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| Educating the Chancellor | ||||
Where
we are going: Excellence across the board |
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Facilities
and Infrastructure | Academic Advising |Teaching
and Learning | |
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variety of subjects fall under the theme “excellence across the board.”
They share several premises: first, that high quality must remain our most fundamental
commitment and, second, that there are strong interdependencies among our programs
at UWGB and so we cannot be fully successful if components of the university are
allowed to lag behind. Facilities and Infrastructure Overall, I learned that our facilities are excellent. We still have some fine-tuning to do with Mary Ann Cofrin Hall including attention to serious “sound-bleed” problems, but it is a spectacular addition to our academic buildings. We are adding a residence hall a year. The Lab Sciences remodel and expansion will provide us with, essentially, a new building thoughtfully shaped by science faculty colleagues to support the ways in which science will be taught in the future. Library space is much too cramped — and furnishings embarrassingly inadequate — but plans are in place for expansion to floors seven and eight. Student Union needs have expanded and changed dramatically since our Union was constructed; we are acting on authorization to plan for an expansion and remodel; and funds to proceed are “in the bank.” Our technological infrastructure would be the envy of many — I suspect from my reading of the Chronicle most — campuses of our size. We have been able to recruit and retain dedicated professionals with the expertise to keep us in a leadership position in this critical area. Our strong position with respect to our technological infrastructure has been maintained, in part, by relying significantly upon institutional reserves; reserves, of course, are for unexpected needs and, whenever an institution chooses to fund predictable obligations through use of reserves, there is the almost inevitable likelihood that, when “emergency” circumstances require reserves to be used for their intended purposes, then former uses for the reserves may not be covered. Our information systems — I have the PeopleSoft implementation in mind — were much discussed during several “get-to-know sessions.” This has been a major challenge, one our campus has been up to because of the extraordinary efforts of many people. Other information and report needs, really quite a diverse range, were identified in various sessions. When this would occur, I would usually suggest that the best solution will likely be to disperse report writing, “what if” analyses, and such to the individual desktop as more user-friendly “data warehouse” products are available. One of our most glaring facilities needs, obvious to me even from as far away as Oregon, was in the area of health/wellness/fitness facilities. In conversations with students, our needs here were dramatically impressed upon me. Since the Phoenix Sports Center was completed (and only a portion of the original project actually got built), we have grown in numbers of students and, in particular, have grown dramatically in the number of students we have residing on campus. Also, students have changed. They care increasingly about their physical well-being. Support for our student-athletes is wholly inadequate, and we should be very proud of what they and the Athletic Department have achieved given such facilities. I like to emphasize, though, that we cannot recruit top students — not just top athletes but top students in all areas — given the poor health and fitness facilities we have. Further, we cannot adequately support the health and wellness programming we should be making available to students, faculty, staff, and classified colleagues. During my earliest meetings with people on campus and in the community, I also learned that our top priorities were going to be torpedoed by inclusion within our plans of a component that provoked strong opposition. This was the large events center. Students, early on, explained to me that their top priority was a facility that would allow them to host concerts and such. The campus certainly also needed a facility to house commencement and other large university events and to feature our outstanding women’s basketball program. These priorities, along with the badly needed exercise and training facilities, were going to be lost if we proceeded with something that would be nice to have but that was not as high a priority. So, we scaled back the project from $60M to $30M by eliminating the very large events center, maintaining a smaller sports and events center suited to our needs and not competing with the community’s new Resch Center. We also embraced the Resch Center, happily, as the home court for the Phoenix Men’s Basketball team. Those were results of the listening and learning process for a new chancellor. Now, we need to finance and build the remodeled and expanded Phoenix Sports Center. I can report that, unlike when I arrived, there is strong support for this effort in the community and genuine appreciation for the need. Students have pledged half the funding; we should all be very proud that our students so recognize the need that those today have decided to tax themselves to pay for a facility that will not be built in time for use by most of today’s students. I am confident that the remainder of the funding will be provided through the generosity of private individuals, the help of foundations, and the support of the Regents and the Legislature. This is an example of “Excellence Across the Board.” Important needs remain. The student-affairs area is in bad need of significant remodeling to support more modern approaches to the provision of student and academic support services. We recognize the need; finding the resources to make the requisite changes will take tenacity and patience. At several points, I heard concerns about whether people will be adequately engaged in the design of our new projects. Concerns ranged from those who feared, in the Union remodel, that revenue considerations might outweigh student-programming priorities to custodians concerned about design features that made buildings more difficult to maintain. We will all have opportunities to be involved in building design. There is an iterative process whereby architects listen to our needs, present solutions, listen to our critiques of their solutions, and