February 2008

Colleagues,

Each semester I prepare a message to the academic community that shares good news, outlines some challenges and issues we are facing and attempts to facilitate communication through clarification of information and solicitation of input.  This spring I will focus on three areas:  1) national changes in higher education and how they impact us; 2) our public affairs mission; and 3) the work life of our faculty.  During this semester, several opportunities will be scheduled for interested faculty and staff to join me to discuss any of these issues.  The first open discussion is scheduled for February 22, 3:00 PM, PSU Union Club.

I.  The National Scene

I recently returned from the national meeting of the American Council on Education, where I learned that many of the initiatives underway in Missouri are being even more rapidly embraced across the country.  The emphasis on accountability appears to be leading to the acceptance of national standards for higher education – an event not even considered a possibility only a few years ago.

I hope to have the opportunity to discuss these changes with you in department meetings, faculty lunches, open forums and other gatherings, because the implications are truly dramatic and far reaching. In a nutshell -

There have been significant US Department of Education efforts to exercise control over regional accreditation, such as our Higher Learning Commission.  In most countries, there is a ministry of education that directly oversees all universities and colleges; many individuals felt that something along those lines was the aim of the current administration.  But Congress did not support such a move, instead mandating that universities meet accountability and reporting requirements through a variety of mandatory and voluntary efforts.

The Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA) that universities themselves developed through their professional associations is being adopted across the country (including Missouri) as a way of meeting federal requirements while still preserving the identity and integrity of individual institutions.  It is an imperfect measure by all accounts, but it is seen as preferable to any other alternative, especially one that might be adopted carte blanche from the K-12 arena. (To give you an idea of willingness to impose additional regulations on higher education, there are 222 new reporting requirements in the House version and 153 in the Senate version of the Higher Education Reauthorization Bill.)

The VSA provides information in two areas about which the federal government is greatly concerned – the pricing of a college education and the educational experience that is typically provided at the institution.  Every institution will have on its web site information on its pricing – students can complete a quick survey providing details of their financial situation at the VSA web site, and then go to individual institutional web sites and find out what they would actually pay to attend a specific university.

The VSA “truth in pricing” approach, which allows students to factor in the financial aid they will receive from all sources as they calculate cost, is a very positive achievement for all of us in higher education.  Within higher education, we have known for years that most students do not pay the high “sticker price” that some elite private institutions charge, nor do students even pay the average cost of tuition most of us officially charge.  This is because college tuition is heavily subsidized by federal, state and institutional support.

The VSA focuses on three measures of the educational experience: persistence (retention and graduation rates), engagement and learning outcomes.  Taken individually, each of those measures is very limited; for example, a 100% retention rate from freshmen to sophomore year might simply indicate a lack of rigor.  High levels of reported engagement might simply mean that students are having fun in class, but not necessarily learning.  But because the VSA also requires reporting learning outcomes – using a value added approach that compares students’ level of ability as freshmen to their level of ability as seniors in such areas as critical thinking and problem solving ability - schools and colleges must find ways to ensure that retention is achieved without sacrificing learning and that engagement is in service of student intellectual development.  This focus on learning outcomes is considerably more sophisticated than the area tests and exit surveys many programs have used in the past – and in the next few months our institution will have to decide among which of three “value added learning outcome measures” we will employ to meet our requirements for participation in VSA.  

In summary, it appears that the federal government is going to permit the continuation of voluntary measures of accreditation and the utilization of a newly developed system of voluntary measurement and reporting of accountability.  The good news is that right now those efforts are managed by the academic community.  

The challenge will be to develop, implement and measure the effectiveness of student success strategies, to ensure that the students we enroll get started on the right track at Missouri State, knowing what is expected of them and having the opportunity and the encouragement to develop what they need to be successful learners.  We will clearly spend more time examining how the efforts of Student Affairs and our academic programs work together to achieve these goals, reviewing the enrollment patterns of our students, and assessing the learning achieved in our courses.  This will be a highly collaborative effort, requiring faculty leadership at all levels.

For my own part, I will be teaching a section of IDS 110 this fall.  I look forward to the opportunity to learn how students born in 1990 view the world, and to explore how to best assist them in getting all they can from the rich learning experience we offer at Missouri State University.

II.  Our Public Affairs Mission

The VSA and some of our new efforts to work with freshmen have required us to take a look at what it is that is unique and special about Missouri State.  This is especially important as we try to communicate to others what we provide to students who enroll, and inform students about the qualities of the Missouri State experience that cannot be measured in rates of retention or scores on learning outcome assessments.  

In each case, we began reflecting on our public affairs mission, and what it means to our students.  It became clear that we would have to define more carefully what it is that every student will experience as part of their living and learning at Missouri State and how that experience will impact them.
 
