Message from the Associate Dean and Extension Director
Occasionally, we encounter conditions that serve to challenge and test our fundamental ideas and values. Pressures can develop that challenge nations, societies, and the systems we use to organize ourselves. These types of pervasive conditions extend into our communities, families, and personal relationships. Thomas Paine famously referred to these conditions as the times that “try men’s souls”.
Without a doubt, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is challenging us at all levels. This is all new to us, but historically there is a clear record of events, usually unanticipated, that can create significant disruptions in time and process.
In the past, the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension System (CES) has encountered significant challenges, along with the communities we serve, and it has successfully responded. In communities across the state, Extension is experiencing citizen response first-hand to these new challenges and the expectation is very clearly for us to engage and do our job.
In Extension, we understand our mission and responsibility. Our call is to invest to our fullest ability and capacity to address our mission, which is essentially “to bring the university to the people of the state and to bring science to bear on practical problems.” We have been doing that, we are doing that now, and we will continue to do so with whatever resources we have at our disposal.
Many thanks to all of you in the CES who continue to constructively and flexibly deal with the circumstances and work through the myriad challenges that we are encountering every day in the communities of Arizona.
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From now until June 30, 2020, the Division of Human Resources, the Office of the Provost, and the Office of Research Innovation & Impact (RII), ask that all departments adhere to the following practices for all faculty and staff hiring.
Temporary Changes (in effect now through June 30) that may be subject to a waiver process:
• New requisitions (job postings) will not be accepted or published on the University’s applicant
portal, Talent.
• For searches currently underway, scheduled interviews with finalists should be cancelled or
suspended until further notice.
• Offers of employment, either verbal or written, may not be extended.
• New hire, rehire, and select job change transactions will not be approved or processed.
All hiring committees with active job requisitions should begin communicating immediately with applicants about the impact of these temporary changes to their recruitment processes. Please note that the timeline for these temporary hiring practices may be extended. Information, including updates, will continue to be posted by the Division of Human Resources.
