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We’ve read and talked about prioritizing academic programs and, in a recent SCUP webcast, prioritizing non-academic programs. Alcorn State is having faculty prioritize deans.

Dickson Idusuyi, the Faculty Senate president and an associate professor of social science at the university, said that discussions have centered around how to make Alcorn more efficient and whether some departments need restructuring. Idusuyi said the university has had a culture where deans stay on in their jobs year after year. “They stay in these positions too long to be effective,” he said. “It doesn’t mean they are not doing their work or they are inefficient. Being a dean is not a lifetime appointment. Just like there is reassessment in the business world, there should be a reassessment of these positions.”

Brown said that one problem with the existing situation was that the deans were not being re-evaluated regularly.

Below, you can read or skim this excellent and important article from Planning for Higher Education. Please do share this URL with any faculty colleagues you know who might understand the value of this for their campus.

The authors are faculty at the University of North Texas who reviewed peer institutions for faculty senate missions, analyzed them, and engaged their faculty in a process resulting in a faculty senate mission statement.

Here, you can also access an interactive beta SCUP semantic analysis of the document, where you can explore its facts, summaries, and key terms in a customizable fashion.

That analysis tells us that the following are the top ten "facts" in this article:

If you're engaged in responsibilities related to planning for adult students, returning students, non-traditional students ... then you may wish to purchase this entire issue of Peer Review from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U).

Below is the Table of Contents as it appears on the AAC&U website. The items which are underlined links are available for reading on line by anyone.

Current Issue:  Winter 2011, Vol. 13, No. 1 Returning Adult Students Adult students constitute a growing population on college campuses. This issue features a range of programs that ensure returning adult and other nontraditional students achieve the full array of liberal education outcomes. Buy Now     CONTENTS: Winter 201 From the Editor Analysis Strategies for Becoming Adult-Learning-Focused Institutions Rebecca Klein-Collins, Council of Adult and Experiential Learning What Adult Learners Can Teach Us about All Learners:  A Conversation with L. Lee Knefelkamp  Laura Donnelly-Smith, AAC&U Practice St. Catherine University’s Weekend College Julie Michener, Amy Lindgren, Greg Steenson, and Joan Robertson, St. Catherine University Enhancing Veteran Success in Higher Education Elizabeth O’Herrin, American Council on Education Planning to Succeed: Meeting the Needs of Adult Students Today Greg von Lehman, University of Maryland University College Adult Students: Meeting the Challenge of a Growing Student Population  Joseph Worth and Christopher Stephens, St. Louis Community College Research Research on Adult Learners: Supporting the Needs of a Student Population that Is No Longer Nontraditional Jovita M. Ross-Gordon, Texas State University-San Marcos; Jossey-Bass AAC&U Work on Community College Students and  Liberal Education Outcomes Reality Check Finding Purpose and Meaning in and out of the Classroom Art Chickering, Goddard College

One of the many good things about the society's annual conference is the opportunity to learn from recipients of SCUP's awards, either in formal professional development sessions or more informal settings.

The SCUP's 2011 Excellence Award recipients have been announced. Congratulations to you all.

We're taking this opportunity to once more bring out information about the 2010 recipients, via SCUP's 2010 Tribute to Excellence newspaper. It is a useful resource that some may overlook, as are the web pages about the recipients. 

Monday, July 25, 2011, 8:30 AM–9:45 AM

What are the implications of student response system availability on the design of learning spaces? This resource helps to answer that question.

An open-ended student response system is an electronic service or application that lets students enter text responses during a lecture or class discussion. Open-ended systems give faculty the option of collecting such free-form contributions from students, in addition to asking the true/false or multiple-choice questions that conventional clicker systems allow. Such tools open a channel for the kind of individual, creative student responses that can alter the character of learning. The great strength of open-ended student response systems may be that they create another avenue for discussion, allowing students to join a virtual conversation at those times when speaking out in live discourse might seem inappropriate, intimidating, or difficult.

The "7 Things You Should Know About..." series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

We agree. This particular series is great, including such core resources as:

Freeman A. Hrabowski is president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and one of the more renowned college or university presidents in the US. He's no stranger to SCUP, having been a panelist in SCUP's first virtual event, SCUP's 1999 satellite telecast: "Creating Tomorrow's Learner-Centered Environments: Today." That webcast, BTW, is available for viewing on SCUP's YouTube channel: www.youtube.Plan4HigherEd.

Hrabowski will kick off SCUP–46 with the Sunday evening opening plenary address on July 24, near Washington, DC. We have a couple of updates on his recent activities, below:

• TIAA-CREF has announced that Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, President of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has been awarded the 2011 TIAA-CREF Theodore M. Hesburgh Award for Leadership Excellence. Dr. Hrabowski was selected by an independent panel of judges based largely on his work to increase the representation of minority students in science and engineering and create an institutional model of inclusive excellence.

