Qualify for your MOJO ribbon by reading a Planning article this fall, then commenting on it. Find out more. Sign up now.

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.

One of our favorite writers, Stephen Pelletier, tackles committees for Trusteeship magazine. This is what your boards are reading:

As governing boards have become more sophisticated and polished in their oversight of colleges and universities, they have also become more intentional in the way they organize themselves to meet their missions. Some boards have evolved entirely new structures. Even within the parameters of fairly traditional constructs, many boards have made important tweaks. But when it comes to committee structures, there is no one-size-fits-all approach: Boards organize themselves distinctly to best fit their needs and those of the institution. And that may be precisely the key to success. ...

“It’s not so much a focus on committees as it is a focus on where committees ought to be focused,” says Thomas C. Longin, [SCUP president, who is] an AGB senior fellow and a former vice president for programs and research at AGB, who also served as provost at Ithaca College. “It’s about getting a strategic orientation to committee work.”

A solid majority of faculty members (58 percent) described themselves as filled more with fear than with excitement ... . Meanwhile, academic technology administrators —defined as “individuals with responsibility for some aspect of academic technology at their institutions”—were overwhelmingly enthused; 80 percent said the online boom excited more than frightened them.

A new study—quite timely in light of the University of Virginia presidency situation and its relationship to online learning—shows faculty more fearful of online learning than tech administrators. Here’s an Inside Higher Ed article about it and here’s the PDF of the study. Inside Higher Ed is having a free webcast about this report on July 10.

Faculty and tech administrators also disagree on assessment of online instruction:

Meanwhile, online courses tend to generate more data from which instructors and their overseers can glean quantitative insights on student engagement and the degree to which a professor has succeeded in meeting specific learning objectives.

Administrators seemed more confident that their institutions were indeed supplying their online instructors with good quality-assessment tools; more than 50 percent of administrators believed their institutions had such tools in place, compared to 25 percent of faculty members.

Mary M. Barnett, Virginia Community College System, is president of the Association of College and University Auditors. Mark Paganelli, of the University of Tennessee System, is the immediate past president of that organization. In Business Officer they explain and take a look at the growth of Internal Audit Committees and some ramifications.

This is an excellent source of information if your planning role will in any way intersect with these issues, as it most likely will.

These good resources are shared at the end of the article:

To start work on a strategic risk assessment, consider these useful resources:

• Risk assessment toolkit. Click here  to access NACUBO's materials and guidance on risk management. 

• Searchable database. To also assist with ERM, the Association of College and University Auditors (ACUA) has created a risk "dictionary," listing hundreds of risks facing higher education institutions, as well as the corresponding controls to help mitigate those risks. The dictionary (available for ACUA members at the ACUA Web site) is a searchable database that is updated often and is an important resource when implementing an enterprise risk management process at a university or college.

• ERM map. David Crawford, audit manager emeritus for the University of Texas System, has created a risk assessment application. Risks and controls are mapped to the institution's mission and presented in a "heat map," a graphic representation that highlights data with different colors. Such a visual is easy to present to the board and senior management and clearly shows the areas of greatest concern. This methodology has been used at several institutions in Texas and Tennessee and is currently being used at the Virginia Community College System.

• Overview and case study of ERM activities in higher education. Read the cover story, "Ensemble Performance," and a companion article, "Learning to Harmonize," in the December 2008 Business Officer.

UVA president Teresa Sullivan has an advisory group that many consider unusual for a university campus, but which sounds remarkably SCUP-like. Its existence and its functioning is, we hope, being studied so that other institutions can learn whether this kind of group is beneficial, and in what ways.

The 13-member crew, whose membership is weighted toward those with some business or finance acumen, is charged to serve as an informal advisory group to Teresa A. Sullivan, the university’s recently minted president. But Sullivan says the committee is also designed to bring transparency to the institution’s often-mystifying budgeting process, connecting the university’s administrators with a diverse pool of faculty.

“It seemed to me a shame these two groups of smart people hadn’t sat down with each other before,” she says.

Unlike a standard faculty budget task force, the advisory committee isn’t necessarily engaged with a particular issue, such as where the university should cut or invest. Instead, it is grappling with more fundamental high-level questions, such as whether the university operates with sufficient liquidity – or cash on hand – to pay its bills should there be another huge economic plummet.

Another point of distinction for the budget committee is its make-up. Like most university-wide committees, the group includes professors across a range of disciplines. At the same time, Sullivan clearly sought a number of faculty with business orientations, and committee members were charged to "draw on on their own expertise in financial matters to provide advice."

While Sullivan says she wasn’t looking for a brain trust to tap for input on specific policy questions, she notes that she won’t “rule out the idea that as we make budgetary decisions I will consult this group.”

Moreover, Sullivan may well be inclined to turn to this committee for ideas, rather than using outside groups that offer such services for a fee, sometimes inviting faculty criticism. "President Sullivan said that she would certainly go to this internal group for advice before resorting to the outside as a general matter," Carol Wood, a university spokeswoman, said in an e-mail. "Sometimes," she added, "there are issues of such technical complexity that you still need the right expert."

