I was thrilled to co-host the Provost Lecture for Social Analysis and Critical Thought with Dr. Chris Harris on Tuesday, March 22nd for the first time since November 2019. The audience was small but highly engaged and it felt wonderful to take an hour for in-person intellectually stimulating connection.

Dr. Paul Mihailidis, Associate Professor of Civic Media and Journalism in the School of Communication at Emerson College, engaged the audience in a “provocation” about the rise of the info-demic that accompanied the pandemic. He explained that through the multitude of online and social media platforms, a new phenomenon emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic: the proliferation of misinformation that could undermine our public health response and endanger lives. The rest of his talk was dedicated to examining the forces that allow an info-demic to spread. Dr. Mihailidis traced the rise of unregulated news outlets coinciding with the “hollowing out” of more traditional media, such as local newspapers and national news broadcasts on commercial television over the last three decades, creating numerous types of “distance” between humans that have become unhealthy for the world’s societies.

Paul has a special connection to Nevada State College. He is the faculty chair and director of the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change, where Dr. Chris Harris is a faculty member, and many of our students have studied under their guidance. In 2019, Dr. Mihailidis invited me to participate in the summer Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change along with Dr. Harris and four of our outstanding students: Ariel Hamilton, Samantha Cortez-Renteria, Claudia Larios, and Suman Randhawa.

I felt honored to give a salon, or seminar, for the faculty on Women in Leadership in Higher Education and moving up in academic administration. I had the chance to share my experiences and advice, both the triumphs and defeats, and engage in meaningful and thought-provoking conversation. I loved every minute of it and would return in a heartbeat.

In the past month, me and members of my team piloted a new strategy for project completion. The idea was to pick an important project, identify the desired outcome, assign every team member to a piece of the project, and then endeavor to complete the whole thing in exactly one month, with a slew of 15-minute check-in meetings along the way.

A relevant industry term for this approach, I believe, is a “sprint.” We called it a “Scrum,” perhaps incorrectly, but the name stuck, almost certainly because we’ve had so much fun with it. A particularly great idea might be a real “scrumdinger.” Honorary but part-time members of the scrum have participated as “Scrumsketeers.” Gregory Robinson, the genius who pitched this idea and helped bring it to fruition, has been anointed “Scrumbledore.”

Our inaugural scrum focused on best practices in course scheduling, and we’ll have more to report on that front after discussing the results with key stakeholders, but all in all it was a successful pilot. As a team, we managed to accomplish quite a bit in a relatively short period of time, and there’s a certain magic in everyone being able to play a complementary – and often equal – part in assembling the larger whole.

The last few weeks have involved a variety of projects, but when I look back the work that stands out the most is related to enrollment and budget, probably because they have such significant implications for the well-being of the college. In terms of enrollment efforts, perhaps the simplest approach is to look at what we are doing in relation to three major populations of students: