News for and about University of Portland faculty and staff.
The program for Faculty Development Day, scheduled for Tuesday, May 8, is now available through the Committee on Teaching and Scholarship. To save paper, the committee encourages faculty to download a copy of the program in advance so they can use it to orient themselves between sessions using their mobile devices. A limited number of paper copies of the program will be available on the day of the program.
The provost’s office is pleased to announce recipients of the Summer 2018 Provost’s Initiative for Undergraduate Research awards. These faculty members have been selected to collaborate with and mentor an undergraduate on a co-designed research experience during the 2018 summer semester:
Email ur@up.edu with questions or call John Orr, assistant provost, at x7857.
The University of Portland’s food service provider, Bon Appétit, will no longer provide plastic drinking straws in the Bauccio Commons or Cove, or any other food or beverage outlet on campus, effective April 18, 2018. Biology professor Tara Prestholdt and Bon Appétit’s Kirk Mustain point out that UP uses approximately 9,000 straws a month, which would stretch to over a mile joined end to end. That translates to over 13 miles of straws a year, which translates into more than 55 miles of straws over a typical four-year college span. Starting next year, every college graduate of UP will help prevent the use of enough plastic straws to equal the height of a 20,000 story building, stretch from Portland to Salem, or build a straw bridge across the Sea of Cortez. According to environmental studies professor Steve Kolmes, UP boasts the first University dining service in the U.S. to successfully institute a campus initiative to ban plastic straws.
Sustainability is a hallmark at UP. Shiley Hall is LEED Platinum certified; Fields and Schoenfeldt Halls are LEED Gold certified; and the Clark Library and Beauchamp Center are LEED Silver certified. Bon Appétit partners with local farmers when possible, and the University’s biodiesel processor converts used vegetable oil into biodiesel fuel. The University was also the first university on the West Coast to eliminate disposable plastic water bottles in 2010, and was honored as a Champion of Sustainability by McKinstry, a full-service consulting, construction, energy, and facility services firm with offices around the country, in 2015. Fr. Mark L. Poorman, C.S.C., joined 200 colleges and universities in signing the statement on the Paris Climate Agreement, and annually, the Presidential Advisory Committee on Sustainability (PACS), comprised of students, faculty, and staff, identifies continuous opportunities for sustainable objectives. Most recently PACS issued an Earth Day challenge to the UP community: students, faculty, and staff are encouraged to make a commitment to take at least one tangible step toward increasing sustainability on campus.
The Franz Center for Leadership, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation will present its annual $100K Challenge Venture Competition on Saturday, April 28, in Shiley Hall room 301. This competition provides students with the opportunity to receive feedback on their proposed ventures from within the local entrepreneurial community, win cash awards, and move on to the opportunity to acquire seed funding that will help advance an entrepreneurial opportunity to the next stage. All faculty, staff, and students are welcome to attend and watch student presentations.For more information contact Peter Rachor, Franz Center, at rachor@up.edu.
Jessica Murphy Moo has been appointed editor of Portland magazine, the award-winning publication of the University of Portland. A writer, editor, and teacher, Murphy Moo comes to UP from Seattle, where she has been senior communications manager for the Seattle Opera, as well as an adjunct instructor teaching nonfiction writing for the University of Washington’s Professional and Continuing Education program. She was formerly a staff editor at The Atlantic and fiction editor at Memorious, an online literary magazine.
Murphy Moo, who will begin her role at the University in July, follows the late Brian Doyle as the editor of the magazine, a literary publication that reflects both Catholic tradition and a unique Pacific Northwest aesthetic. In addition to her fiction and nonfiction work in various literary journals and magazines, Murphy Moo also profiled a group of Benedictine nuns who live on Washington’s Shaw Island for Portland magazine in 2008.
Murphy Moo says her top priority when she arrives will be to get to know the people who comprise the UP community and their stories. “In my experience, most people don’t know that their life and their work tell a story. The value of writers resides in our ability to connect the dots between a person’s every day and a person’s heart. In that space, story and mystery abound.”
Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, Image, and Memorious, and Signs of Life, an anthology for Seattle-based writers. Her nonfiction has appeared in Portland magazine, Poets & Writers Magazine, ParentMap, The Tablet, Boston College Magazine, and The Atlantic Online, among other publications. In 2006, she earned a nine-month postgraduate writing fellowship from Image magazine, an award given annually to a writer of Christian commitment who is working on a first book.
When she isn’t writing, she and her husband can be found chasing after their three children and finding the humor in things.
For more information contact marketing and communications at x7202 or mktg@up.edu.
The performing and fine arts department presents a show of fine arts students’ art projects in Buckley Center Gallery from April 9 to 26. All are welcome to come visit and celebrate our students and their hard work over the spring semester. For more information, contact Pat Bognar, performing and fine arts, at bognar@up.edu.
A staff forum will take place on Wednesday, April 25, from noon to 1 p.m., in Bauccio Commons, according to Sandy Chung, human resources. The goal of the forum is to uncover shared learnings since the Sunday, April 22 Wally Awards. Our path forward is one that reinforces our values and all that is best in our UP community. We invite input from as many community members as possible. There will be time for an open microphone, although time will be limited so that we can hear from as many staff community members as possible. In addition, there will be a handout available asking for specific recommendations about what our priorities might be for the University as we go forward.
Time spent attending the forum is work time, and staff may schedule a 30-minute lunch period before or after the forum, whichever works best for each staff member and his/her office. If you are unable to attend, we encourage you to share your thoughts and suggestions via the methods noted at the bottom of this email.
Anonymous Reporting Address:
Email: hr@up.edu
Interoffice Mail: Office of Human Resources
US Mail: Office of Human Resources, University of Portland, 5000 N. Willamette Blvd., Portland Oregon 97203
University president Rev. Mark L. Poorman, C.S.C., and the Presidential Advisory Committee on Sustainability recently issued an Earth Day challenge to the UP community: “What Can You Do To Help?” Students, faculty, and staff are encouraged to make a commitment to take at least one tangible step that is within your own control toward increasing sustainability on campus. All through the month of April, the committee is asking you to make a commitment and share it with us.
The women’s soccer team declares they are passionate about our environment and “vows to reduce our energy consumption during the month of April and beyond. By unplugging chargers and appliances while not in use, and turning off all lights after use, we can all make a huge difference! Please join us in reducing the amount of energy we consume on a daily basis. Saving energy and helping our environment is just turning off one switch or unplugging one appliance away!”
Share your commitment via sustainability@up.edu. At the end of the month, the most impactful sustainability commitment will be recognized and the individual or team who made the commitment will be featured in various campus media.
This week’s post to the Teaching and Learning Collaborative blog concerns a topic not every professor finds comfortable: boundaries, and not the dotted lines you see around countries on a map. Why are boundaries important? Where does your responsibility as a professor begin and end? What are the signs that you need a boundary adjustment? Answers to those questions and more can be found in this article on the TLC blog.
For more information contact Zachary Simmons, psychological sciences, at simmonsz@up.edu.
All faculty and instructors must turn in their course pack materials for summer classes to the printing services office as soon as possible, as the deadline of April 20 has passed, according to Kassie Hansen, printing services. In addition, course packs for fall 2018 are due before leaving campus at the conclusion of spring semester. The lead time is needed so printing services staff can obtain copyright permissions and organize the packs for production before the start of summer and fall semesters. Submit requests to printjobs@up.edu.
For more information contact printing services at 7200 or hansenk@up.edu.