Because of public health measures in place, public comments were not given at tonight’s meeting. President Toler’s statement has been distributed to the Trustees.

Good evening. My comments to you tonight are mostly about gratitude and flexibility. Things we will all need strong doses of in the days, weeks and months to come as we figure out where and how to bend without breaking.

First, thank you to Jasmine Schuett for her service as the Student Trustee. You have been a wonderful advocate of student activities and the important impact they have on COD and on individual students. And welcome to Samiha Syed. We look forward to working with you.

I would like to offer special gratitude to our Learning Technologies team who are working tirelessly to support both full-time and adjunct faculty as we transition to remote teaching responsibilities. They anticipate our needs. They answer questions without judgment. They are a steady presence at an uncertain time.

While faculty are on the front lines of responding to student needs and we are committed to doing everything possible to support student success under these challenging circumstances, we know that many other groups are also providing critical college services at this time. Academic Support Services, Student Development, Records & Registration, Financial Aid, Admissions…are just a few of the essential functions we are grateful for and will continue to count on in the weeks and months ahead.

I think special gratitude also needs to be extended to our operating engineers, our groundskeepers and the COD police who will continue to keep our campus safe and secure long after the doors are locked.

As we offer flexibility to our students, we hope that the same flexibility will be evident throughout the institution. These are unprecedented times that will call for unprecedented measures. I am confident that we are capable of being remarkable in our response to this crisis. I am confident that full-time faculty, adjunct faculty, classified staff, managerial staff, the administrators and this board are ready to work together to figure out just how and where we need to bend.

On behalf of the faculty, I wish you all safety and health.

Good evening, my name is Christine Monnier, vice-president of the COD Faculty Association.

Over the past year or so, the Arts have been at the center of many discussions at the College, and often here at these meetings.

We all hope and expect that the upcoming Frida Kahlo exhibit will have a powerful impact on the college community and that many come to see College of DuPage as a center for the arts in our district.

But Frida will come and go. There have always been Arts at the college. Maybe not on the scale of Frida Kahlo, but we have always had arts. Arts that are part of the daily life of the college. Arts as an integral part of a well-rounded education, irrespective of major.

There have always been Arts at COD because of Art Education and Arts Educators. We grow artists here. Not all of them may end up with their name on an auditorium, but some students who pass through our doors end up in the local artistic world, and many get at least exposure to artistic productions that broaden their horizons.

Arts at COD never waited for Frida. For decades, there have been music ensembles, jazz orchestras, choirs, art galleries, and theater.

A few years ago, the Board of Trustees made the absolutely correct decision to bring back Buffalo Theater Ensemble. Tonight, the Faculty Association asks you to vote in favor of the item in your packet pertaining to BTE.

BTE deserved your support when you brought it back. It more than deserves your support now. Over its seasons since its return, BTE has provided our communities with brilliant productions across a variety of genres and was awarded Best Non-Profit Organization in Glen Ellyn by members of the community and the Glen Ellyn Chamber of Commerce.

I’m sure you’ve been to some or, maybe, all of those productions. You know how valuable BTE is to the college community.

So, the bottom line is this: there is no art at COD without Arts Faculty.
Thank you.

Good evening. First, I’d like to offer congratulations to my colleagues being recommended for tenure tonight. I am especially pleased that three of these newly tenured faculty are counselors who are truly at the front line with classroom faculty in supporting student success and retention.

Unfortunately, there are a couple names missing from that list, and as I’m sure you can already tell, faculty are disappointed, confused and concerned.
At In-Service, I joked about disagreements on the horizon. They arrived sooner than expected, but here we go.

Just because an action is legal, that doesn’t mean it stands up to the highest standards of moral character and ethical behavior.

In a complicated world, in a complicated profession like teaching, truthfulness should consider multiple streams of information and data. And trustworthiness, well that is earned. It is difficult to trust a system that changes midstream – especially when those changes are not even communicated to those of us doing the swimming.

There is no courtesy or dignity in putting off difficult conversations or even simply not having them.

The first step in fulfilling obligations and taking accountability is communicating the measure of those obligations.

In case it isn’t clear, I am weaponizing the stated core values of this institution. Much the same way this administration is preparing to weaponize the gathering and utilization of student performance data.

I don’t doubt that the best of intentions guided the creation of these core values, but they feel especially hollow right now. I don’t doubt that we have good intentions around using student performance data to help us improve, but I don’t have confidence in this administration pulling it off.

Any administrator who tells you that once tenure is awarded, that means we’re stuck with someone for the next 30 years, is basically warning you that they can’t do their job. That’s like me walking into a classroom of Intro to Business students and telling them that anyone who’s on academic probation should probably drop now because there’s no way you’re going to be able to succeed in this class.

Student success is our “main thing.” Student success is also a really complicated thing. This is a challenge that requires innovative, sometime experimental, individualized solutions. And… you need these solutions to play out in our classrooms.

The administration seems to view our contract as a collection of carrots and sticks. Carrots and sticks may be able to motivate those engaged in rote, mechanical work. There is nothing rote about teaching at a community college. You are thinking about extrinsic motivation when you need to be thinking about intrinsic motivation, and you are destroying it. It’s been dying a slow death all over this campus for a while now, and this kind of thing just accelerates it.

