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:

1.	mission of the Faculty Senate represent faculty interests to University and community stakeholders
2.	mission of the Faculty Senate lead faculty in fulfilling their responsibilities in the shared governance of the University
3.	faculty senate is agent of the faculty, and its mission statement stakes the faculty's claim in the institutional decision-making process
4.	Chair of the faculty senate tasked to develop a mission/vision statement for the faculty senate
5.	Faculty Senate will be perceived by faculty and administrators as a well-respected representative body that has a substantive role in University governance
6.	work of the Faculty Senate will be seen as highly relevant to the daily endeavors of faculty and to University decisions that affect academic affairs
7.	that faculty involvement is the most important factor contributing to faculty senate effectiveness
8.	One way to shape faculty senate efforts and to advocate for the senate's role in the university community is adhere to a clearly defined mission statement
9.	committee approached this task with the strong sense that developing a mission statement was an important step in establishing the faculty senate's role in shared university governance
10.	Faculty Senate serves as a liaison between faculty and administration

We've been hearing a lot of good things about this recent article from SCUP's journal, Planning for Higher Education, and requests to be able to read it. So we've brought it outside password protection for a wider audience. SCUP hopes you find this integrated planning look at things to be both useful and inspiring.

Duke University's mission statement has not been amended for ten years. Its current strategic plan, Making a Difference: The Strategic Plan for Duke University, was produced in 2006. A series of executive summaries of departmental plans is part of the website and an appendix to the document. A link is also provided to a Duke resource on its campus planning.

Duke's plan is only one of about a thousand plans in Links From SCUP to College and University Plans, a Web-based resource for SCUP members. SCUP members can access the links in a sortable online spreadsheet that also includes useful data fields like Carnegie Class, Enrollment, FICE, Unit ID, and so forth. 

If you use it, please tell us how we can improve it: terry.calhoun@scup.org.

Scott Jaschik once again covers an important topic in a useful way. His story of the institutional direction planning for Augustana College (IL) touches all the bases. It's a story that has its parallels in the major challenges faced by small private institutions which did not, pre-recession, have large, highly noticed brands:

Now, in the face of the economic downturn, the college is making some adjustments -- which Steven C. Bahls, its president, calls the "post-recession strategic plan" for a liberal arts college. That means several new majors focused on pre-professional interests. With new majors, Bahls says the college may need, over time, to move away from a tradition (rare among American colleges) of paying faculty members equivalent salaries across disciplines; the plan also means symbolic and real steps to be sure that the college can attract diverse students, beyond its historic (and shrinking) base of Swedish Lutheran families.

No one will mistake Augustana for a vocational institute. Even with the changes, this is a college that offers numerous modern foreign languages as well as the classics, a college that, true to its immigrant roots, has a Scandinavian major and instruction in Swedish, a college with majors in philosophy and art history and theater at a time when such programs are being threatened at much larger and wealthier institutions. But the changes are nonetheless significant and, to some, jarring.

Any college administrator will tell you that the landscape for higher education is shifting under our feet.

 

Consider some of the powerful forces that buffet academe today: Shrinking revenues. Stronger resistance to tuition hikes. Calls that universities produce more graduates. The rapid rise of classroom technology and online learning. Stronger competition, including the expanding for-profit sector. Shifts in student demographics. Globalization. More government scrutiny of university practices. Louder calls for transparency and accountability. Public skepticism about the value of higher education.

 

Welcome to the “new normal,” many say. Behind that cliché lie hard truths that raise perplexing questions. If the landscape for higher education has in fact been transmogrified, what now? How should colleges and universities respond? If the academy is changing fundamentally, is it time to fundamentally rethink the academy?

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

 

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Here's your SCUP Link to "Back In Line"

The two authors, Marilyn Hansmann and Dave Weber, are part of a team presenting about "Achieving Strategic Alignment" at Rochester Community and Technical College on Tuesday, July 13 at SCUP–45.

This Business Officer article is blurbed, "Despite a history of continuous process improvement, a community college noted some mismatches in its goals and resources. An integrated planning process brought things into strategic alignment." The article includes a handy list of "essential factors" important to understand in aligning resources and strategic planning. 

Since 2006, the Integrated Planning Process has been a coordinated effort, with the chief strategic operations officer facilitating the strategic planning process while the vice president of finance and facilities conducts the annual budgeting process. Together, they build a bridge between the two activities to achieve strategic alignment in an environment of continuous improvement and innovation.

The IPP has evolved into an annual activity that includes: (1) service department and academic program review; (2) identification of overarching college goals and related departmental and divisional strategies in support of those goals; (3) assignment of resources; and (4) tracking of performance.

 

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

 

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Here's your SCUP Link to "Managing Faculty Talent"

This very well done article explores the development of a useful faculty talent dashboard at Ohio State University. Business Officer magazine blurbs it: "With an analytics dashboard, human resources and academic leaders at the Ohio State University have at their fingertips trend data that supports faculty workforce planning."

