This article from Planning for Higher Education's January 2010 issue, is the updated results of an ongoing environmental scanning process by Herman Miller. We've decided to share it with the larger higher education audience, so please do let your colleagues know that this is available here. The embed below, is from SCUP's publishing presence on Scribd. We'd like to call your attention to the authors' trend #7:

Advances in technology will drive ongoing changes in all aspects of college and university life and offer new opportunities to enhanced and broaden learning experiences. ... There is no service of activity conducted in higher education that will not be affected by advances in technology. t is time to conduct a comprehensive and holistic institutional review of this rapidly growing tool.

There will be a related conversation on SCUP's Linked in group of ~2,500 participants (newly named the Integrated & Well-Planning Campus) this week, beginning in the afternoon of Tuesday, June 21, led by SCUP board member Michael Hites of the University of Illinois Administration and Kelly Block, also of the University of Illinois. They are presenting a half-day workshop on Sunday, July 24 near Washington, DC, titled: Designing IT Governance to Facilitate Decision Making Across the Organization. It's the kind of workshop you want to attend when you consider the quote above about the impact of technology on everything and everyone.

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.

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!

Youngstown State University (YSU) uses the acronym "TRAC" (Target, Resources, Alignment, and Culture) to demonstrate the structure of its strategic planning process as it goes for a comeback in an area already devastated before the Great Recession hit. In this article from Trusteeship, the magazine of the Association of Governing Boards of Colleges and Universities (AGB), YSU board of Trustees chair Scott R.Schulick and YSU president Cynthia E. Anderson, describes that school's strategic plan and planning.

Even before the economic downturn, Youngstown State was experiencing tough financial times. State support had dropped 24 percent from 2001 to 2007, and it has fallen another 14.5 percent, net of stimulus money, since 2007. Having faced those conditions, the hardships that will accompany the end of stimulus funds in FY 2012 are all too real to us.

Fortunately, the board decided a while ago that we needed to re-examine our assumptions about cost, time, resources, planning, budgeting, governance, and institutional success. We were not willing to support a “cut back and hope” approach. We began learning more about effective governance, strategic finance, and what it takes to get through hard times, and we started to make changes.

Trustees and administrators alike wanted a simple approach, recognizing that “simple” is often not “easy.” The simple version of our efforts now is: Decide where the institution needs to be in the future, endorse and support activities that will cause it to get there, align everything we do in that direction, and reorient the culture accordingly. An acronym could be TRAC: Target, Resources, Alignment, and Culture.

The big story in higher education last week was a new book purporting to show that many students learn more or less nothing during the first two years at college: 45% show no significant improvement on the standardized Collegiate Learning Assessment test over the first 2 years, and 36% show no significant improvement over four years. The authors label the non-improving students Academically Adrift. [This link will take you to the book on Amazon.com.]

Here's a brief review at The Chronicle, here's one at Inside Higher Ed, and another one in inside blog at The New York Times. From The Chronicle:

Growing numbers of students are sent to college at increasingly higher costs, but for a large proportion of them the gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication are either exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent. At least 45 percent of students in our sample did not demonstrate any statistically significant improvement in Collegiate Learning Assessment [CLA] performance during the first two years of college. [Further study has indicated that 36 percent of students did not show any significant improvement over four years.] While these students may have developed subject-specific skills that were not tested for by the CLA, in terms of general analytical competencies assessed, large numbers of U.S. college students can be accurately described as academically adrift. They might graduate, but they are failing to develop the higher-order cognitive skills that it is widely assumed college students should master. These findings are sobering and should be a cause for concern.

While higher education is expected to accomplish many tasks—and contemporary colleges and universities have indeed contributed to society in ways as diverse as producing pharmaceutical patents as well as prime-time athletic games—existing organizational cultures and practices too often do not put a high priority on undergraduate learning. Faculty and administrators, working to meet multiple and at times competing demands, too rarely focus on either improving instruction or demonstrating gains in student learning.

A session here at the Council of Independent Colleges' conference for presidents opened with the sort of joke that goes over well in a room full of top administrators: "How many faculty members does it take to change a light bulb?"

The punchline: "Change?"

