After two forums earlier this week, UCCS hosted the final forum for candidate Lora Billings in the search for the new provost and vice chancellor of academic affairs on Nov. 16.
According to the job description posted on the CU Careers website, the provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs is the chief academic officer in charge of providing leadership and strategic direction for all academic programs and initiatives. The position is being paid an annual salary between $240,000 to $290,000.
Billings has served as the dean for the College of Science and Mathematics at Montclair State University since 2017. She is a graduate of CU Boulder with a Ph.D. in applied mathematics.
“I was very excited about this position because … I love Colorado, and an opportunity to come back and serve this group that actually gave me my start would be just awesome,” she said.
Billings said that higher education is in an interesting place with things happening at the federal level and the learning loss that occurred in K-12 education due to COVID. She believes COVID-19 has affected students’ ability to mentally and emotionally cope with stress, which in turn is affecting retention.
In response to lower retention rates, Billings said her institution created support programming to help students feel like they had agency and had mastered the material in their field.
In her time as dean at Montclair, Billings said that yearly external research funding for the College of Science and Mathematics has grown from $2 million to $9 million.
Since UCCS is an R2 institution, Billings said she would support research by focusing on resources, particularly staffing in the Office of Research, mentorship for tenure-track faculty and having a campus wide conversation about the definition of research.
Billings feels research should not be so abstract, and that researchers need to show how the research can be applied to real problems in the world.
She wants to bring her interdisciplinary mindset to campus, and the key to success in interdisciplinary studies is rethinking structures. “I think that we need to kind of get our heads around, as much as metrics are very, very important for productivity, how do we create new ways to view those metrics to give credit for interdisciplinary studies?” she said.
In her position at Montclair, Billings helped create a Bachelor of the Arts degree in Biology which has a lighter core course load but included a public service capstone and a requirement for a minor in a different college.
“What [Montclair] is trying to do is make these degrees into things that actually serve the student more than just immersing them in one group of people that whole time with just one discipline,” Billings said. She also would like to encourage hiring faculty who have affiliations across departments to encourage interdisciplinary studies.
An area of interdisciplinary studies that Billings feels higher education should focus on is AI. “[AI] is going to be the most interdisciplinary thing ever,” she said. “Any student that graduates right now needs to know what it is, what it can do and the powers of it.”
As a solution to this, Billings suggested creating a three class AI certificate, teaching about the ethics and applications of AI.
Another thing Billings would like to bring to UCCS from Montclair is a program called the Green Team, a summer program which combines five students from various academic backgrounds to solve any sustainability-related problem they choose. Billings would like to apply this kind of experiential learning across colleges on campus and during the academic year.
The full forum is available on the UCCSLive YouTube channel. The search committee is accepting feedback forms for each candidate. The forms are due on Nov. 19 by 5 p.m. and will inform the committee’s decision.
This article is the final part of a series for the provost candidate forums. Click here for the article on candidate Lynn Vidler and here for the article on candidate Andrea Golato.
Photo courtesy of Montclair State University.