Annual Reviews

Long time, no blog posts. First of all, let me apologize for the snow this week. The family minivan has an appointment to get the winter tires removed and the summer tires installed, and the gods of irony will get their due.

On Elephants

Elephants figure large (ba dum boom, ching!) in English idiom.

• The elephant in the room.
• Seeing the elephant.
• Blind men and an elephant.
• White elephants.
• Pink elephants.
• When the elephant dances.
• Elephants never forget.

Elephants are large, expensive, complicated, dangerous, gentle, magnificent, social, intelligent, and most assuredly non-ignorable. Sometimes other colleges at the U think of CLA as an elephant, some days beating out a trail for others to follow, and other days blundering around (see dancing elephants and mice).

Here in UGE we have a baby elephant of our own: the Career Readiness Initiative. It’s new. It’s complex. It’s going to grow into something huge and be pretty expensive. You can no longer ignore it. It’s going to establish or widen some paths in CLA, and we think it’s going to be a wonder and magnificent when it is fully grown.

We are UGE

The t-shirts we give incoming students are emblazoned with “WE ARE LIBERAL ARTS.” It’s proud; it’s unapologetic; it’s in your face. I like it. In the process of trying to create an “annual report” for the Office of Undergraduate Education, I had to come to grips with who were are in UGE, and come to grips with it in such a way that I can explain to outsiders who we are and what we do. It took me seven pages to list our primary areas along with brief explanations what we do in those areas and how many people work in those areas.

Budget Basics for UGE

CLA Undergraduate Education is a big unit with a big budget. There seems to be a lot of mystery, folklore, and curiosity about our budget, and CLA budgeting more generally, so here is a brief introduction to the budget in CLA and UGE.