Support Page Content
Provost's Communications Summer 2020
Dr. Steve Perez's messages to students, faculty, and staff.
Message to Faculty July 28, 2020
July 28, 2020
Dear Faculty Colleagues,
We are part way through the summer, and I hope this email finds you and your loved ones well and healthy. Following the announcement that all non-essential travel is suspended through the next academic year and while we are making plans for how to work remotely through the fall semester, I want to reach out to you as I imagine the circumstances have created significant uncertainties regarding the tenure and promotion process. The impacts the COVID-19 pandemic has created for all of us are significant and almost unbelievable. For you these include moving to virtual classes, limited access to laboratories, limited access to library materials, restrictions on the ability to work closely with community partners, restriction on travel and conference attendance (among many other effects). Each limitation and restriction has put some faculty in a position where reaching the criteria for retention, promotion, and tenure may appear more difficult. While the campus and local chapter of CFA have agreed to a process where a faculty member may extend their probationary period for one year to allow faculty more flexibility in their path toward tenure, I encourage all reviewers to be thoughtful of the circumstances of the pandemic as they review faculty members’ files and how these circumstances might have impacted the ability of faculty to meet criteria as defined in the departmental RTP policies. This is not to say that those criteria are not important, they clearly are and we should have high expectations of each other. However, find ourselves in unique circumstances that were most certainly not in the minds of departments as they developed their criteria.
Along these lines, I commit to you as faculty that when I do my reviews in the coming years, I will not forget these circumstances and the outstanding work that our faculty did and are doing to help our students and each other be successful. Thank you for all you do to support our students and each other.
Thank you,
Steve Perez
Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs
Fall Schedule of Classes
May 29, 2020
Hello everyone,
Below you can see a message that is going to be distributed to students today. This is a preview of it, and I’d like to offer some context for it.
As you know, when the Fall 2020 semester schedule was created the University was in a face-to-face environment. Now, departments are working hard to revise the schedule to indicate which classes will be virtual and which ones we will request to teach in-person (using all appropriate safeguards for health and safety). The message below explains those schedule changes to students.
Although we won’t know for awhile whether our requests to the Chancellor’s Office will be granted, registration for students re-opens on Monday, so we want to provide them with the best indication we can of the modality we hope to offer for any given learning experience. The schedule is the best University-wide tool we have to communicate about course modalities, but naturally it doesn’t replace the specific communication that will need to come from colleges, departments and individual faculty about what teaching and learning will look like in a given class.
Thank you for engaging in that follow-up communication, and for everything you do to help our students succeed.
Steve Perez
Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs
Sacramento State (a caring campus)
Archive of Provost Communications