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HomeAbout CommunicationsMay 2024 Senate Report

May 6, 2024: University Senate Report

Office of the Provost

Provost's Updates

CAS Dean Candidate Visits

Three candidates for dean of the College of Arts and Sciences are visiting Stony Brook the week of May 6. Each candidate will deliver a public presentation to share how their background and experience have prepared them to assume the role of CAS dean at SBU. Each candidate will be named one day in advance of their public presentation. More details about the public presentations and candidates are available on the CAS Dean Search webpage.

Budget Model Presentations

Provost Carl Lejuez has met with several academic departments and groups to share details about a revised budget model under development at the university. The goal is to identify and implement a model that better aligns budgets with university strategy. Key outcomes include increasing financial transparency and clarity, and enabling multi-year planning to allow units greater agency in strategizing for their programs' long-term development. Provost Lejuez, Executive Vice President for Health Sciences William Wertheim, and Senior Vice President for Finance and Administration Jed Shivers are co-sponsors of the budget model project.

Anti-Racist and Inclusive Pedagogy

The cohort selected for this initiative have concluded their series of four interactive workshops designed to support faculty in developing or revising a course that integrates practices of Inclusive and Anti-Racist Pedagogy. The workshops were facilitated by Crystal Fleming, a scholar of racism and professor in the Department of Sociology. Participants will submit a report in addition to a syllabus for a revised or newly developed course.

AcademIc Programs

Recently approved programs:

  • Health Science BS (program revision; 4/2024)
  • Occupational Therapy OTD (new program; 3/2024)
  • Accounting and Analytics MS (program revision; 3/2024)
  • Biochemistry and Cell Biology BS/MS (new combined program; local approval only)
  • Africana Studies/Public Health BA/MPH (new combined program; local approval only)

Faculty Development

Navigating Stony Brook University

This program for early career faculty offered a workshop on Introduction to Research Mentoring on March 22. More programming will begin in the fall starting with New Faculty Orientation in August.

Emerging Leaders

This program offers development opportunities for the next generation of higher education leaders in research, education, and administration. The next event is the spring retreat and will take place on Monday, May 20.

Excellence in Teaching Program

This program includes a series of workshops and hands-on activities focusing on teaching and learning. The next event is the spring retreat and will take place on Tuesday, May 21.

Chairs Retreat

The annual retreat for departmental chairs will take place on Monday, May 20.

Provost's Lecture Series

The final Provost's Lecture Series for this academic year took place on April 4 and featured Professors Christopher Gobler of School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS) and Sharon Nachman of Pediatrics from the Renaissance School of Medicine. For more information about these events please visit Provost's Lectures and Talks.

COACHE (Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education)

The report and summary presentation can be found in the SBU COACHE webpage. Next steps include discussing with the Senate Executive and preparing an action plan for the Fall 2024.

Academic Affairs

Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching 

Enrollment Management

Office of Financial Aid & Scholarship Services

FAFSA Processing

To date, we've received 16,336 FAFSAs for our incoming first-year students. Unfortunately, 3,204 of these were rejected due to signature or other errors. We've proactively reached out to this population, advising them on corrective actions to rectify these issues. Our efforts last week resulted in nearly 1,000 students making necessary edits, indicating that our process is indeed effective.

This leaves us with 13,132 successfully processed FAFSAs, many of which arrived with known issues flagged by the US Department of Education. Currently, we've provided financial aid packages for 6,674 students. Among them, 3,420 are Pell-eligible students, and 275 are EOP students. Identifying eligible students for aid has been a top priority, requiring significant time and effort. This places us at a progress rate of approximately 50% of all received FAFSAs. Already, students have begun reaching out to our team to inquire about their aid packages. We are diligently reviewing each subset, ensuring that students with accurate and valid information are appropriately packaged for financial aid, and these packaging numbers will continue to grow.

We're still awaiting resolution from the US Department of Education on two key issues. Firstly, the DDX processing issues, affecting roughly 20% of our population. While ED has indicated potential resolution by May 1st, I've learned through a secondary source that Under Secretary Kvaal that ED only received the correct DDX code yesterday, and testing needs to occur prior to reprocessing. Secondly, general FAFSA reprocessing, which we anticipated to be completed by this week, has yet to occur. These are the primary reasons why 50% of our new students have not been packaged with financial aid.

Office of the Registrar

Friday, May 3

  • UG: LOA/Term Withdrawal: Last day to take a leave of absence or withdraw from the University. Students can process via SOLAR
  • Graduation application: Last day for spring/summer degree candidates to apply for graduation via SOLAR. Applications submitted after 4/10/24 will not appear in the commencement publication
  • GRAD: Semester Withdrawal: Last day students can submit a withdrawal form to the Graduate School/SPD. Petition required after this date.

