Restructuring Task Force Meeting Notes - Oct. 10, 2003

Dennis Nunes and Andrew Larkin reviewed the Provost’s charge to the task force.

Discussion about the real and/or perceived problems with the university’s current structure:

• General education - three of the five core areas are in one college, which weakens the other programs in the college. If all liberal arts were together, the burden of general education would be spread out.
• Academic course work that’s not being supervised by an academic area.
• Advising - faculty are not well informed either about general education advising or advising specific to departments and colleges. There is a perception that once students are admitted into a major they don’t need advising any more.
• Needed courses are often not available for students.
• Budget cuts/lack of resources.
• Assessment will become a problem when it’s time for reaccreditation.

Discussion about the extent to which these problems are organizational issues and what issues the committee should be looking at. Common themes the provost has mentioned include improving advising before students are admitted into a major, first-year experience and retention. The committee’s charge is making recommendations for reorganizing the colleges, creating a professional college, reorganizing academic support services.

It was felt to be important to allow all members of the campus community to be able to give their input. The committee wants to solicit opinions particularly from people in areas that would be most affected by reorganization, including but not limited to: deans, Lin Holder, Nathan Church, Mahmoud Saffari, Steve Klepetar, Julie Bresnahan-Stark, Richard Rothaus, and the FA Committee on First Year Experience. They will be given a set of questions ahead of time and asked to meet with the committee to give their reactions, with time limited to 20 minutes.

Questions suggested included:

• What are the main issues that organizational structures have impact on?
• How could changing the organizational structure better serve students?
• What are your reactions to the choices outlined in the Ghosh/Mortimer consultant report?
• What is an optimal structure for delivering services to students?

There may be time enough only to listen to reactions to two questions. If only two, they should be:

• What are the critical issues?
• What is the optimal organizational structure?

It was reiterated that this is an open forum, everyone should have the ability to add input, and everyone should have access to the documents the committee is looking at.

Looking at other organizational structures was suggested. P.N. Subbanarasimha will look up structures of other kinds of organizations; Dennis Nunes will look for organizational structures of peer institutions

Timeline: Solicit input during October, work on report first week of November to have a draft out to the university community by the middle of November.

Agenda for Oct. 13: Dennis Nunes & Andrew Larkin will meet at 7:00 a.m., and the rest of the committee will join them at 8:00 a.m.