August 2025

CFR Leadership and Other News

From your CFR Chair, Dene Grigar:

On Friday, August 29, 2025, CFR held a half-day retreat. A copy of our agenda can be found here. I thought it would be useful to post some of the outcomes from the meeting relating to leadership and other news.

We elected Wendy Olson as our Vice-Chair. This means that Wendy will serve as CFR Chair in 2026-2028.

We also elected Paul Bonamie to the position of Recording Secretary. Paul did this work last year, and we appreciated the care he took with the minutes from each meeting.

I will be serving as the Tenure-Track Representative to the Faculty Senate Steering Committee this year and Shiloh Green Soto  will serve as the Career-Track Representative to Steering. For those of you new to Faculty Senate processes, the Steering Committee plans the agenda for the Faculty Senate meetings. In other words, nothing gets done in Senate without it being approved by Steering.

Laurie Drapela will serve as the faculty representative to the Chancellor’s Advisory Council, as she did last year so well.

Alex Spradlin and Joann LoSavio are serving on a CFR Ad Hoc Committee to research a strategy for WSU Vancouver to make food better available on campus.

Some of you may remember the Faculty-Student Mixer last fall that CFR co-hosted and co-sponsored with the ASWSUV. We will be hosting another one this fall on Friday, September 26 from 5:30-8:00 p.m. in the Firstenberg Student Commons. Make plans to join us.

I will be listing the Interim Chancellor’s time on our campus on the CFR Calendar so that we all can know when she is available in-person.

The Faculty Assembly meeting takes place on Friday, September 26 from 9:15-10:45 a.m. The Interim Chancellor will be present in-person at this meeting and will be taking questions.

Survey, Continued

VCAA Christine Portfors met with the College of Arts and Sciences Program Leaders on Monday, August 25, and reported that she had spoken with the rpk Group about some of the concerns posted on the CFR Blog that faculty had about the survey. She is meeting with the group on Tuesday, August 26, to talk further about the question of anonymity that faculty raised.

Stay tuned for updates.

WSU Vancouver Survey

On Wednesday, August 20, the Interim Chancellor Sandra Haynes sent the WSU Vancouver community that is part of the Administrative Services Review aimed at preparing us for the work the rpk GROUP to “strengthen WSU Vancouver for today and the future.” I am not sure if you have started the survey, but I just finished it. Here are some things to know:

  • It is best to type the responses in Word and paste them into the “line”.  In other words, there is no textbox that allows us to easily read through our responses and fine tune them
  • You cannot save as you go, but luckily it does not time out
  • At the end you can “save” the survey and print it out, but you do not know that until you get to the end of the survey. I do not know where it saved to and am still looking for the “doc”
  • There are 22 screens of questions divided into what is working, what is not working, and suggestions we may have
  • It is clear that we are talking only about our own campus administration
  • It does not touch on academics or our college issues; it is focuses on campus processes
  • It took me two hours to complete a draft of it
  • There is NO deadline for when to turn it in
  • There is no indication about how rpk plans to organize and synthesize this information

Let me or your CFR Representative know if you have any comments or questions. I will continue to collect items that we all need to be aware of as we undertake this activity.