Of course you do. That's why I stop regularly by "The Confessions of a Community College Dean" at IHE to see what Dean Dad's shared recently. His latest examines the possibility that there are good things about being a dean, and is titled, It's Not the Dark Side. It Just Sucks. The comments sections is also interesting and insightful.

This comment by Dr. Crazy about yesterday's post stuck with me. In explaining – very clearly – why she refused to move into administration, she noted that much of what attracted her to academia is precisely what keeps her out of administration. Instead of teaching and doing research, both of which she enjoys, she'd have to spend her time in committee meetings and dealing with recalcitrant colleagues. Plus, she'd have to do it eight-plus hours a day, five days a week, twelve months a year.

Some other commenters made similar points, if with different emphases. One put it quite bluntly, asking just what, exactly, makes this job worth doing.

I had to think about that one for a while.

Perry A. Holloway is the pseudonym of a professor at a public university in California who shared thoughts on Inside Higher Ed about "Is Fundamental Change Really 'Inevitable'?" The comments section of this article is especially useful in gauging various campus perspectives.

Are faculty really obstacles to needed change or are they performing an important function by opposing administrative initiatives?

The budget woes seem to many commentators to be an inarguable reason for “fundamental change” in education, but is money really a sufficient excuse for reorganizing and perhaps thereby weakening an effective system of higher education that has been the envy of the world? Further, do today’s temporary budget problems really reflect a permanent inability to fund higher education in the future, a disinclination to educate students in the ways that have been traditional in the past or a dissatisfaction with the quality of prior education? …

A great deal of the faculty resistance to change occurs because many faculty regard these faddish initiatives, along with the emphasis on assessment, as a waste because they divert resources from the classroom. When tenure-track lines are replaced by adjuncts and faculty are denied lab space, travel funding, or even market-average pay, they come to doubt the sincerity of administrative assurances that the institution cares about quality education.

From the comments:

I teach at a similar institution and can vouch for the fact that what he describes goes on elsewhere as well. The administration pushes the latest pedagogical fad while faculty ignore them and continues to teach using nineteenth-century methods (but with PowerPoint substituting for blackboards). A plague on both houses, I say!

Of course there are exceptions--small colleges dedicated to student learning, like Alverno College--but while I have only my own institution to judge from, I doubt that it is unique.

One way to test this hypothesis would be to ask at your next faculty meeting, "has anyone read any good books on teaching and learning lately?" I know at my university that would be the only time in departmental history that there was total silence at a faculty meeting.

Think about it for a minute: how many professors would give a conference paper without bothering to read up on any of the secondary literature? I mean, you'd be laughed out of the profession. But in universities across the country faculty can walk into classrooms with out the slightest grasp of the research on teaching and learning.

Very good, lengthy article by Jack Stripling in Inside Higher Ed about the changing roles of deans. One of his sources says, “'A dean really more and more becomes like a mini-president -- the best ones, I should say.'" He examines the changing roles and brings perspective on the positive and potentially negative effects of the change, which appears to be unstoppable.

This is deanship 2.0, and it’s not for the faint of heart. Increasingly complex and big-budget colleges, a crushing economy, and a skeptical public questioning the very purpose of higher education have changed the landscape for a middle management position that now resembles some earlier incarnation of the presidency itself. While the deanship was always a position of leadership in academe, today’s deans say they are administrators in the truest sense, called upon to engage in more long-term strategic thinking within the wider contexts of universities that are often struggling financially. At many institutions, deans are also forced to fend more for themselves by courting donors, bolstering research and creating entrepreneurial partnerships with industry.

Wow, if nothing else, this article reinforces the diversity of opinions about outcomes and success in learning, and the disparity of motivating forces.

"If a student gets an A in my class, and an A in yours, then we say the student is good," says William G. Tierney, director of the Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis at USC. "We don't make any comments about what the student has actually learned."

That's the case in part because university prestige often stands in as a proxy for learning. "The general public, they want to go to Stanford whether you learn anything or not," says Ms. Kezar. "As long as employers and parents promote that system, it's not really about what you learn, they just care if students go to a prestigious place."

Indeed, many professors feel little pressure from either students or the public to change the way they do business. "Why I need to spend a lot of time working with my colleagues documenting learning outcomes is unclear to me," Mr. Tierney says of a hypothetical professor. "What is going to happen if I don't? Will no one take my classes? Will no students attend this university?" Faculty members, Mr. Tierney notes, are busier than ever, and assessing student learning is often viewed as just one more demand on their time. "Should they pay attention to learning outcomes rather than understand how to make their classes go online or how to update the syllabus on reading that's changed in their area in the last year?" he asks. "They can't do it all."

If there is any pressure from students, say professors, it is to keep classwork manageable.