Editorial: Dear WCU faculty, may we talk?

The 53rd WCU Faculty Senate (2019-2020)

In this post:

• Faculty Communications
• Inside WCU/Cerkl

I get it, my dear colleagues, your work mailbox is flooded. In my 12 years here, I’ve watched with alarm as the number of official WCU weekly official university communications emails began to expand geometrically. My friends, I resisted implementing clever Outlook tools like rule wizards, flags and folders convinced that succumbing to them would be an admission of failure on my part. Then at the same time I joined a large research collaboration, the Faculty Senate and the UNC Faculty Assembly, and I had to capitulate on this account too: the floodgates were open.

Despite University policies mandating that your read official communications, I am sympathetic to all of you would would send automatically all emails not from students or immediate colleagues to the Clutter folder to be read at the end of the week… maybe. You may de facto already do this by scanning subjects lines and make millisecond decisions to see if any particular email is worth even a fraction of your time. (But hey, you followed the link and read up to this point, so I’m impressed.)

But, you see, this puts us in Faculty Governance in a bit of a bind. How do we, your elected representatives let you know in a timely fashion what issues require your input as they directly affect you? Do we need to send subject lines with emojis and ALL CAPS to get you to click?

So please indulge me as we undertake a months-long experiment on Faculty Senate/Body of the Faculty communications, to see if at least the essential current knowledge is tunneling through between us.

This year, University Communications and Marketing has adopted a new communications platform based on Cerkl, Inside WCU, which will allow you to get daily or weekly news digests, and let you tailor the content of your feed for these digests. At the Faculty Senate, we have created this blog and a corresponding RSS feed (Real Simple Syndication) into the dedicated WCU faculty news feed, in the hope that you can find regular updates and have a good sense of what your Faculty Senate is working on without having to dig through agendas and reports. For this to work you need a promise from us. We promise to be essential, concise and parsimonious in what we send out, so that you don’t have to dedicate too much of your cognitive load into getting and adequate sense of our work. Please, would you give this a chance?

Enrique Gómez is the 2019-2020 Faculty Chair. He is no angel.