A review of our mission statement, long range plan, and numerous other documents and our points of pride – outstanding students and faculty, alumni, and community support – led to a rather simple articulation of the public affairs mission as it relates to our goals for our students.  It is an attempt to answer the complicated question – “what is public affairs?” in a manner that we could implement campus wide.  It is designed to help us more effectively organize and deliver what we are doing now.  The three broad themes of the public affairs mission can thus be articulated as:

1) Community Engagement   - our students should learn to appreciate, participate in, and impact the community and world around them. Our graduates should have a thirst and hunger for meaningful involvement, and the skills to make a difference.

2) Cultural Competence – our recruiting efforts have clearly achieved a more diverse and international mix of students and faculty than in the past.  But our efforts must go further, working to:

Recruit – efforts are well underway but by no means achieved
Include – create an inclusive environment for all our students
Connect – connect majority to non majority students and others – in the classroom, through campus activities, in the community – if learning and understanding is to be achieved.  
Enable – ensure that our students learn how to be effective among diverse populations at work and interpersonally in this “global village.”

3) Ethical Leadership –  
Missouri State has turned out a large number of leaders in our history, and the values of those graduates and the positive impact they have made on the world is one of our very greatest assets.  Ethical leadership is written into our long range plan and the signs of this focus are evident throughout campus – in our classrooms, labs and studios, in student affairs, in our alumni.  Missouri State has prided itself on being the kind of place where students could come and find themselves – find that they had strengths and abilities beyond their realization – and discover their passion.  That passion can produce excellence in achievement and leadership in action.  The conduct of the leaders we develop may well be as important to us as the accomplishments they achieve.

I hope you will see a number of efforts underway to communicate, support and promulgate the above areas of focus, and define our efforts in the above terms.  We hope to involve people throughout the campus in promoting the public affairs mission – working to ensure that community engagement is embedded in the very fiber of campus, organizing our international and diversity efforts to ensure cultural competence and reflecting on the challenges of leadership and how to better “grow” ethical leaders among our students, faculty and others.

III.  The Work / Life of our Faculty

Faculty have spent a significant portion of their time in the last two years developing and revising guidelines for merit evaluation, evaluating each other under the compensation plan, revising tenure and promotion guidelines to reflect changes in merit evaluation, evaluating and revising policies and procedures and working to understand changes in the Faculty Handbook, the management of the extended campus and budget realities.  I would like to update you on where things stand on these matters from my perspective, and invite your comment and feedback.

A.  Merit Evaluation

There is no question that the annual evaluation of faculty is here to stay and that as long as we have raise pools above 2% we will have merit evaluations.  I believe that most faculty members support this concept and understand its appropriateness.  There remains some level of distress about a few elements of the current plan and process, most of which seems to be focused on the necessity of faculty involvement in personnel committees, the perceived rigidity of the weights and the forced distribution of outcomes.

a)  Although I acknowledge the substantial amount of faculty time that goes into personnel committee efforts, I think that faculty involvement has served to raise awareness of the extent to which we are ill prepared to evaluate teaching and service.  We are poised for a serious discussion of teaching and learning, and how to recognize and promote quality in these efforts.  We are also ready, I believe, to take on the question of what should be the focus of faculty service, recognizing that it should not simply be the “catch-all” that remains when the teaching and research assignments have been made, but an important part of the faculty member’s contribution to our university’s mission.

b)  There is information on the provost’s website about the compensation plan under resources/policies and procedures.  After considering questions raised by faculty at the Senate meeting last week, I realized that we need to do more to communicate this information and promulgate its distribution.  I am asking to have the link to the compensation plan displayed on the main page of the provost’s home page to facilitate communication.  I am also asking Chris Craig, Chair of the Compensation Committee, and the deans and department heads to work with me to find other means of facilitating thoughtful communication and “fact-checking” on this important matter.  

c)  Continued complaints from faculty regarding an inability to negotiate weights that deviate from college or department norms or to renegotiate weights after circumstances change are troubling. The compensation committee specifically provided discretion to department heads and deans to negotiate with faculty when special circumstances or changing circumstances warrant such a discussion.   While all parties may not be pleased with the results of discussions, good faith negotiation is a requirement of the process.

d)  To address these and other concerns, we have developed a five step process:

i.  Chris and I are soliciting additional information on any concerns of the faculty related to the compensation plan (and any other item of interest) at our open forum on Friday, February 22 in the Union Club at 3:00.  Issues related to  the compensation plan will then be brought before the Compensation Committee.

ii.  Personnel Committees in each department are being asked to submit questions and issues of concern to Chris, who will bring them to the Compensation Committee.

iii.  There will be a Town Hall Meeting on the Faculty Compensation Plan in mid March.  At that time, responses to the issues raised, particularly those related to department level processes, will be specifically addressed and the discussion will be opened for further input.  This forum will be sponsored jointly by the Faculty Senate, Compensation Committee and Provost’s Office.

iv.  The Faculty Senate will undertake its review of the Compensation plan after the completion of this year’s cycle.

v.  Additional guidelines will be developed to further support and clarify the compensation plan procedures.