The biggest disappointment to me over the last week is the characterizations I heard of these faculty and the vehement declarations of needing to protect our students. These came from people who have never met these women. From people who have never seen them teach. From people who apparently didn’t view the classroom observation reports as even remotely credible.

If, as a faculty member, I let a narrow data point drive my impression and reaction to a student like this, you and my colleagues would be so disappointed in me. And that’s where I am. Disappointed.

We are in the midst of In-Service days that reconnect us all to each other and the institution before students return next week. Yesterday, we participated in advising training that will help strengthen classroom-based advising activities. Today, we rolled up our sleeves and worked on rating more than one thousand assignments that were collected as part of our critical thinking general education outcomes project. This assessment data will be reported out to all faculty later this semester so that we can begin discussing how best to further support the development of our students critical thinking skills. This work is an important part of the story we will tell HLC when they return next year.

You may remember approving a software purchase to help facilitate these kinds of activities – well, we put it to the test. Thank you for that, and much gratitude to Faon Grandinetti, Director of Assessment and Lisa Stock, AVP of Assessment & Student Success, for their organization and facilitation of todays work. And thanks to John Santiago, professor of philosophy and David Smith, professor of engineering for their leadership as co-chairs of the SLAC.

There is something special about the start of a decade. You don’t just reflect on the last year…you reflect on the last 10 years. And your hopes – they aren’t just for the next year, they are also for the next 10 years. I will not launch into a detailed retrospective, but, just as a point of reference, in January of 2010, we were one year into the “Breuder era” and we were on the verge of starting the major physical transformation of our campus. We’ve come a long way.

There is one word that sums up the pride I have in my colleagues and this place when I think about the last 10 years and that’s resilience. Turmoil, embarrassing headlines, probation, uncertainty, none of that stopped the people at COD from focusing on students and the community. My hope for the next decade is that we can use this resilience not just for survival, but use it to propel us forward. I hope that in 10 years, we look back and say “wow, who even knew this was possible?”

I don’t have any real predictions for the next decade – but, one thing that I am pretty sure of is that in 10 years we will look back and remember that this is the year we hosted the Frida Kahlo exhibit. I hope we remember not just the number of people it brought to our campus, but that everyone in here also remembers which painting was your favorite. And that everyone takes a moment to think about how Frida Kahlo is an incredibly appropriate exhibit for this institution at this moment in time. Because Frida Kahlo pretty much personified resilience.

So, as we start this new decade, CODFA looks forward to collaborating with all of our colleagues – adjunct faculty, administration, classified and managerial staff, and the Board – to crack the code of student success, to prepare the people of DuPage county for the 30’s and beyond, and to make this not just a first class institution, but a first choice institution.

Happy New Year!

Good evening. My name is Christine Monnier, professor of sociology at COD, and newly elected Vice-President of the COD Faculty Association. I have worked at the college for 19 years and occupied many institutional functions in faculty leadership. I will spare you the details of that long list. Just know that all these years at the college have been very professionally fulfilling for me.

Tonight on your agenda is a topic that is of great importance to me: Open Educational Resources. You will receive a presentation from Library Professor Denise Cote, who has been the heart and soul of OER initiatives at the college for many years. Unfortunately, for most of those years, Denise has worked without much institutional support. Thankfully, that is no longer the case. Provost Mark Curtiz-Chavez is now providing the much needed institutional “muscle” needed to propel OER at the college to the next level. We now have a working steering committee for OER, that provides both leadership and resources from across the college, to foster the adoption and development of OER.

I do not have to tell you how important this initiative is. We know that many students do not purchase course materials whose cost is prohibitive. We also know that a lack of course materials leads to poorer outcomes. On the OER steering committee, we see availability of open materials as central to student success.

I urge you to give Dr Cote’s presentation the attention it deserves, I hope that you will be as supportive of this initiative as our provost and the CODFA leadership.

Thank you.

Last night we welcomed program advisory committees from throughout COD to our campus for meetings and an appreciation reception. This event is a great example of how our staff, faculty and students can come together for impressive results. Barb Groves worked with culinary and hospitality faculty and students, as well as horticulture faculty, staff and students, to create an event that really did make everyone attending feel appreciated.

Charles Schwab once said, “The way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement.”

I think we often have a tendency to do one or the other – offer appreciation or offer encouragement, but we don’t think about how the two should really work together. Especially when it comes to student success. We do a lot to encourage students – inside and outside our classrooms. We may need to think more strategically about how to really appreciate them.

Faculty look forward to having these kinds of discussions around student success and how “one size fits all” measures are exactly what has fueled our current achievement on that front – which, by the way, is in line with most of our peer institutions. But if we are serious about moving the needle, we need to think creatively about our students. We need to think about appreciating them as individuals. We need to appreciate how they make us better teachers every day, better advisors every day, better Deans every day, a better President every day, a better institution every day.

We also need to make sure that we appreciate and encourage all constituent groups – whether they teach, counsel, protect, fix, organize – whether they do that for 10 hours/week or 60 hours/week. Developing the best in our people will help us develop the best our students.

Finally, I think we can all agree that it’s nice to get back to a more normal rhythm around here. I look at what is happening around us and I am especially grateful that we were able to reach a compromise that will support innovative teaching, first class curriculum, continuous improvement and, ultimately, student success. I’ve talked in the past about how learning is hard. One of the things that makes learning hard is the listening – not just hearing, but listening. Thank you, all of you, for listening when we really needed you to.