Stewarding Excellence at the University of Illinois
Academic Unit Review
Combined Unit Response
July 2010
Introduction
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign launched “Stewarding Excellence” as a process for reviewing current operations in order to maintain excellence even as we face a continuing decline in state support for the university. This is an important, necessary and difficult undertaking – it requires taking into account deep challenges that go to the heart of the future of higher education here in Illinois and beyond.
On March 5, 2010, the Stewarding Excellence initiative announced a review of four academic units – the College of Media, the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, the School of Labor and Employment Relations, and the School of Social Work. The four units were selected for the review based on their faculty size. In the charge letter to the Review Committee, it was noted that all four were independent schools and colleges and they were selected since each had fewer than
40 faculty members. The Review Committee was informed that “the primary focus of this project is to explore structural and organizational changes, including possible consolidation, to realize budgetary savings while at the same time preserving and even enhancing the intellectual and academic mission of the units.” The Review Committee was further asked to “openly examine the extent to which new intellectual synergies and cost savings could be enabled through alternative alignments of small colleges and schools.”
Since reviews of academic units are relatively infrequent and highly consequential, it is important to summarize key aspects of this process as it unfolded. At the outset, the establishment of the
Review Committee (and the prior indications that such a committee would be established) had a galvanizing impact on the faculty and staff in the four smaller academic units. In good faith, discussions were initiated in each unit to explore possible mergers or consolidations – conversations in which the faculty and staff overcame the initial shock of being under a review in which the possible outcomes included giving up their independent standing as an academic unit.
Faculty and staff did appreciate that, if there were ever a time to consider consolidation or merger with another unit, this would be one where there would be a high likelihood of central administrative support.
At the same time, the very existence of the review raised many questions. Why were small units clustered for a review? Why was the cut-off set at 40 faculty? Would there be any other academic units under review? Was the implicit assumption that small units were inherently inefficient valid?
Would there also be a focus on low-enrollment programs? Was there full awareness of the many costs that would be incurred just by conducting such a review? Despite incomplete and sometimes inconsistent answers to these questions, the faculty and staff in the four units all reached similar conclusions, which was that the Stewarding Excellence process was well structured and that a fair
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review was possible. As a result, all four units participated in the process in a full, open and complete manner.
It should be noted that all four program are sized to match our primary orientations as professional programs. In this capacity, these units and other professional programs on campus have distinct roles educating and socializing students to the values, standards and practices of our professions – all of which requires an intensified “customer” focus with our students and the organizations that hire them. It is these distinctive identities that are a particularly salient consideration when it comes to possible mergers or consolidations.
The Review Committee, which was led by Law School Professor Thomas Ulen, conducted interviews with leaders and others in each of the four units, examined budget and archival materials, studied additional analyses produced during the review process, and considered a broad mix of secondary sources. The Review Committee chose to operate from a risk/benefit framework. As the units under review, we agree that the chosen framework was appropriate to the task. The report found that there were no significant administrative efficiencies to be gained from consolidation or merger among the four units – a finding that confirms the views of the deans, faculty and staff in the four units. Similarly, all four units concur with the Review Committee’s finding that there could be significant harm to program quality, professional identities, and competitive standing with many consolidation or merger options. The report did note the potential for shared services – among the four units and others. This is something that all four units (and others) have already been doing to some degree and that we will pursue more intensively in the months and years to come.
Two studies were undertaken by faculty members who challenged the view the small units were inherently inefficient. One study, conducted by Professor Meyer in Media, provided a crosssectional comparison of administrative costs for all independent Colleges and Schools. A second study, conducted by Professor Olson in LER, featured a pooled time-series comparison of the efficiency of the four smaller academic units relative to comparable social science departments – testing the “counter factual” case of what might be expected after a merger or consolidation. Using different methods, both studies came to similar conclusions – rebutting what the Review termed
“intuition” and analysis from the administration. The Review Committee called for improvements in the use of central data to assess the efficiency of academic units and reached the following overall conclusion:
In the end, we did not find empirical evidence that confirmed the intuition that there would be significant administrative efficiencies from consolidation or merger among these four units.
To be more accurate and following our methodology, we did not find evidence that the rewards from consolidation among the four units or some subset of them would clearly exceed the risks.
Looking ahead, we recognize that the University faces many challenges. Even though we welcome and endorse the finding that supports the continued independent standing of the four units under review, we also are committed to ensuring that Stewarding Excellence and parallel change efforts within academic units do find those areas where there are efficiencies and improvements to be obtained. Further, we are committed to fostering revenue generating initiatives that would make these and other units less dependent on state funds.
Rather than present the Stewarding Excellence Steering Committee, the Council of Deans, and Office of the Chancellor with four separate responses, the four units under review have generated this combined document. Following this introduction, separate statements are included from each of
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the four units and a concluding statement is also provided. We thank all of the groups reviewing this submission for their consideration and their many efforts on behalf of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
College of Media Response to the Academic Unit Review Committee Report
We believe the Review Committee’s report was a thoughtful and thorough assessment, and we thank the Committee members for their hard work. The Committee’s evaluation of the College of
Media considered the numerous complexities of the College, its professional, academic, scholarly and public engagement programs and entities, as well as its substantial and strong alumni and stakeholder base that annually create numerous opportunities for the College’s students and graduates nationwide. We agree with the Committee’s conclusion that there is no evidence that significant administrative efficiencies would occur through consolidation or merger. We note that the Committee reached this conclusion after independent evaluation of the data in the face of considerable intuitive speculation that small units are inherently more inefficient and costly. In fact, the Olson study referred to in the Committee report conclusively states that consolidation of Media
“would generate no savings.” The College of Media Study Team, according to the report, also concludes that it did not “observe any areas of inefficient, redundant or under-utilized academic professional staff.” We also concur with the Committee conclusion that consolidation would carry the risk of doing “significant harm” to our programs and that any restructuring discussions should rise from the “bottom up” and “under the leadership of senior faculty in the College.”