B.  Tenure and Promotion

Department tenure and promotion guidelines are currently under review by the Provost’s Committee on Tenure and Promotion.  I have made two requests of the PCTP:

First, I have asked the committee to review tenure and promotion expectations for teaching and service.  Although expectations for research and creative activities should rest with the discipline, all of the university community shares a strong interest in promoting learning and meaningful service.  We need to ensure that our expectations in this area are comprehensive and clear.

Second, I have asked the committee to review criteria to determine the extent to which the public affairs mission is embedded in our guidelines.  This assessment might take many forms, but at a minimum it should address the role of applied research. This is a challenging issue, since no one wishes to reduce the quality of our expectations to include work that cannot be reviewed.  Fortunately, other universities and national professional organizations have been addressing this issue as well:  there are now templates available to guide the rigorous assessment of applied work.  If applied research supports our communities and informs the education of our students, we need to consider how it fits within our promotion and tenure expectations.

A third step is also underway to ensure that department standards for tenure and promotion are appropriate to their disciplines within universities like ours:  
Tenure and promotion criteria will be included in our program review process.  We will invite the assessment and recommendations of our external consultants regarding the fit between department expectations and disciplinary norms for each of our programs.  

C.  The Extended Campus (EC)

Good News.  While the deans work to sort through the budget implications of the move of all extended campus tuition dollars to the general fund, and all EC payments to the colleges, we have been able to develop an approach for the ongoing support of faculty who teach on line courses at the level previously contracted - $55 per headcount in a three credit course.  A proposal to earmark the “internet differential” in tuition (the amount beyond standard tuition that students pay for internet courses) for payments to the faculty and support for online and other instructional support will be presented to the Executive Budget Committee at our next meeting.  It has the support of the President, and Chief Financial Officer, so I am optimistic that it will be approved.  Contracts for new on line courses can include this provision for faculty support.

The new Director of Instructional Design, Tom Lightner, will be working with a faculty advisory committee to develop support materials and software for online faculty and ensure a level of quality for internet offerings that is comparable to other modalities.  

D. Budget Realities

Cost Centers.  The “cost center” approach to budgeting vests budget control, allocation and management in the head of the cost center.  This means that deans are responsible for allocating the dollars available to them to the departments and other units in their colleges.  There is tremendous flexibility within this model to move dollars from one category of expenditure to another.  With this flexibility comes a great many options and choices, and the recent addition of extended campus dollars into the permanent allocation of the colleges provides even more choice and challenge.

Prioritization.  Under this model, dollars saved from one source can be used for virtually any purpose - to raise salaries, hire faculty, per course, graduate students, buy supplies and equipment, etc.  This requires a prioritization of expenditures and an analysis of the fairness, effectiveness and efficiency of past practice in budget allocations.  All college faculty and administrators need to be engaged in the development of processes that permit the use of these new funds in a manner that rewards frugality and efforts to serve students, while investing in important research and public affairs endeavors.
I hope to work with the deans and department heads in facilitating these processes.

Reallocation.  At this time everyone, administrators and faculty, is gradually coming to grips with the new realities; some aspects of the changes are not widely understood.  Faculty are accustomed to assuming that new expenditures result from new dollars, but from now on, most new expenditures will probably be a result of shifting dollars from one area to another, not new income.

All of us now have to reallocate existing dollars to meet new priorities.  In the provost’s office we have identified a number of vacant positions that will not be filled, and used those resources to support college budget officers and facilities rentals, provost fellows, student success and learning initiatives, and a variety of one-time expenditures.  Vacated positions include:
 
Dean of the College of Continuing Education
Assistant to the Provost for Public Affairs
Director of the Distance Learning and Instructional Technology Center
Graphic designer
Administrative secretary
Director of the Center for Continuing and Professional Education
Computer Institute Technical Instructional Specialist I
Computer Institute Technical Instructional Specialist I
Assistant Program Coordinator Health & Human Services and Summer Youth Program
 
Additional positions have been reorganized, with a savings of 50% or more:
Director of International Programs
Director of the Academic Development Center

Conclusion.  We will continue to review job descriptions, assignments and other expenditures with the aim of maximizing the effectiveness and efficiency of our resource utilization.  I invite you to join me this semester to discuss any of the preceding matters or concerns not mentioned here.  Details of these discussion times will be announced in the near future.  Continuous communication and the transparency of our efforts can facilitate collaboration and understanding, and generate the most productive outcomes from our efforts.  I believe we are well positioned to address all of the challenges we face; the dedication of our faculty and staff to our students and to our university are clearly our greatest assets.