then come back with the next proposed solution. Inevitably, we must work within fixed budgets and so compromises will be made. We will not get everything we want. That does not mean that our needs were not heard, though. As we anticipate new construction, we must consider maintenance needs. I heard of this concern from several groups. The fact is maintenance is currently significantly underfunded, and it is very hard to find funding for maintenance. New buildings are popular, but legislators do not gain votes by increasing allocations to maintenance. Donors are not interested in endowing a named “custodianship.” We, though, must plan for the impact of new construction on our maintenance capacity. Resources were reallocated to provide support for Mary Ann Cofrin Hall. The plans for the PSC remodel and events center include, within them, revenue streams to cover operation and maintenance. Academic Advising Academic advising is a special obligation at UWGB. It is also a special challenge. This is because of our roots, our academic plan. From the beginning, we emphasized individualized, student-planned courses of study. We emphasized programs drawing from multiple disciplines. And, we developed many, many minors with complex interrelationships among themselves and to majors. I have been at much larger universities but have never seen such curricular complexity. We should not be surprised if our students are sometimes bewildered. Such considerations — chief among them the laudable emphasis upon student-centered program design — also mean that “assembly line” advising via web pages or advising handouts will not suffice. Students have praised the attention and help they have received from academic advisors. But, usually only after they survived a variety of impediments to finding and forming such a relationship. I have heard, repeatedly and from students with diverse backgrounds, that their academic advising experiences have not been satisfactory. Beginning students sometimes feel lost and too frequently report great difficulty in finding an advisor. More advanced students report considerable variability in the quality of advising they receive from particular faculty, and students in some programs report considerable variability in the knowledge, expertise, and nuts-and-bolts advice they receive. Survey data dramatically document how dissatisfied our students are relative to students at other UW campuses and campuses like ours across the country. This holds for students in their first year as well as in their senior year. Academic advising is a key component of our teaching responsibilities, as I view it. In terms of the contributions of our teaching faculty to the success of our students, the importance of advising is second only to the quality of our classroom instruction. We need to improve advising. Several thoughts occur: • We need several approaches. We need to target “at-risk” students — those, in particular, who are uncertain about their academic objectives. Universities are finding that the solution for retaining “undecideds” is not to force them into a major; it is to target resources tailor made to the particular needs of these students. We also need approaches for students who do know what they wish to major in. |
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Our approach, for those who have clear majors, needs to be flexible. Different
approaches work best in different circumstances. “Head advisor” models
tend to work well in professional programs where programs are highly structured
and where students need to all “get the same story.” Often, in the liberal
arts, individual faculty advising is best suited to the individual needs of students. • The quality of academic advising needs to be assessed, regularly, just as we do instruction, and such assessments must be a part of routine personnel evaluations and decisions. I have asserted that academic advising is a key component of our teaching responsibilities. If we are not measuring our success here — advisor by advisor — what is that saying, symbolically, about the importance of academic advising? I have heard some say that, today, the principal reward for being an effective advisor seems to be to have more advisees. • Advising serves several purposes. There is what I call the “academic accounting” function: reviewing progress toward degree requirements. Our machines can, increasingly, take care of that — on demand as students want an update. There is also the critically important function of reviewing goals, accomplishments, challenges, and plans. Advising performs another function critical, so the research suggests, to academic success: the development of a bond with the institution/program/advisor. This “fuzzier” payoff from academic advising needs to be valued. Its importance is such that we should consider mandatory academic advising. • At one time, academic advising services and the Registrar’s office were more closely integrated, organizationally, with Academic Affairs and some told me, during the listening sessions, that student advising was an area of high student satisfaction. We should review these organizational matters. • We have charged a group to develop approaches in this area. We should all look forward to their recommendations. As was my suggestion for general education, my bent is not to look for the ultimate solution; rather, we need to try what we think will work, experimenting where we are unsure or disagree, making certain we have in place the processes for using information on results to further refine our approach. Teaching and Learning I heard from a number of faculty about the need for help with pedagogical innovation: the need for more time and for development opportunities. These comments often came from newer faculty but were not restricted to those who only recently joined the professorate. These comments provoked some introspection. I entered the classroom with not one hour of preparation on how to teach. I was awful. With painful experience — my own, my students’ — I did improve. I also entered the classroom with a mindset that all I had to do was figure out how to teach as I had been taught. Once done, I had taken care of learning how to be a good teacher. I expected, almost daily, to work on my development as a scholar: keeping up on the field, certainly, but also regularly undergoing significant retooling as I would shift fields or as fields would shift. I never expected that I would so regularly need to “retool” my pedagogy. Today, we do need to regularly reinvest in