12:00PM - 1:30PM, Monday, Feb 1

Opening remarks by President Michael Schill, Provost and Senior Vice President Patrick Phillips, and Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Student Success Doneka Scott

Keynote: Undergraduate Education at Research Universities Post-COVID: Making Good on Longstanding Goals, Realizing Our Highest Aspirations 

By Dr. Steven P. Dandaneau, Executive Director of the Reinvention Collaborative and Associate Provost at Colorado State University

The Boyer Commission, a blue-ribbon panel dedicated to critique of undergraduate affairs at research universities, issued its call to arms in 1998. In their view, there was no reason undergraduate students should not benefit from distinctive, well-rounded, highest-quality educations at the nation’s largest, most diverse and multifaceted, most well-resourced and influential universities. While effort on behalf of equity and excellence, fair access and high-impact enrichment, structural as well as cultural reform throughout our institutions, have been sincere and legion, results, frankly, have lagged. To be blunt: research universities as a whole have not, as data documents, made nearly enough progress on most key measures of success. There are many reasons for this lack of progress, including disinvestment in public higher education, the ill-effects of the Great Recession, institutional racism, and other forms of built-in inequity, and others. But there is also a good reason to anticipate that, post-COVID, the University of Oregon and its fellow R1 U.S. universities will be as well-positioned as ever in the 21st century to make good on Boyer, and what some have called Boyer II, goals and ambitions. This talk will focus on the emerging alignment of pertinent ideas and values, resources and needs, and leadership opportunities that characterize 2021 and beyond.

	Steven P. Dandaneau is Executive Director of the Reinvention Collaborative and Associate Provost at Colorado State University. In these roles, Dandaneau provides leadership for a national consortium of leading public and private research universities focused on innovation in undergraduate education and he collaborates with colleagues to strengthen the undergraduate experience at CSU. Dandaneau previously served as Vice Provost for Undergraduate Studies at Kansas State University; Associate Provost and Director of the Chancellor’s Honors and Halsam Scholars Programs at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Visiting Professor of Sociology, University of Maryland, College Park; and Director, University Honors & John W. Berry, Sr. Scholars Programs at the University of Dayton. He earned a B.A. in Economics (with honors) from Michigan State University and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Brandeis University. His most recent publications include a forthcoming chapter in At the Intersections: Understanding and Supporting First-Generation College Students (Stylus Press), a forthcoming chapter in The Routledge International Handbook of C. Wright Mills Studies, and Say Hey Little Prince: A Novel (Owl Canyon Press, 2020).