Un-Town Halls

We invited our CNAS Equity Advisor, Prof. Amy Litt, to join us for our inaugural anti-town hall.  

Attendees: Amy Litt, Bryan Scott, Elizabeth Finney, Brian Siana, Flip Tanedo; Marie Lau was unable to attend but prepared a statement that was shared with the group.

Discussion

• We shared our perspectives of the climate in our department. While there is work to do, we do not think anyone is acting maliciously. Members of our department are doing their best and are acting in good faith.

• Each of our individual lived experiences can shape different perspectives of how to move forward. 

• We reflected on key events over the last two years that have shaped the equity climate in our department. One goal for our group is to repair trust between groups that may have been polarized against one another based on how they perceived these events.

• We discussed the CNAS vision for supporting equity across departments. We proposed a concrete investment from CNAS: an investment in a set of GSR positions for departments to support students who are leading impactful equity efforts. This would incentivize department-level support for equity work. Separately, we request monetary support for department awards (CV items) for students who do equity work

• We discussed the comprehensive exam as a topic that has been particularly polarizing and identified the ways in which different perspectives have been broadly misunderstood. We pledge to have a future "anti-town hall" meeting with members from the comprehensive exam committee to discuss these in a more productive way.

• We acknowledged that there are groups within our department who are not well represented in equity discussions. International scholars and postdocs, for example.

• We reiterated that communication is a challenge in our department. While individuals are well meaning, we do not yet have an adequate way for members split across four buildings and multiple specialized subfields to connect with one another.

• We agreed on the significance of departmental social events (e.g. picnics) given the barriers between groups. We recognized that this effort is brought up often when we discuss concrete steps that would improve the climate. 

Action Items

• Amy will bring to the Dean our proposals for how CNAS can support department equity efforts.

• We agreed to post this summary statement on our public-facing website along with a group photo. 

• We will share our summary with the graduate climate committee.

Our April 7th meeting focused on the comprehensive exams.

Attendees: Elizabeth Finney, Marie Lau, Owen Long, Kirill Shtengel, Brian Siana, Flip Tanedo.

To be posted: discussion bullet points and next-steps, as soon as these are approved from the attendees. Tentative list as follows:

• The goal of the comprehensive exam is to test for a core set of competencies for a graduate degree in our department.

• The department does not use the comprehensive exam to trim the number of graduate students, nor does it have any incentive to do so.

• The comprehensive exam and the number of attempts is mandated by UCR Graduate Division. The department does not have the ability to change these requirements.

• A core part of the exam is fairness. We discussed the ways that this is already enforced by the committee and the ways in which we hope to improve. 

• Guidelines on what topics may appear as well as grading criteria should be shared equally among students. (E.g. partial credit when self-identifying a mistake.)

• Ideally, failing the comprehensive exam should be an opportunity for growth: not just to “study harder,” but to identify topics and skills where one can improve.

• The comprehensive exam committee reads all concerns sent to them, it ensures that all exams are graded blindly, and goes out of its way to ensure the integrity of the exam. 

• Three distinct phenomena that draw from the current student culture around the exam are: (1) persistent rumors about the exam (e.g. used to reduce the number of students), (2) accusations of examiner maliciousness, and (3) a stigma that those who leave the program have less value.

• We generalized a bit and talked about the type of professional development that grad students need, and from whom those skills should be taught. 

Photo (courtesy of Brian Siana)

A meeting with Owen Long to discuss our visions for the department.

Attendees: Owen Long, Archana Aravindan, Liz Finney, Marie Wingyee Lau,  Ananya Paul,  Bryan Scott, Brian Siana, Flip Tanedo

Summary (final approval pending)

• Prof. Owen Long will be taking on the role of chair of our department this fall.

• The chair is the head academic of the department. (Wendi is the analog for the staff.) 

  • The chair's responsibility is to make sure that the department fulfills its academic mission.

  • The chair oversees new appointments, teaching, and issues in the department.

  • Teaching assignments are typically delegated to the vice chair. 

  • Owen welcomes input about the department so that he can be as informed as possible in this duty.

  • The chair negotiates with the dean for limited resources for the department. 

  • There is some flexible funding that the department has, one vision for this is to outfit the reading room with audio for hybrid meetings. 

• Discussion: staffing and perception of staffing issues

  • Part of the staff turnover comes from navigating remote work with in-person work. 

• Discussion: pedagogy

  • Perception that undergraduate students are divided by those who were able to learn effectively while remote, and those that really struggled.

  • We discussed the value of lecture time and what effective pedagogy looks like. One vision that is backed by education research are flipped classrooms; we discussed the ways in which this has been implemented in undergraduate and graduate courses.

  • What can the chair do to promote effective pedagogy? Faculty have autonomy in how they teach and what they teach, and it can be hard to change habits. As a super structure, one thing the department can do is provide context for faculty merit and promotion files to explain that sometimes effective pedagogy (e.g. flipped classrooms) come with negative teaching evaluations. 

• Discussion: international students

  • There is a sense that those who have not been international students do not appreciate some of the challenges that international graduate students must navigate. 

  • For example, work permits take a long time to process and can cause delays. There is a perception that there could be more understanding of some of these issues.

  • The graduate advising committee is pushing for more equitable TA assignments so that international and domestic students TA the same amount in their first year. In the future, we will try to avoid having first quarter TA assignments for international students. 

• Discussion: general aspects of being a student. 

  • Finding/creating community can be challenging.

  • The astronomy group does this very well. Events like astro coffee help a lot.

  • There was a strong message that both the undergraduates and graduates would like more structure for more interactions with other physicists.

    • The graduate students worry that their social group narrows to their research group. Would it be possible to organize events to help graduate students socialize across sub-disciplines? (E.g. an informal open house series to visit each other's labs, share in the journey of being a graduate student)

    • SPS wants to do something similar for undergraduates. There is a desire for more ways to meet faculty as potential honors thesis advisors, not just the faculty happened to teach the undergraduate courses. 

  • We discussed the barriers preventing these things from happening: in some sense they need to be student-generated rather than imposed by the faculty. However, everyone is exhausted and worn out. 

• Discussion: inclusiveness

  • Would it be possible to have a prayer/lactation room in our department?  There are aspects of individuals' lives that may benefit from privacy.