Society for College and University Planning

A recent letter to Barack Obama and John McCain from the presidents of the AACC, AAU, AASCU, NAICU, ACE, and NASULGC: "As representatives of our higher education institutions, we wish to suggest several areas of consideration for strengthening higher education, preserving America's economic and national security, and ensuring that our citizens have full opportunity to succeed in a world undergoing vast and rapid change." The main points in the message for the candidates: 1. Solving the Access Problem, Together; 2. Maintaining the Public Trust through Greater Transparency; 3. Maintaining Our Competitive Edge—From Research to Job Training; 4. Advancing International Education—Our Best Diplomatic Tool; and 5. Success Through a Proactive Partnership. [more]
Tags: election, federal, government relations, leadership, policy

We sometimes bemoan the lack of time for reflection. Jerry D. Campbell calls it "thinking," or at least we think it's the same thing: "Unfortunately, in failing to emphasize thinking in the workplace, we risk losing its potential. Thinking must be nurtured and facilitated. It is not so easy sometimes to get into the thinking mode. . . . We feel like we are wasting time if we are not doing something tangible: making calls, answering e-mails, starting the next assignment or project. Nonetheless, it is critically important to develop the discipline of turning off the ringer, putting away the Blackberry, moving aside the laptop, and turning mentally to the challenges in our work. . . . But again, this is hard to do. Without institutional encouragement, we start to feel guilty, like we're wasting time. Just sitting and thinking—isn't there something 'real' we should be doing? And even with encouragement, making the time to think takes practice, especially for those of us who have been out of school for a while. Thinking—especially useful, creative thinking—must be cultivated." [more]
Tags: academic leadership, innovation, professionalism, thinking

SCUPers enjoyed Piper's plenary address at SCUP–43. A lot of what she had to say there is now covered in this new article from University Affairs: "Let me start with a quote by James Duderstadt, from the book A University for the 21st Century: 'We must take care not simply to extrapolate from the past, but rather to examine the full range of possibilities for the future.' . . . But there's a problem with that quote as far as I'm concerned—it doesn't resonate particularly well in universities. . . . Why do I say that? Because universities relish the past. They're built on the history of centuries. They pride themselves on not changing. Scholars are taught by scholars who were taught by scholars. Teaching methods and cultural values have been handed down from generation to generation to generation. They actually resist change because they believe they've done it right, and the traditions are so ingrained in the culture." [more]
Tags: change, environmental scanning, future, Martha Piper, transformation

It should be especially interesting to SCUPers that some very intriguing thoughts about curriculum change are coming from the anonymous Getting to Green blogger, G. Rendell. His latest post is titled "Realistic Radicalism." Do you think this could "fly?": "[David Orr is] quoted as saying, 'The main architecture of the curricula is sacrosanct . . . . Conversations still don't easily cross back and forth between disciplines. And anything that begins to threaten that structure dies a pretty quick and painful death.' . . . In a nutshell, the complexity inherent in the information we need to exist in this world intelligently has surpassed the organizational capacities of our current system of academic disciplines. . . . So here's a modest proposal—no more single-subject, or even single-faculty (in the British usage) degrees. If your major is already trans-disciplinary, you're fine. If you have two majors, drawing on differing academic traditions, you're fine. However, if you're majoring only in a subject among the humanities, you need to at least minor in a social or a physical science. If you're majoring only in a physical science, you need to at least minor in one of the humanities or social sciences. And so forth. . . . As a solution to strict disciplinary thinking, this is an incomplete solution. But it's one which could be implemented more quickly and with less resistance (note, not zero resistance) than a true trans-disciplinary reworking of the academic organization." [more]
Tags: academic planning, curriculum, sustainability

This article suggests that more than half of high school students are looking at less prestigious schools than before the recent financial crisis, due to financial considerations: "For high school seniors like KC Martin of Englewood, Colo., even a four-year public university feels out of reach. She says she'll probably go to a community college, a decision she reached with her parents. 'It's a tough one, because I want to go to a four-year school, but it's expensive,' she says. . . . Community colleges typically swell during economic downturns, but with the financial crisis and the loss of state revenues, it will be daunting for some to accommodate what could be unprecedented demand, says Norma Kent, spokeswoman for the American Association of Community Colleges in Washington. Without funding to hire more faculty or build labs, 'there's a de facto cap,' she says,' despite their mission to be accessible to everyone.'" [more]
Tags: accessibility, community college, cost, financial crisis, tuition

NAICU (the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities) surveyed its 953 member institutions about the effect of the credit crunch on student loan availability for ths current semester. Good news: Not much of a strong impact, yet: "While there was no widespread student loan crisis this fall, there were multiple instances of students taking time off of school, switching to part-time status, and turning to alternative forms of financial support, according to the results of [this] survey. . . . The survey . . . also found a considerable amount of behind-the-scenes scrambling by private colleges to keep loan capital flowing to their students. 'In the main, the survey shows that independent higher education and our students weathered the student loan crunch through September,' said NAICU President David L. Warren. 'To varying degrees, individual students and institutions were impacted by the crunch, but no widespread access crisis materialized in the first half of the fall semester.'" [more]
Tags: credit, credit crunch, finances, financial crisis, student loans

