the senate meetings should be in-person with the Kean community being able to watch it online, starting Tuesday, Nov. 1.
“My motion is that all in-person meetings should have an electronic format for all people to attend,” Halper said. “I want people to be able to attend electronically or remotely when we have in-person meetings.”
There was also a second motion for making every other senate meeting in-person with the virtual option, starting with the next meeting, which will take place on Tuesday, Oct. 18.
As a result, the senate agreed that the full senate meetings will have every other senate meeting in-person, with the first in-person meeting starting on Nov. 1.