Thank you to those who were able to attend the recent post-Board Town Hall. For those unable to attend or who would like to watch it again, you may view the presentation via this link Post Board Town Hall. As was stated at the town hall, this information is for faculty and staff only and is not to be shared in any form outside of current faculty and staff. Thank you for respecting this expectation. 

You may also read spring narrative reports (that are provided with the same criteria) through the following links:

Academic Affairs Report

Faculty Chair Report

Business and Finance Report

Chief of Staff Report

Enrollment Management and Marketing Report

Student Life Report

University Advancement Report

Mission Integration Report

Diversity and Belonging Report

A message from University Advancement: On Wednesday, April 8, SPU will host its first-ever hybrid Giving Day and we want to feature faculty and staff and their impactful programs and work! How? Look for an email from Monica Hubert in University Advancement titled, “Count Me in for Giving Day," for ways to get involved — e.g., pray, give, volunteer, or simply join in the fun of the day. We would love every department to participate!

Sneak peak for ways you can get involved.

• Join the fundraising fun with other SPU departments in a campus competitions to win prizes for your department.
• Volunteer to support our fundraising work throughout the day.
• Be an ambassador to spread the word and help inspire others to give to your projects and SPU by sharing the day on social media.
• Submit a short summary of your department, its mission, top three wins or achievements or current projects, and how donors and SPU community can help or get involved.
• Make your gift to SPU at givingday.spu.edu.

Staff Council would like to encourage you to nominate a staff member to be recognized for their outstanding contribution to the SPU community at the upcoming Celebration of Service. Submit your nominations by Tuesday, March 18.

A message to faculty from Bryan Jones, associate vice president for admissions: Each year we try to convey to incoming students the kind of learning community they will find here at SPU. An example of this has been a project that the Undergraduate Admissions team spearheads in asking faculty to write a personal note to each admitted student for the coming fall. Each year we get unsolicited feedback at our spring events, as well as from our admitted student research, that receiving a personal notecard from a SPU professor is a powerful message that they will be known and begin an actual relationship with a faculty member.

We are asking faculty to sign up for the number of cards they can write (even just a few), and those cards will be delivered on campus. Please COMPLETE THIS BRIEF FORM (takes about 30 seconds to complete).

A note to SPU staff. This project is primarily for faculty, but we welcome you to sign up if you are interested in participating. We may have undecided students or specific academic areas that could use additional support in writing these notecards.

Additional information

• Most faculty will write to students within their own academic disciplines, but please know that you may still be asked to write a “general” note of welcome to students from outside your program’s majors or to those whom are undecided.
• All notecards will be pre-labeled and pre-stamped and we will include suggested text for your note. (Though it’s a wonderful touch if you can include one of your business cards if you have them.)
• We are hoping to have all notecards mailed by Friday, March 20, so that our students will hear from our faculty while they are deciding which college to attend.

Again, thank you for all that you are doing for our current students and we thank you in advance to those who help us with personal touches of recruitment!

Previous Golden Falcon Penholder Award Winners:

2021 Tim Nelson
2022 Randy Beavers
2023 Andrew Ryder
2024 Grace Blum
2025 Grace Blum

A message from InformationTechnology: To better steward SPU’s storage resources and prevent outages of key university services (such as the OneDrive and SharePoint outage last fall), IT has worked to right-size campus users’ storage quotas and remove unlicensed/inactive accounts.

Student accounts as well as alumni accounts have seen some quota changes as announced last month. For employees, the only change is to the initial OneDrive storage allotment. New employees now receive 100GB of storage in their individual OneDrive, and may request additional storage as needed. Existing employees’ OneDrive storage quotas have been reduced to 100GB where their usage was already well below this amount. Accounts already using this amount (or near to it) have automatically had their quota increased beyond their current usage with headroom for ongoing growth. 

OneDrive is an essential service for the secure storage, creation, and modification of files needed for individual work, and IT is committed to providing the resources and capacity needed for SPU operations. For any files that are not individual in nature (e.g.: shared with a department, committee, other colleagues), Teams and SharePoint sites exist for these collaborative works and sharing of digital resources.

The Faculty/Staff Bulletin is published every Monday during the academic year. The next deadline is Thursday, March 19, and the next Bulletin will be published on Monday, March 23. 

If you have information or event news, send it as soon as possible with an image or graphic to Bulletin editor Tracy Norlen at fsb-editor@spu.edu. Submissions may be edited for clarity and will be published for two consecutive issues; they can be resubmitted for an additional two weeks.

Doug Strong, Paul T. Walls Professor of Wesleyan Studies, and Rob Wall, Paul T. Walls Professor Emeritus of Scripture and Wesleyan Studies, will be honored with individual Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Wesleyan Theological Society at their annual meeting, March 19–20. The meeting will be held at SPU with almost 200 scholars from around the world in attendance. WTS is the premier academic society for Wesleyan theologians. Congratulations to Doug and Rob!

An article by Krystle Jalalian-Chursky, associate professor of curriculum and instruction/special education titled, “Beyond Labels: Embracing Innovation to Support Twice-Exceptional Learners in the Classroom," was published in the Feb. 2026 issue of the Washington Educational Research Association journal.

An opinion piece by Joshua Tom, associate professor of sociology, titled "Evangelicalism’s Twin Engines of Destruction: The Theological Innovation Sanctifying Trump’s War in Iran," was published online at Good Faith Media on March 11. The piece dealt with the use of theology in the current war in Iran.

Kathleen Braden, professor emerita of geography, is leading a panel on "Geographic Research During Conflict" for the annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers on March 18.

A New York Times obituary on Dr. John M, Perkins on March 14 included photos and references to Seattle Pacific. Perkins, who died on March 13 at the age of 95, was co-founder of SPU's John Perkins Center in 2004 and a longtime partner and friend to many on campus. (The obituary is paywall protected.)