Yes, there really is a Chief Dull Knife College. As you can learn very quickly from this "postcard," which is a text and visual snapshot of a unique institution: "Littlebear, 68, has a doctorate in education from Boston University and is fluent in Cheyenne; he teaches evening courses in it. He refers to tribal colleges as 'underfunded miracles.' With a meager $4.9 million budget provided mostly by the Federal Government, his school operates on a thin shoestring indeed. But Chief Dull Knife College perseveres, holding out hope for a new generation of Northern Cheyennes. More than half its graduates now go on to four-year schools." [more]
Tags: Cheyenne, Chief Dull Knife College, community college, dull knife, knife, Native American

Community college driven: "The Cluster formed in January 2004, when county managers of Wilkes, Ashe, and Alleghany Counties joined WCC to create a sustainable economy in northwest North Carolina. Under the direction of WCC, the Cluster forged partnerships among a number of industries, educational institutions, and governmental agencies. An executive committee guides the mission of research, education, job growth, and infrastructure. Collaboratively, the committee makes strategic decisions regarding programs, organizational structure, and partnerships. What began as a three-county economic development effort under the leadership of their community college has now grown to encompass several counties, partners, and networks across the state. . . . As the three-county service area's higher education institution, WCC saw the webs of interconnections that weave the region together; became more aware that the region lives in relationship, connected to everything else; and learned that profoundly different processes explain how open systems emerge and change. Many disciplines, in different sectors and voices, now speak about the advantages of networks, the value of relationships, the importance of context, and new ways to honor and work with wholeness." [more]
Tags: community college, economic development

Everyone complains about textbook prices. Who's going to do something about them? A consortium of community colleges has created the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources. Its goal is "to identify, create and/or repurpose required course content as Open Textbooks and make them available for use by community college students and faculty in America and globally. . . . The first open textbook, Collaborative Statistics, is now freely available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license for use by community college statistics professors . . . . More open textbooks are now being identified for use in the months and years ahead. As CCCOER develops and more open textbooks are created, located, and used by community college professors, more information will be added to this website." [more]
Tags: CCCOER, college, Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, textbooks

This is one in a series of "chapters" about college and university best practices, written by presidents for the Presidential Perspectives.org website. In this essay, Beheruz N. Sethna, president, The University of West Georgia, writes about his campus' successes in sustainability achievements. His "recommendations for implementation" of any successful initiative at a university are: "First, Make it an institutional priority"; "Second: Create a plan of action to generate the conservation"; "Third: Present the implementation plan to the leadership of the institution"; "Fourth: Roll out the plan with the endorsement of the leadership"; "Fifth: Monitor the progress with regularly scheduled metric analysis": "The title of this essay also emphasizes how the University of West Georgia (UWG) would not be able to realize its Green Initiative without the involvement of the entire campus. Add together, in approximately equal parts, the faculty, staff, students, alumni, and a large external community. Next, mix in undergraduate and graduate student research with faculty and staff research and continuous monitoring, assessment, and reporting. You begin to get an idea of the complexity of a Green Initiative that partners with a multitude of public entities." [more]
Tags: best practices, leadership, operational planning, sustainability

This resource is from EDUCAUSE Review: "Focusing on 'glimpses of the future,' the 2008 EDUCAUSE Evolving Technologies Committee looked at five IT technologies and trends of importance to higher education: green enterprise computing; location-aware computing; virtual worlds; business process management; and regulatory compliance. . . . No, it's not a corny joke your six-year-old might tell. 'What's green, mobile, and regulated all over?' is a fairly succinct description of today's evolving IT environment. More than ever, we find we are dealing with a new interpretation of Moore's Law. As technical capabilities continue to double regularly, energy, economic, and regulatory constraints on those capabilities are increasing exponentially as well." [more]
Tags: information technology, IT, sustainability

This brief (4.5 minutes) video begins, "Life is a design problem. Anything is a design problem": "Mardelle Shepley, DArch, director of the Center for Health Systems & Design at Texas A&M University, describes her adventures moving from the academic setting to an architectural practice for several months, and what the experience taught her about the information needs of practicing architects wanting to pursue evidence-based design." [more]
Tags: architecture, classroom design, evidence-based design

Maybe you use Wikipedia, maybe you sneer at it, maybe you contribute to it. No matter, it's an important part of academic life in 2008 and if you read this article, subtitled "Why the online encyclopedia's epistemology should worry those who care about traditional notions of accuracy," you will certainly know more about how Wikipedia content gets to where it is than almost anyone else you know: "Why should we care? Because Wikipedia's articles are the first- or second-ranked results for most Internet searches. Type 'iron' into Google, and Wikipedia's article on the element is the top-ranked result; likewise, its article on the Iron Cross is first when the search words are 'iron cross.' Google's search algorithms rank a story in part by how many times it has been linked to; people are linking to Wikipedia articles a lot. . . . This means that the content of these articles really matters." [more]
Tags: information technology, IT, library, reference, Wikipedia