Welcome to CLAS Leadership Loop, a quarterly communiqué that previews major campus and college initiatives. This is a pilot communication series, and we welcome your feedback. This message is meant to orient you to CLAS’s approach to two major campus initiatives underway this fall. We hope you will find this content helpful, and you are welcome to share it with your faculty and staff members. We look forward to seeing chairs, directors, and staff leads on August 12 for our annual CLAS Fall Leadership Retreat! Until then, we wish you a wonderful remainder of summer!
–Your CLAS Deans’ Team
Transitions and Tributes
Join us in welcoming a few new team members to our CLAS leadership circle!
Chair of Ethnic Studies
Edelina Burciaga, Associate Professor of Sociology
Director of ESL Academy
Jean Daugherty, Senior Instructor of English
Chair of Geography & Environmental Sciences
Bryan Wee, Associate Professor of GES
Chair of Integrative Biology
Christopher Phiel, Associate Professor of Integrative Biology
Co-Chair of Psychology
Krista Ranby, Professor of Psychology
Interim Director of Interdisciplinary Studies
Candice Shelby, Professor of Philosophy
Onsite Director of International College Beijing
Matthew Jellick, Instructor of English
Director of International Studies
Soumia Bardhan, Associate Professor of Communication
Director of Law Studies
Omar Swartz, Associate Professor of Political Science
Associate Dean for Academic & Strategic Planning
Lisa Keränen, Professor of Communication
Associate Dean for Research & Creative Activities
Troy Butler, Professor of Mathematics & Statistical Sciences
A special thanks to Peter Anthamatten, Christopher Bodden, Mike Greene, Fatima Esseili, and Sarah Hagelin who are transitioning out of their leadership positions. Your work is appreciated, and it made a difference to faculty, staff, and students!
We also want to welcome our newly hired CLAS Staff Members and congratulate those who were promoted:
Kayla Spencer, Business Operations Coordinator in Political Sciences
Meghan Manwaring, Senior Business Operations Coordinator in Biology
Kelsey Ostenaa, Finance and Accounting Senior Professional in the Dean’s Office. Kelsey starts August 4 and comes to us from CU Boulder, where she was a Sponsored Projects Manager in the School of Education.
Associate Dean Marjorie Levine-Clark will be on approved medical leave through October. Michelle Comstock, Associate Professor of English, will be filling in as a CLAS Faculty Fellow. Congratulations also to Associate Dean for Faculty & Staff Affairs Faye Caronan for her promotion to full professor.
Amy Gandarilla, who many of you know from the CLAS Deans' Office Front Desk student team, is staying on as a temporary employee to help with the ORCA transition.
And finally, a huge and hearty thanks to Associate Dean Laura Argys, who is ending her 16-year stint as Associate Dean for Research and Creative Activities and to Interim Dean Rich Allen for returning from a sabbatical that had barely started to lead us in the spring and summer of 2025.
Laura is returning to the faculty of Economics and has begun working with graduate students and preparing courses. Her daily wisdom will be much missed!
Rich has been selected for a prestigious year-long American Council on Education (ACE) Fellowship. Congratulations to Rich on this well-deserved honor. Both Laura and Rich have played an integral role in the life of the college for well over a decade, and we are grateful for the ways they show up for faculty, staff, students, and their CLAS colleagues every day!
Looking Ahead to Fall
This edition highlights two campus and CLAS priorities for the coming year:
- Student Success
- Program Vitality
Prioritizing Student Success
In the coming year, we will revisit and strengthen our focus on student success.
Chancellor Christensen and Interim Provost Jansma kicked off a Student Success Transformation Initiative during a May 22 Town Hall. This work began in response to a comprehensive evaluation of CU Denver’s approach to student well-being, academic success, and career readiness by the National Institute for Student Success (NISS).
The report recommended four key areas as central to the needs of our students and to the long-term wellbeing of the campus as a whole.