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Scott Carlson, writing from the presidents' conference of the Council of Independent Colleges, shares from a presentation that was focused on good relations with faculty, and the importance of getting faculty support, especially in tough times. Some of the presidential advice:

• Be brutally honest about the challenges, but don't paint a situation as hopeless—and never overpromise.
• Encourage faculty members to interact with the business-affairs staff and decision makers on the board of trustees—not just at board meetings, but also in informal situations.
• When sacrifices pay off with new or renewed resources, be sure to share those resources with those who gave up something for the organization. "Conspiracy theorists will say, You're just using the crisis to pull things from us that you felt you couldn't do" in good times, he said. ...

The key lessons, Mr. Anderson said, were that crisis can drive change on a campus, but it can also present two risks: "The first is that we can get into a food fight over process, and we lose our focus on the real issue of how we are going to make reductions and reallocations," he said. The policy document from the 1970s helped with that problem in this case.

"The second thing is, How do you preserve the fabric of the community and avoid the board taking charge or the administration taking charge?" he said. That threat can alter the very spirit of the higher-education enterprise, he said.

This very interesting post at "BlogU" brings to light many of the issues and questions that we've been hearing about at SCUP events and via SCUP communications. It specifically looks at what some institutional associations are doing to collaborate in gaining and sharing expertise in internationalization. As might be expected, the author quotes SCUPer Ann Duin Hill as someone with much related expertise. Her comment to the author was about shared infrastructure development, something that is focused on during the latter half of the post:

[W]hy should universities establish their own IT systems in global higher education hubs when they could collaborate much more closely and reduce costs? Or why should universities from one country work on an individual basis to establish foreign presence via leased space in select city-regions when they could collaborate, via an associational or inter-associational relations, and build a purpose built structure?

After the following paragraph, the author raises a long list of questions to be answered: This list is probably worth accessing and keeping on hand or in your mind.

These associations, and their cousins in other countries and regions, have shown themselves to be adroit and supportive on an increasing number of levels despite constrained resources. This said, it seems to me that there is a growing disjuncture between well-intended associations of universities and the defacto (and often not expressed) needs of their membership bases, especially with respect to the deep internationalization agenda. Members are grappling (or not, which should be a concern!) with complex challenges and topics like: (See the article for the list of 12 itemized questions.)

He recognizes the good work of such groups as the APLU and CIC, but says that much more is needed:

Associations of universities are obvious candidates to build up the capacity of their members but they too are seeing enhanced obligations and mission creep as the denationalization process unfolds. Such associations are also grappling with fiscal constraints for they tend to reply upon membership fees as a main if not majority source of revenue. Thus there is an emerging disjuncture - universities have more on their plate, while associations have more on their plate, but the membership fee revenue foundation has intractable constraints and structural contradictions associated with it.

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.

The editorial "we" often disagrees with Stanley Fish, but he often is provocative or interesting. This time we pretty much agree with his thesis, although perhaps not with his full analysis of the actions of SUNY Albany's president. It might be about time to declare the humanities officially endangered. Addressing what, if anything can be done, he writes:

The only thing that might fly — and I’m hardly optimistic — is politics, by which I mean the political efforts of senior academic administrators to explain and defend the core enterprise to those constituencies — legislatures, boards of trustees, alumni, parents and others — that have either let bad educational things happen or have actively connived in them.

And when I say “explain,” I should add aggressively explain — taking the bull by the horns, rejecting the demand (always a loser) to economically justify the liberal arts, refusing to allow myths (about lazy, pampered faculty who work two hours a week and undermine religion and the American way) to go unchallenged, and if necessary flagging the pretensions and hypocrisy of men and women who want to exercise control over higher education in the absence of any real knowledge of the matters on which they so confidently pronounce.

On the basis of his performance in this instance, President Philip (who is without a doctoral degree and who has little if any experience teaching or researching) is not that kind of administrator, although he does exhibit some skills. With little notice, he called a town hall meeting for Friday afternoon, Oct. 1, when he could be sure that almost no academic personnel would be hanging around. In an e-mail sent the same day, he noted the “unfortunate timing,” but pleaded the “limited availability of appropriate large venue options.” In effect, I can’t call a meeting on a convenient day because we don’t have a room large enough to get you all in, so I’ll commandeer a large room on a day when I know that very few of you will show up. Brilliant!