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SCSU Task Force on Restructuring
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Task Force on Restructuring Meeting Notes
October 20, 2003

Present: Nunes, Larkin, SubbaNarasimha, Starks-Martin, Rundquist, Bayerl, Dobey, Cogdill, Murphy, Spaude, Hansen

Absent: Lawrence, Kang

Steve Klepetar and Julie Bresnahan-Stark presented:

Steve had some written information to give the committee. Critical issues related to structural organization of the university for the Academic Advising area are: 1) we are in an awkward structural position because there are dual leaders - Steve is the faculty director, and Julie is the administrative director. The problem is about where we report. Steve’s impression is that he reports to Academic Affairs, but that Julie reports to Enrollment Management. In terms of practical operation that does create some difficulties. In our current situation we have bi-weekly unit meetings with Enrollment Management, Admissions and Records. We also meet bi-weekly with the Enrollment Management VP. Steve is not sure what the relationship is, since he doesn’t report to Enrollment Management. 2) There are concerns about where we would go to talk about issues we might have. We would like to have a structure that would allow us to bring our concerns to a higher level of administration. We don’t feel we have a way of expressing concerns without seeming to be setting up conflicts between administrators.

Questions:

  • Who supervises professional staff? We both do.
  • What is their classification? MSUAASF.
  • What are the positions in your area? Faculty Director (Steve) - .75 time in advising and .25 time teaching, 4 faculty - .25 time advising and .75 time teaching, Administrative Director (Julie) - 1.00 time advising, 6 full-time MSUAASF advisors - 1.00 time advising.

Our major concern is course availability, particularly for certain general ed courses but also for courses in some majors. We’ve noticed over the past 6 years that as SCSU approaches enrollment goals, it becomes more and more difficult for students to get classes. It’s possible that the restructuring plan that calls for a Liberal Arts & Sciences College might be helpful. Restructuring in and of itself is not likely to be able to resolve problems that are resource problems. Right now nobody has primary responsibility for general education. We wonder how it would work if restructuring took place with option 2 or 3 - would that change the way we do general education? There are a number of departments outside arts and sciences, e.g. business, education, and information media, that would be termed pre-professional; could they still participate in general education? There is a relationship between SCSU and the MN Transfer Curriculum. We have to accept courses that fulfill any goal in the MN Transfer Curriculum whether any department accepts them or not. We also have to offer MN Transfer Curriculum to anyone who wants it. Other than that we’ve chosen to largely ignore the MN Transfer Curriculum. An Associate Dean of Advising might give us a person who has responsibility to the MN Transfer Curriculum. Option 2 or 3 could give us someone to go to.

Questions:

  • How will that help? If you go to someone to say we need more seats, what will they do? A different structure in and of itself wouldn’t change anything, but someone with responsibility for general education might change the view. That person may be given more resources, etc. We go through the same issues every year. International students are the last students to register and every year it’s a problem. Maybe with someone in charge we could plan ahead for that.
  • So now it’s really the responsibility of the departments to plan for how many general ed seats they will offer, and there’s really nobody saying how many seats need to be saved campus wide? A person in charge of general education could control that number among the colleges. If restructuring means only shifting colleges, there would be no particular benefit.

We agree with the e-mail that stated that faculty in general seem not to have not a firm grasp of the general education program, despite efforts we’ve made to offer training sessions. We’ve changed the approach because there hasn’t been good attendance. This year we made offers to departments separately, and that seems to be working better. Faculty in general don’t seem to feel a very big stake in general ed advising, and we understand that, but it doesn’t solve the general ed advising problem. We need to offer incentives - something that would make advising part of their workload, or part of tasks that need to be completed. Faculty own the curriculum, general education courses are created by faculty, and faculty should take ownership of it.

Questions:

  • Some faculty see general ed advising as no more than posting the access codes on the wall, and that’s it. What should we do about that? That’s a problem advising deals with all the time. Some faculty are first-rate at advising; one faculty has even created an advising web site. There’s nothing much we can do with people who refuse to advise. One strategy would have been to assign all incoming students to the Advising Center, but that would have taken more staff, and that isn’t our structure. Advisor assignment is based on the departments telling Advising who’s willing to do general ed advising.
  • What about an Associate Dean of General Education and Advising? Sounds like a good idea. Enrollment Management and Advising don’t really go together that well. Enrollment Management has to do with marketing, recruitment and retention; we’re primarily involved in retention, but our role is to provide excellent advising.
  • How did advising work when retired faculty were recruited to do it? That was a special circumstance, we were forced to do that, it was driven by enrollment management. Every student had to come to get a hold removed before they could register. This approach created problems if something happened with the registration system, with everybody trying to register at once. It created stress and tension for everyone, instead of advising the students who really needed it. The retired faculty were great, however. Students loved them.
  • What would the optimal organizational structure be? It would help to create a structure that would clarify lines of reporting; a College of Arts & Sciences might help. But structure alone won’t solve the problems; we have to pay attention to resources, and to the relationship between major courses and general ed courses.
  • What was the rationale behind the co-directorship? Both MSUAASF and IFO felt that they “owned” advising.
  • Did you come up with some possible resolution to the reporting problems? The proposed new structure calls for Advising to be removed from Enrollment Management and report directly to Academic Affairs and that would be better. We are uncomfortable reporting to Enrollment Management because our goals are different. We see our function as married to academics rather than enrollment. It seems like a conflict of interest to be concerned with retention.

Discussion:

  • The issues we’re hearing about aren’t so much about structure. It is structure inasmuch as we always have the same problems.
  • We need to come up with list of pros and cons, we should think about those as we go along. Could we achieve consensus among the committee that the issues don’t seem to be organizational, though they may be structural?
  • The clearest things from their presentation are that there’s conflict between Enrollment Management and Advising, and that it’s important to have somebody in charge of general education.
  • Structure is not a solution to any problems, but some structures may allow us to solve our problems better than others. If we can identify some things that can help us to resolve the issues, we want an organization that would support that. Maybe the organizational structure we have now is the most effective for allowing us to solve our problems. Maybe we should be looking at what it is in our structure now that impedes solving our problems and meeting our goals.
  • As we introduce new ideas, those meeting with us early will not have the chance to address the later ideas.
  • Another thing that is falling into place is that there appear to be three dimensions - structure, resources, and control. Control seems to be coming up over and over. There’s only so much the structure can do; you have to provide appropriate benefits or awards. Another dimension may be to come up with ways to do cross-discipline integration. We may have to consider if general ed, graduate studies, or research are more important because of finite resources.
  • We have to offer 40 credits of general education to every student; somehow we have to provide the resources.
  • There may be some of the “doing things this way because they’ve always been done this way” in our thinking.
  • Would there be other ways to fulfill the writing requirements other than everybody taking ENG 191? The semester system is a reduction of the writing requirements from the quarter system. Many departments teach upper-division writing courses within their majors. The English Department has also experimented with having a few departments teach English 191 equivalents within their major, and has no problem with that if the people doing it are trained to teach writing.