Office of the Provost Newsletter November 2024
Dear Faculty and Staff,
I hope the 2024-2025 academic year is going well for all of you.
It feels good to see all the new faces on campus as we welcomed 40 new tenure-track faculty, ~5543 first-time freshman, ~4324 first-time transfer, and ~1664 new graduate students onto our beautiful campus! We are pleased that our overall enrollment is at 36,848 and represents a 1.3% increase from last year. Thank you for everything each and every one of you did to make this possible. We could not have done it without you.
Similar to last year, the four-day New Tenure-Track Faculty Orientation was well received and the new faculty shared positive feedback about their experiences. We are planning to hire 42 new faculty members for Fall 2025 and these hires are underway, pending budgetary considerations. The Equity in Faculty Hiring initiative remains in place and continues to successfully use an equity lens to guide our efforts in recruiting a diverse group of faculty members.
Last week, I wrapped up the annual virtual Retention, Tenure & Promotion [RTP] Roadshow along with Christina von Mayrhauser, Interim Vice President for Faculty Affairs, and Sylvia Macauley, Chair of the Personnel Planning & Review Committee (PP&R). The eleven sessions provided opportunities for our academic colleagues to ask questions, become more informed about timelines, updates, and the overall RTP process, and become more familiar with the RTP process.
To share more information about our budget challenges, budget memos were sent out in June and August, co-signed by Colin Donahue, CSUN’s Vice President for Administration and Finance, and me. In addition, along with Vice President Donahue, I have visited all of the colleges to discuss our budget challenges with faculty and staff. Thank you for engaging, asking questions, and sharing your points of concern. Thank you also for attending the University Planning and Budget Group (UPBG) meetings in strong numbers and learning more about our budget planning for the current and coming year.
As part of our focus on increasing student retention rates, we continue with our efforts to enhance student advisement. Toward this end, we have hired Directors of College Advising, with the last such hire currently underway. Since we aim toward a caseload model of advising starting Fall 2025, we are hiring new advisors and also investing in advisement space within the academic colleges.
In closing, I appreciate all that you do and remain deeply grateful for your dedication to student success, at both the undergraduate and graduate level.
Wishing all of you a productive rest of the Fall semester and academic year.
Meera