Saturday, May 4

  • Classes End: Last day of classes

Tuesday, May 7, through Wednesday, May 15

  • Finals

Wednesday, May 15

  • Semester End: Official end of spring semester

Friday, May 17

  • Commencement

Undergraduate Admissions

  • We hosted two Admitted Seawolf Days over the past month; both programs drew over 6,000 total participants with students coming from multiple states. Both also featured academic sessions, programs, and tours that allowed students and their supporters to engage with multiple perspectives of campus.
  • In mid-April we hosted our virtual Counselor Advisory Board. This opportunity allowed us to engage with school counselors from New York and select out of state markets around select topics related to the admissions process. Additional insight is currently being collected from international school counselors that will also help inform any process changes.
  • In May we will host 15 out-of-state school counselors for 2.5 days on campus for our fly-in program. Fly-in programs are hosted to showcase our campus and drive knowledge of our institution with counselors who will in turn share that knowledge with prospectives students. Over the course of the 2.5 days, counselors will tour campus and engage with many campus partners, including select academic programs.
  • Yield activities for admitted 2024 students, first year and transfer, continue through the middle of May. We are closely tracking enrollment deposits and will soon begin reviewing available seats in programs against our waitlist.

Graduate School

Graduate Awards Ceremony

The annual Graduate Awards Ceremony will be held on Monday, May 13, starting at 11 am in the Student Union Ballroom. Please come celebrate our outstanding graduate students, faculty, and staff. RSVP here

Research Mentor Training for Faculty

Join us for Research Mentor Training for Faculty, Monday, June 10, 9:30 am to 3:30 pm and Tuesday, June 11, 9:30 am to 11:30 am. Virtual via Zoom, link to register. These two-part interactive workshops develop inclusive mentoring capacity and provide evidence of mentoring skill for grants. Participation in both sessions for each workshop is required for completion. More information is available. 

Institutional and Educational Effectiveness

Middle States Accreditation

  • Stony Brook hosted a successful visit from April 7-10, 2024
  • The verbal team report indicated:
    • All standards of accreditation appear to be met
    • All requirements of affiliation appear to be met
    • All federal compliance requirements appear to be met
    • Requirements: None
    • Recommendations: None
  • The team offered numerous commendations and pieces of collegial advice. This will be shared with the campus community once a final report has been received and the Commission has taken formal action in late June
  • A huge thank you to the entire campus community for their contributions to a process that resulted in a "clean bill of health"

Academic Program Assessment Reports

  • These were due in February, and as of April 23, 95% (181) have been submitted.
    • The SBU Assessment Council will review all reports and provide improvement-oriented feedback to programs by fall 2024.
    • The 2024-25 program assessment reports will be due on September 30, 2025

Excellence in Educational Effectiveness Awards

  • Congratulations to Brenda Hoffman, Matt Reuter, Carol Della Ratta, Cathy Marrone, Adam Schultheiss, and Wei-Hun Lu on receiving the Excellence in Educational Effectiveness award from the provost, in collaboration with the Assessment Council. This award honors those who uphold best practices in academic assessment and use assessment outcomes to drive programmatic improvement.

Department and Program Review Site Visits

These visits with external reviewers are ongoing. Seven of the eight programs have already had their site visits, and the final visit is scheduled for May. Thank you to the departments of Applied Health Informatics, Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Biomedical Informatics,  Economics, English, Marine Sciences, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies for participating in our first cohort.

General Education

General Education will continue to be assessed through guided conversations with faculty teaching Stony Brook Curriculum (SBC) courses. Faculty conversations will take place in spring 2025, and faculty selected to participate will be notified in fall 2024.

Continuing, Professional, and Executive Education

The Osher LifeLong Institute (OLLI) launched a new program aimed to promote intergenerational learning this spring called the Emerging Scholars Program. The program is designed to showcase the exceptional work being done by Stony Brook University PhD graduate students. Selected student scholars are invited to share their research through a formal presentation to a group of interested OLLI members (OLLI currently has ~750 members). This intergenerational program benefits both parties, as OLLI members have an opportunity to get exposed to cutting-edge research being done at Stony Brook University, and PhD candidates have an opportunity to engage and get feedback from an interested and diverse audience. OLLI Emerging Scholars for the spring 2024 semester included Katherine Kling ("Paradise Lost in Madagascar?") on March 4, Cal Simmerman ("Funk-tional Fashion: Disability, Fashion and the Post War") on April 8, and Hafza Girdap ("Contextual Gendered Racialization: Immigrant Women from Turkey in the U.S.") on April 24.