Provost lays out planning priorities

by Sarah R. Buchholz, Chronicle staff

ddressing deans, department heads and chairs, and campus staff in Academic Affairs, Research and University Outreach on Tuesday, Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Provost Cora Marrett announced plans to form several faculty committees to study key issues affecting the future of the campus.

     During the meeting in the Lincoln Campus Center, Marrett presented "Planning Priorities for the 'Academic Core,'" a look at critical choices and challenges involved in achieving the profile of an Association of American Universities (AAU) institution, a prestigious distinction, and called for questions and comments afterward.

     "We're beginning to tell the story about ourselves as the Commonwealth's university," she said. "We are identifying areas we must emphasize if we are to give form, shape and verity to our story. We are responsible for carrying the creative activity beyond the bounds of the campus."

     "I'd like Academic Affairs to achieve the profile of an AAU institution. If we want to serve the commonweal effectively, we ought to be of the highest quality."

     Marrett described the campus as being at a "critical juncture in the life of a research university." She identified four areas where the institution "must make critical choices and accept the consequent challenges": faculty, quality of instruction, interdisciplinarity and facilities.

     The current concern with the faculty is the "prolonged and continuing loss of intellectual capital," she said. Because the ratio of the base faculty to full-time students is diminishing and approximately half the faculty are expected to leave in the next decade, she said, "We are committing to a faculty renewal strategy." The strategy includes minimizing the loss of young faculty due to raiding. A faculty renewal framework will include addressing the problem of unfunded mandates, which sometimes leave departments with no choice but to cannibalize a vacant position to pay for rising costs elsewhere, and to persist in trying to provide adequate start-up monies.

      "For undergraduate education, nothing can be more central that a high-quality faculty," she said.

     Quality of instruction is being affected as faculty face multiple demands asking them to do more with fewer resources. The demand for smaller classes and learning communities is one example, she said.

     "How in the world are you going to supply smaller classes when you have fewer people to teach those classes?" she asked rhetorically. Other demands listed included "expectations for remote and on-line education," and the stresses of an imbalance between supply and demand in some areas.

     Marrett said that maintaining integrity of instruction in the face of these expectations will be critical. This will involve using instructional technology effectively, enabling the faculty to fulfill its responsibility for quality control, and avoiding loss of focus and "brand erosion." Balancing instructional supply and demand and preserving the primary role faculty play in quality control will be key challenges in this area, she said.

     Growing interest in interdisciplinary work has created conflicting commitments because "resources and faculty commitment are rooted -- appropriately -- in departments" and yet intellectual activity is increasingly at the intersections of disciplines. A lack of flexibility with resources can create conflicts between disciplinary and interdisciplinary work. Marrett said she hopes the campus can rethink roles and rewards structures and organize its resources differently so that interdisciplinary work can be at its conceptual core. She would like to see obstacles to collaboration removed, faculty vacancies viewed as common resources for the academic area, and investments targeted at the intersections of disciplines.

      Because facilities are a factor in attracting and retaining excellent faculty, the overwhelming needs generated by a deteriorating physical plant, "poor configuration of space" and inadequate or unreliable funding are an academic-planning concern.

     "We're committed to implementing the recommendations of the ad hoc planning group," she said. She indicated that academics can participate in the capital campaign by building support for the priorities in the capital plan and helping to generate interest in key projects, such as the proposed integrated sciences building and much-needed space for the visual arts.

     "Almost all of our visual arts spaces on campus are being closed down," she said. We've got to do something about the absence of adequate facilities on that side."

     Marrett said that the campus must take action in these areas in order to maintain momentum in admissions and research- and fee-based revenue streams, to successfully compete for sponsored projects, and to make the best use of existing resources. Toward that end, she plans to form three working committees composed heavily of heads and chairs but also open to other faculty.

     "As we enter a period of more intensive, focused planning, the deans, heads and chairs will be key academic leaders," she said. "I invite volunteers."

     The committees will address revenue development, organization of resources, and hiring and staffing policy.