November 18, 2020

Dear MICA Faculty, Staff, Students, and Trustees,

This communication follows up on the October 22 communication that updated you on the move of Human Resources (HR) under the Office of the President and its transition leadership.

In October, HR Transition Leader Charlene Hayes and I collected and learned from the campus community’s hopes, wishes, and feedback regarding HR at MICA. We sincerely thank all of you who contributed thoughtfully through:

• The HR Reimagined Survey for individual input from October 2 through 16 – there were 172 individual entries, with participation by 89 staff members, 45 faculty members, 25 students, 9 trustees, and 4 unidentified respondents.
• Focus groups between October 14 and 28 – there were 69 participants, with 41 staff members, 14 faculty members, 7 students, and 7 vice presidents.

You may view the input from these activities here in three formats: 1) For a quick glance, a short summary of the common themes and expectations from the survey results. 2) In the interest of transparency, the survey entries as largely raw data*. *The light editing involves removing names and summarizing a few revealing details in the open comments. 3) The focus group input as a list of themes and comment highlights.

Informed by the campus input, Charlene and I are now finetuning our thinking on the future of HR at MICA. We plan to conduct consultative meetings with faculty, staff, and student leaders in the next few weeks. A campus memo will then share the final results of this visioning process with the MICA community.

Due to the extended campus engagement process last month to garner richer input, the national search process for a new vice president will commence in December instead of November. I still expect the newly identified leader to join MICA in mid/late-Spring 2021 per the original timeline.