our professional development as teachers. It is not just the emerging technologies that are driving this. More fundamentally, we are ever better understanding how people learn and how people can be helped to learning. The scholarship of pedagogy is real: theories developed, hypotheses tested, findings interpreted. That need was not obvious to me when I began as an assistant professor. I was very pleased to learn that it is clear to UWGB’s faculty today. Colleagues here are continually experimenting with new approaches to promoting learning. They are staying informed about developments in these areas. But, this is, currently, usually dependent upon individual efforts, one faculty member at a time. How do we continue to improve as teachers? I heard from teaching faculty about the heavy loads under which they already operate including teaching, scholarship, and service. We clearly need to provide support for professional development in teaching and learning. Just what this will come to mean remains to be seen — there are many models and we must judge the approach best suited to our circumstances and our means — but this needs to be a high priority. Research and Creative Activity Precisely because we are an institution dedicated to fostering learning, we set high standards for the continuing scholarly engagement of our faculty. In meeting after meeting, the faculty’s commitment to this principle came through very clearly. That is reassuring, for the quality of our programs — and the learning they foster — depend upon our continuing investment in our capabilities as scholars and creators. Our adherence to strong expectations for continuing scholarship cannot be enforced “top down.” We must share the commitment because our personnel procedures are “bottom up.” Or, so they must be if we are to be a healthy university. And, the overwhelming evidence is that we are. We should all find significant reassurance here. Our research and creative activities pay off in terms of our continuing development as faculty. We are the institution that society looks to for its regular “retooling,” and, in an environment of rapidly changing understandings (technical, scientific, and cultural), we can only fulfill that responsibility by being at the forefront of our fields. However, I also was excited by the numerous examples I heard of other ways in which our commitments to research “pay off.” Our students, both graduate and undergraduate, are actively engaged in faculty research and creative activity. There are really exciting involvements allowing our students, through the efforts they put in, to attain a truly higher education. This year the University hosted, for the first time, a symposium highlighting what our students, working with faculty mentors, were able to achieve in scholarly and creative endeavors. It was very impressive. There are institutions of our type that are expecting every undergraduate to have a significant research or creative experience working with a faculty mentor. Given the fit with core strengths of our academic plan (practical problem solving, individualized and student-centered academic programs) this is something we should consider, perhaps as a part of a “capstone” requirement for every major. I was also excited to hear how often our research and creative activities directly engage and support our surrounding communities. Faculty and students undertake projects of direct benefit to our area, something not well understood in the community but essential, I will later argue, to the future well-being of UWGB. Sometimes, what one does not hear is as important as what one hears. Universities around the country have, over the last decade, been reconsidering definitions of scholarship. They are doing so for many good reasons and prompted by much stimulating debate. What I sensed at UWGB was a rather traditional view of scholarship and little interest in engaging in the sort of discussions taking place on other campuses. If, however, we remain serious about such pursuits as enhancing the learning environment, practical problem solving, and communiversity, then I suspect we will want to seriously examine our approach to assessing scholarship. The bar should remain high. But, we must make sure the realms we consider are up-to-date and consistent with the institutional directions we wish to emphasize. I heard, at several points, expressions of satisfaction with the degree of support provided for research and scholarly activity. I also heard from a number of faculty that other expectations — teaching loads in particular — significantly impair a person’s scholarly accomplishments. Or, and this is more often how it was stated, other commitments mean that weekends, vacations, and other more private times are gobbled up in order to fulfill the individual’s scholarly expectations. No quick solutions to workload issues were apparent. Expectations for load hours are unlikely to be diminished: at UWGB or at any comparable institution anywhere in the country. We must pursue strategies to bring our class sizes into line with those at comparable institutions and longer-term strategies to achieve that aim will be suggested below. There are several more immediate ways in which we might address concerns in this area if the University (i.e., you) determines them high enough priority to warrant resource reallocations. Extramural support for research and creative activity can help. Our current efforts in this area are respectable but could be further supported and emphasized. We could also establish a competitive program of modest internal grants for scholarly enterprises, perhaps awarded for summer research and, perhaps, emphasizing efforts laying groundwork for successfully obtaining extramural support. |
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| More EXCELLENCE ACROSS THE BOARD | ||||
| TOP OF NEXT COLUMN | TOP OF PAGE | |||
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| ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS | INTRODUCTION | THEMES | WHERE WE HAVE BEEN | FOUNDATIONS | ||||
| WHERE WE ARE GOING: Engagement | Excellence Across the Board | Education for the 21st Century | ||||
| GETTING THERE | CONCLUSIONS | CONTINUING THE DISCUSSION | SUMMARY | APPENDIX | ||||
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| Office
of the Chancellor, David A Cofrin Library, Suite 810, University of Wisconsin-Green
Bay, 2420 Nicolet Drive, Green Bay, WI 54311-7001 Phone: 920-465-2207 E-mail: shepardb@uwgb.edu Comments to: Chancellor's Web Manager Revised: 7/31/06 |