Since development of the Faculty Analytics Dashboard took quite a bit of time, one of our hopes is to find a way for other institutions to be able to use what we've done and eliminate the need for them to reinvent the wheel by having to develop their own tools from scratch. We have approached the Inter-University Council in Ohio, a group of four-year public institutions, and have made an initial presentation to that group with the hope of having other schools use our product. Several other Big 10 institutions have seen the dashboard in our CUPA-HR presentations, and we would love to have discussions about common use of the tool for benchmarking purposes.

Larry Lewellen, Ohio State's vice president for human resources, sums up the impact of the Faculty Analytics Dashboard at our university: “This simple-to-use but robust tool, and the data it generates, creates conversations and partnerships with academic leaders and an appetite for use of data by our senior fiscal officers and senior human resource officers; helps us make informed diversity-related decisions and other talent-related decisions; and aids us in making decisions around the difficult task of budget and position reallocation.”

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

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Here's your SCUP Link to "Higher Ed: Innovative or Devoted to Mimicry?"

A number of top higher education policy thinkers met June 3 at the American Enterprise Institute to talk about "Reinventing the American University: The Promise of Innovation in Higher Education." David Glenn reports out on the discussions for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Some sample comments:

The structural incentives within higher education "seem to push against innovation," said Dominic J. Brewer, an associate dean and professor of urban leadership and education at the University of Southern California. "They seem to push toward mimicry."

That theme ran through the conference's first two panels: The structure of higher education makes it difficult to improve the quality of teaching. But the speakers did not always agree about which structural factors are to blame for the purported institutional sclerosis. Some pointed fingers at faculty-governance systems, which they said slowed down the pace of change. Others blamed regional accreditors for being too inflexible about, for example, standard models of credit hours.

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Ronald G. Ehrenberg, a professor of economics at Cornell University and director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, offered a rather gloomy analysis of changes in the faculty profession . . . Outside of elite research universities and liberal-arts colleges, Mr. Ehrenberg said, most institutions of higher education are likely to see a "de-skilling" of faculty jobs in the coming years, as fewer instructors will have Ph.D.'s.

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Two speakers dissented, in part, from the basic premise that there is too little innovation in higher education. Jack H. Schuster, a professor emeritus of education and public policy at Claremont Graduate University, said there is plenty of experimentation at American colleges; he expects higher education to be substantially transformed within the next decade.

And Candace Thille, director of the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, said the problem is not a lack of innovation but a failure to carefully study the experiments that do take place. Thousands of college instructors make good-faith efforts to improve their teaching, she said, but there are usually no resources for evaluating or replicating those innovations.

 

 

 

NACUBO's Business Officer often comes up with great content. In the current issue, there is a series of three case studies worth looking at. They include: "Rising to the Top," by Lee. T. Todd, Jr., about the University of Kentucky, Lexington's plan to become a "Top 20" public research university by 2020; "Transformation to the Third Power," by Bill Duncan, about High Point University's challenge to tackle its physical appearance, academic environment, and overall student experience, all at once; and "Online and On Our Way," by Patrcia Charlton, about the College of Southern Nevada, Las Vegas' implementation of online learning to handle massive growth demand:

The College of Southern Nevada, Las Vegas, is a two-year public institution providing educational opportunities to this fast-paced, growing metropolis. CSN is one of the largest community colleges in the country and the largest institution of higher education in Nevada. In fall 2008, enrollment topped 41,000 students, or 21,000 full-time equivalents. Like so many other higher educational institutions, our college has felt the pressures of increased enrollment, continual student demand, strained fiscal operating resources, and limited funding to support capital projects. Further, we faced budget constraints that limited our ability to increase faculty, construct new facilities, and expand student service operations. Despite these challenges, the college was determined to meet the current and future needs of its students.

Based on the unique nature of our student population, the 24-hour demand, and limited ability to obtain new physical facilities, implementing online programs was a natural solution that would enable the institution to meet the needs of our students. In the past three years, we’ve gone from having only a few selected courses online to offering more than 22 programs and 300 courses to students in a structured “online campus,” with academic and student services online and more than 19,000 duplicated enrollments annually (with each online course a student takes counting as one enrollment). The online presence is our fastest-growing campus community, and demand is still outpacing the institution’s ability to keep up.

These folks claim to have developed a strategic plan by spending only five hours with their stakeholders, who claim to have 'enjoyed' the process:

Mention “strategic planning” and watch people’s eyes glaze. Most picture endless meetings spent doing SWOT analyses, crafting vision and mission statements, and developing goals and action plans. Few look forward to the experience or reflect back on it with pleasure.

So, what’s the solution? Higher education IT organizations need strategic plans to function efficiently. Can the process be condensed into a few hours? Can that condensed process produce an effective, flexible document? Can the participants actually enjoy the process? Yes, yes, and yes!

At Penn State University–Berks during the spring 2008 semester we developed a new five-year Information Technology Services (ITS@Berks) strategic plan, and we did it in less than five hours of meetings with stakeholders. Participants even said they enjoyed the experience. Here’s what we did.