OCAC Initiatives

Responding to the interests of faculties, staffs, and administrations of the 7 Colleges, the Academic Deans Committee identify a rotating number of priority themes to focus this office’s attention. The founding two initiatives in 2017 were data science and justice education.  Justice education developed fully and blossomed into its own independent 7C initiative (completing its support from OCAC) in December, 2020.  In January, 2021, OCAC launched a new initiative, faculty mentoring and collaborative research.

Data Science

Vision: The Claremont Colleges are poised to create a model for data science education that applies innovative data methods and instruments into a contextually-nuanced and critically-examined course of study in the liberal arts tradition. This vision views data science literacy as a core and common competency across each of the colleges. Click the header above to learn more, including how to be involved.

Subscribe to the Claremont Data Science listserv to hear about news and events, available resources, professional development offerings, and research collaboration opportunities.

Justice Education

Vision: To confront mass incarceration as a defining social problem of the contemporary era, The Claremont Colleges have launched the Justice Education Initiative. Supported by a $1.1M grant awarded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to Pitzer College, the Initiative will coordinate collaborative justice education programs across the consortium, at regional carceral institutions, and with local community partners. Click the header above to learn more, including how to be involved.

Subscribe to the Claremont Justice Education listserv to stay updated on events, funding opportunities, training offerings, and more.

Faculty Mentoring and Collaborative Research

We are delighted to announce the launch of the new Faculty Mentoring and Collaborative Research Initiative. In our work to develop effective, efficient, sustainable, and enduring cross-campus academic collaborations, the Office of Consortial Academic Collaboration has created a process of intercollegiate working groups made up of dean-nominated faculty and administrators, who work together to fulfill a vision and action plan related to the initiative at hand. Two principles guide our work: (1) Do together that which either cannot be achieved alone or would be more stunning if done together; and (2) Do together that which does not differentiate among our institutions.

The Faculty Mentoring and Collaborative Research Initiative aims to:

1. Incubate faculty mentoring (research best practices for faculty mentoring, survey existing mentoring resources on campuses, and work with key campus leaders to facilitate strategies and means for building new faculty mentoring opportunities and infrastructure/support for sustainable mentoring programming).
2. Incubate faculty research collaborations (design sustainable models to facilitate connections and relationship building with faculty that share similar research agendas and seek seed grants for faculty interdisciplinary research collaborations).
3. Incubate lab researcher’s collaborative (design sustainable models to facilitate connections and relationship building with faculty that share similar research agendas and seek seed grants specifically pertaining to life sciences, research confabs)

To achieve these aims,  a new working group is currently being developed and will design a vision for building sustainable programming models and infrastructure for both faculty mentoring and faculty collaborative research. This vision will then be translated into measurable goals, which we will work towards over the course of the initiative to achieve collective and campus-specific success.

FACULTY MENTORING AND COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH YEAR-END REPORT 2020 – 2021