• Hraboski was recently interviewed for The Washington Post:  

Problem: College students of all backgrounds struggle in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses at a time when the U.S. needs to increase dramatically the number of graduates in these fields.

Solution: Group learning in introductory courses supports student success and increases interest in pursuing STEM majors, with the long-term goal of increasing the numbers of students who graduate in STEM majors and pursue graduate studies and careers in these fields.

Strategy: Ten years ago, we examined how we were teaching our introductory science classes, with the goal of improving the academic performance of students. A 200-plus lecture hall does not work for everyone, and does not necessarily encourage student engagement with the work and each other.

 What? Isn't it SCUP–46 that's coming in July, near Washington, DC?

Yep. But we've brought out three of the concurrent sessions from last year to remind you, once again, of the great quality of concurrent sessions at SCUP's annual conference that is higher education's premier planning event. This year it's "Integrated Solutions: How & Now." Click on the banner, above, for more. Register now!

• Paul E. Lingenfelter, President, State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO), "The Knowledge Economy Has Arrived: Now What Do We Do?"
• George Pernsteiner, Chancellor, Oregon University System, "Are We Wasting a Percfectly Good Crisis?"
• Peter Smith, Senior Vice President of Academic Strategies and Development, Kaplan Higher Education, "The New Ecology of Learning in the 21st Century"

Enjoy these extracted SCUP-45 executive summaries using our interactive PDF functionality, below. Now iPad compatible!

This content was previously unavailable to the public. SCUP members and those who attended SCUP–45 in 2010, can download the entire 49-page booklet of SCUP-45 executive summaries here. The document, below, cannot be downloaded, printed, or copied from—only viewed.

After SCUP–45 in 2010, SCUP commissioned executive summaries of 20 plenary and concurrent sessions, which became a 45-page PDF resource available to SCUP members and SCUP–45 attendees only. Starting this week, we will be bringing the contents of one executive summary out each week for everyone to see. This is the first of 20. Read it and see why you need to be at 2011's premier higher education planning event! Registration is open now.

So, what do you think. Will we look back in 40 years and see nothing but the memories or bones of academic libraries? Or, will there still be units performing related duties that we still label, or at least think of occasionally, as libraries?

This blog post links to three, related commentaries. What do you think from the unique perspective of a SCUPer? Reply in the comments below, or go to SCUP's LinkedIn group and engage with the discussion there. Be sure to share not only your thoughts, but links to related resources. Thanks!

Early in 2011, before most of academia was even out of winter holiday hibernation, Brian T. Sullivan of Alfred University wrote a letter to The Chronicle of Higher Education, which is written from the perspective of a 2040 autopsy on the body of the dead academic library. His autopsy concluded that the death of the library could have been avoided by more realistic planning now.

In summary, it is entirely possible that the life of the academic library could have been spared if the last generation of librarians had spent more time plotting a realistic path to the future and less time chasing outdated trends while mindlessly spouting mantras like "There will always be books and libraries" and "People will always need librarians to show them how to use information." We'll never know now what kind of treatments might have worked. Librarians planted the seeds of their own destruction and are responsible for their own downfall.

As you might expect, there was a lot of buzz in the comments.

Nearly three weeks later, The Chronicle published another opinion, by Patricia A. Tully of Wesleyan University, who writes (labeling Sullivan as a Cassandra) that the end of the library is a long ways off:

Mr. Sullivan ends his article by stating that librarians "planted the seeds of their own destruction and are responsible for their own downfall," and he implies that this was in part by participating in the digitization of print materials and the development of a variety of online, unmediated services. But librarians should not be resisting these efforts to increase and enhance access to content—a central value of our profession is to make content as discoverable and accessible as possible to as many people as possible.

And in leading these efforts, we are not making our professional obsolete. Librarians in 2050 will be doing the same thing we are doing now—making content accessible to our users. We will be doing this very differently, of course, just as we are doing things very differently now than we did in 1960. The library will look and operate differently, and perhaps provide a different kind of experience for students and faculty. But the library's end is a long way off.

 Then, last week, James C. Pakala of Covenant Theological Seminary (St. Louis), asserts that Sullivan's autopsy report "Overlooks Libraries' Other Roles," saying that libraries do more than serve undergraduates, and also that faculty and staff require a great deal of information searching and analyzing assistance.

And as to IT taking over libraries, the opposite tends to predominate, owing to such factors as librarians' faculty ties, organizational ability, relational skills, etc. Ironically, the last Educause Review issue of 2010 even warns that campus IT operations could fade as technology becomes ubiquitous and consortia or other competitors beckon.

So, what do you think. Will we look back in 40 years and see nothing but the memories or bones of academic libraries? Or, will there still be units performing related duties that we still label, or at least think of occasionally, as libraries?

This blog post linked to three, related commentaries. What do you think from the unique perspective of a SCUPer? Reply in the comments below, or go to SCUP's LinkedIn group and engage with the discussion there. Be sure to share not only your thoughts, but links to related resources. Thanks!