The working groups addressing these four mission-critical areas are:
- Standardization of Student Advising
- First-Year Experiences
- Early Action on Student Challenges
- DFWI Rates (D and F grades, withdrawals and incompletes)
“High DFW rates in first-year courses are highly associated with attrition after the first year, by undermining student mindset, academic eligibility, and satisfactory academic progress” –NISS, 2025.
Because CLAS is central to boosting student success and persistence at CU Denver, we have leadership and representation across all four committees.
And we need your help in achieving the “transformation” part of this initiative to boost our retention, graduation, and course completion rates, and to reduce our DFWI rates.
As we head into the fall, it is important that all units have early-term conversations about how to reduce DFWI rates and increase student persistence. Some ideas to consider include:
- Normalizing conversation about DFWI rates in a supportive and systematic way that promotes a culture of care and belonging for all stakeholders at CU Denver
- Avoiding student-and faculty-deficit models
- Adding supports for student learning in high DFWI courses
- Resequencing or redesigning bottleneck courses
- Standardizing course policies and grade norming across large multisection classes
- Making expectations for all who teach multisection courses clear
- Encouraging increased use of Early Action
- Providing training and encouragement for the regular and ongoing use of the new DFWI data dashboards (to be released this fall).
This work is critical for ethical, financial, and mission-driven reasons. Ethically, we have an obligation to each learner we accept to provide pathways to successful course and program completion. Financially, boosting retention and graduation rates will shore up our long-term financial picture. And finally, promoting student learning and success are a primary mission of CU Denver.
Academic Check-Ins for Program Viability/Vitality
Instead of just focusing on “program viability/curricular innovation/academic check-ins” and its associated metrics, we are inviting CLAS members to use the viability process to engage in dialogue that focuses on the productive possibilities of our disciplines and their interconnections. Instead of fixating on the statistics, let’s ask:
- What can we do within our units to make our program(s) as exciting and useful to learners as we can? That is, how can we stimulate the vitality and relevance of our programs?
- How can we remove barriers to student success and attract new learners?
- How can we stress the enduring knowledge and skills of a liberal arts and sciences education that prepares our learners for a changing world?
Many news articles have stressed that humanities, liberal arts and sciences are key ways of “AI proofing” a career because the human dimensions of knowledge production cannot be replaced by algorithms. We need to tell this story frequently and widely and emphasize the durable, human skills of the liberal arts and sciences.
Reframing the Academic Check-in exercise to be about “vitality” instead of “viability” turns the conversation towards things like:
- Renaming class titles and reformulating descriptions and learning outcomes to attract learners
- Resequencing courses to ensure early success and retention and updating degree maps
- Considering breaking down high DFW courses into smaller 1-credit units or stretch sections, where possible
- Combining certificates or microcredentials into stackable degree plans
- Optimizing scheduling by focusing on the classes students need at the times they need them
- Gathering feedback from alumni and industry insiders about the skills they needed to be successful in the industry
- Shoring up community and industry connections and building partnerships for student learning
- Forging new pipelines for students to enter your program
“Redesigning higher education to promote student success will require subtle culture change and shifts to normalize a consistent focus on capturing empathy and learning from the lived experience of today’s students, coupled with consistent design experiences that enable professionals to walk through the actual systems and processes students are wading through.”- Dr. Bridget Burns
Documents Used in Program Check-Ins
- Metrics Dashboard (DRAFT as of 4.28.25; CU login and VPN required)
- Self-Study Template (Updated 7.25.25)
- Program Action Steps Template (Updated 7.25.25)
Training Documents
We’ll be having more conversations about program vitality and student success at our coming retreat, so stay tuned!
Leadership Loop Comments
Communication loops encourage feedback and exchange. We are working on setting up a Teams site to encourage multi-channeled communication for Department Chairs, Directors, Deans, and Staff Leads. Until then, please email your feedback on Leadership Loop to Elly.Lewis@ucdenver.edu.