Academic Affairs Newsletter

Fall 2011-Spring 2012

Dear Friends,

CCA Provost Mark Breitenberg

As we approach the start of the new academic year, there are many reasons for optimism and excitement about the future of CCA. Despite tough economic times, our enrollment numbers are up, including the largest percentage of entering international students in the college’s history.

A host of new initiatives will be launched in Academic Affairs and across the college, and we will continue to build the excellence of our faculty through ranked, unranked, and visiting artist hires, with an aggressive focus on diversity.

Discussions about the future use of our new property are also planned for the Board of Trustees as well as the college community.

I remain enthusiastic about the participation of many voices in the goals we have set for Academic Affairs. The structure of divisions led by directors, associate and assistant directors, begins its second three-tear term this fall.

I’m pleased to welcome two new directors: Andrew Lyndon in fine art and Emily McVarish in design.

We also welcome changes in the leadership of six of our programs:

Sue Redding, interim chair, Industrial Design
Allison Smith, chair, Sculpture
Tim Smith, associate chair, MBA in Design Strategy
Antje Steinmuller, interim chair, Interior Design
Rick Vertolli, chair, Animation
Sandra Vivanco, chair, Diversity Studies

Once again, the directors and assistant and associate directors held a two-day, off-site meeting early in the summer and a second one in August to assess our work from the previous year and to plan for 2011–12.

President Stephen Beal also held two retreats for the Senior Cabinet to coordinate individual department goals and strategies with those of the college. Based on these meetings, I’d like to mention some of the key initiatives on which Academic Affairs will focus this year.

Faculty Governance

I’m very pleased to welcome the new leadership of the three faculty governance committees at CCA as well as their new members.

Mitchell Schwarzer will begin his term as president of the Executive Committee this year and Kim Anno will serve as vice-president.

Donald Fortescue will chair the Appointments, Promotions, and Tenure Committee.

Jason Johnson will lead the Curriculum Committee.

The full membership of these important bodies can be found in the Academic Affairs section at the CCA website.

I would like to thank the faculty members who have taken on these critical roles, and I urge all of you to bring your ideas and concerns to them.

Improving Communication

The success of our leadership structure depends on communication within Academic Affairs as well as with other departments at the college, particularly

Student Affairs
Enrollment Services
Operations
Communications

It is also critical that all of our faculty are engaged in the ideas and goals of their respective programs. This year we are making a concerted effort to widen the involvement of the entire CCA community in the dialogues about our future plans and goals. It is especially important to bring all levels of our faculty into these conversations.

Diversity

Diversifying our faculty remains a critically important objective and challenge. To begin the year, the first all-chairs meeting will include a workshop devoted to strategies that will help us to recruit top faculty who will contribute to our diversity.

In addition, we will continue working with faculty leadership to ensure our multipronged approach to faculty development and pedagogy workshops is infused with an emphasis on diversity and cultural literacy.

Retention

This year we will continue the collegewide effort to increase our retention and graduation rates. In addition to the implications for the college budget, improved retention represents improvement in student success and satisfaction.

Our target over the next five years is to increase first-year retention to 80 percent and maintain overall retention of 87 percent. As part of our collegewide effort to improve retention after the first year, the directors will continue to create their own “bridge plan” that will introduce first-year students to their prospective majors in a variety of ways and create enthusiasm for their future education at CCA. Attention to this issue by faculty in the classrooms and studios is also critical to our success.

ENGAGE at CCA, Impact IMPACT Social Entrepreneurship Awards

In just a few terms the new ENGAGE at CCAprogram has already made a vital contribution to our students’ experience, and I continue to believe that these community-based projects embody the values, aspirations, and pedagogy of CCA.

In the next two years, we would like each program at CCA to have at least one ENGAGE course embedded in its curriculum. We look forward to your involvement in this important collegewide initiative.

In addition, this past year we launched the first Impact IMPACT Social Entrepreneurship Awards; the three winning teams have been working over the summer on their projects. A presentation of their work will be held September 29. This year we’ll hold the second competition for IMPACT projects.

Alumni Success, Career Services

As we continue to see higher expectations for professional opportunities among our new students and their parents, it becomes increasingly important to our recruitment efforts to tell the stories of our alumni success, build our internships, and share with our students the many career paths available to them.

Our academic programs will be working this year to provide content for the new “Alumni Success” section of the program pages, and we have recently brought in a consultant to look at ways we can improve the success of the Office of Career Services. Additionally, each of the divisions is planning workshops and courses devoted to professional practice.

New Searches

As part of our ongoing effort to increase CCA’s ranked faculty, this year we’re hoping to undertake four or five tenure-track searches as well as ranked, nontenure searches. At the time of this writing, we are discussing which disciplines and programs to target for tenure-track searches, and I encourage faculty members to participate in this conversation within their programs.

We will also continue the search for a new chair of Industrial Design and launch a new search for the chair of Interior design.

Humanities & Sciences

Many of you have been involved in the collegewide discussion led by the Joint Committee to recommend changes to the humanities and sciences curriculum and structure. This conversation has already raised important issues about our overall educational mission and identity as a college, and I am looking forward to the involvement of the faculty of the humanities and sciences programs as well as the rest of the college in the ongoing discussions this year.

Interaction Design

This fall marks the launch of CCA’s new undergraduate program in Interaction Design, a “natural” for CCA in many ways. We’re located at the center of this industry here in the Bay Area. It is a design practice that has become important in many disciplines, and it incorporates a variety of humanities and sciences fields: ethnography, cognitive psychology, narrative and critical thinking.

Led by chair Kristian Simsarian, our ambition is to create a program that prepares students for a professional career, provides a broad liberal arts and sciences education, and creates a center for interaction design that influences other programs at CCA as well.

In addition, we are working on a plan for the “gizmo lab,” a resource for all of our students across the programs to receive technical support and guidance for their digital-based projects.

NEW TENURED FACULTY

Congratulations to Jordan Kantor and David Huffman, who were awarded tenure this past year.

Jordan Kantor, associate professor of the Painting/Drawing and Visual Studies programs, is a practicing painter with an international exhibition record as well as a writer on the subject of contemporary art.

David Huffman, associate professor of Painting/Drawing, has recently exhibited his paintings in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles. He is also an active member of CCA’s President’s Diversity Steering Group (PDSG).

NEW RANKED TENURE-TRACK HIRES

Michelle Murillo
Printmaking

Michelle comes to CCA from the University of Texas at Arlington, where she has been an assistant professor of Printmaking and Drawing since 2007. She holds a bachelor of fine arts, Painting, from Boston University, and a master of fine arts in Printmaking from the University of Alberta. In addition to her many group and solo shows, Michelle conducted an international course and exhibition of prints in Buenos Aires and curated an exhibition of silkscreen prints, artist books, and digital prints in Uruguay.

Anne Shea
Writing and Literature

Anne joins CCA after holding the position of associate professor at Redlands College. She earned a bachelor of arts in English at Syracuse University and her doctor of philosophy in Comparative Literature from the University of California, San Diego. At Redlands she created and led the Composition and Writing Across the Curriculum program. She has published widely on narrative and rhetoric, specifically in the contexts of disenfranchised populations and cultural alterity. Anne also brings an expertise in ESL pedagogy to CCA.