We support the synergies and enhancements that could emerge from thoughtful collaborative discussions consistent with the Committee’s original Stewarding Excellence charge that changes preserve or enhance the intellectual and academic missions of the College.
We do believe the Committee may have misinterpreted the willingness of our faculty and administrators to candidly discuss reorganizational scenarios. Consistent with the commitment to freedom of expression embodied in the values of the College, Media’s faculty is historically robust and freewheeling in its planning discussions. We fear this candor was perceived by Committee members as indicating disunity. On the contrary, Media faculty members in recent years have been intensely cooperative across units in creating a new four-year College and a new College Student
Services Center while nearly doubling our student body; winning Illinois Board of Higher Education approval to create the new Department of Media and Cinema Studies; newly centering its College doctoral program in all our units; opening the membership of the scholarly Institute of
Communications Research to accomplished professional faculty; emphasizing class offerings for students across units; newly agreeing that Media and Cinema Studies should offer a stronger digital production element in its curriculum; planning to jointly administer the historic Agricultural
Communications program with ACES; agreeing across units that the Department of Advertising needs to increase the number of its faculty and that the College itself would not thrive without
Advertising; and planning a unified College response to opportunities created by the university’s early separation programs. During the permanent Dean’s search, the interim Dean did postpone a planned College “visioning” process to await the Dean’s arrival. With the appointment of a new
Dean imminent, that process will resume under his or her leadership.
We also note the Committee’s reference to the multitude of successful organizational structures for media-related programs. Yet the implication that there is no clear model for organizing media programs can be deceptive. For instance, of the 63 universities in the American Association of
Universities that offer accredited journalism, mass communications and advertising programs, 78 percent offer free-standing units for media-related programs and only three (3) are schools within
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liberal arts and sciences colleges. The distinct nature of educating and socializing students to the values, standards and practices of our fields makes the placement of professional media programs in overwhelmingly non-professional structures problematic.
As the Committee notes, Media has been financially challenged in the face of new university funding models, and we welcome supportive coordination with the university to create a financial plan that will efficiently secure the invaluable missions of the College into the future. Never has the need for socially conscious and broadly educated media professionals, scholars and citizens been greater.
The Illinois Legislature created our initial school in journalism and advertising in 1927 with the goal of improving those professions. That remains a central purpose of our College. Illinois graduates populate small-to-large journalism, advertising and media-related organizations throughout the nation. They head giant advertising agencies, hold prestigious journalism positions, lead scholarly university programs—and compose a body of alumni deeply committed to the
College for what it contributed to their lives and careers. Each year, alums from our small college are well represented among those receiving prestigious university awards and honors. Our faculty includes award-winning professionals and distinguished scholars with, as the most recent national accrediting team report stated, ”an impressive record of research, creative and professional activity that is matched by few programs in the nation.” Our students win numerous awards each year.
Illinois Public Media last year earned PBS’s award for the best fundraising operation in the nation and won eight Mid-America Emmy Award nominations.
Finally, it is necessary to address the “Summary of Academic Unit Reviews Comments” and the various public comments. The comments about Media were overwhelmingly positive. Journalism
Associate Professor Eric Meyer has analyzed the contents of the comments and reports that nearly three-quarters of them focused on a single, specific unit under review. Of those, 61 percent focused on Media. All but two of those comments expressed strong support for reaffirmation of the college as an independent unit. One was informational and clarified that AGCM will become a joint program between ACES and Media, while the other comment was critical of Media. Among the majority expressing support for continuation of Media as an independent unit, nearly half criticized the campus decision to suspend the search for a new Dean.
An almost equal number of the public comments criticized the number of reviews the college has undergone in recent years and urged that the campus issue a statement of support for continuation of the college as an independent unit. Two suggested there was no legitimate reason, other than possible preconceived bias, for the current review. Three individuals new to the college — a student, a faculty member who transferred from LAS, and a new hire from Stanford — offered impassioned personal testimonials about how Media’s intimate focus was crucial to their decisions to come to Illinois or to their ability to teach and conduct research. In a separate comment, an alumnus stated that he would no longer contribute to the university if Media were restructured.
Nearly all applauded the Review Committee’s findings that there was no evidence restructuring would save money. No comments identified as coming from students, faculty members or alumni criticized the college in any way.
The College of Media is an important component of the University of Illinois. It is also important to the media landscape of the State of Illinois and the nation. We concur with the Review Committee that consolidation or merger could threaten the College’s mission. Yet we stand ever ready to study ways in which media education, scholarship and creative endeavor can be improved on campus and look forward to stewarding the societal responsibilities of our programs on to new generations of students.
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Graduate School of Library and Information Science Response to the Academic Unit Review
Committee Report
The Graduate School of Library and Information Science appreciates the diligence of the Academic
Unit Review Committee and the time committed by the external advisory group. We agree with the general conclusion reached in the report, that “There simply is not any strong evidence that the potential savings [from consolidation] are significant, yet the risks in terms of intellectual vigor and professional standing appear quite significant.” We also endorse these findings from the concluding section of the report:
 “In a difficult budget situation, there is an imperative need to tie financial decisions to strategic planning.”
 “the University, and unit heads within it, requires valid context-appropriate as well as crosscampus metrics for evaluating performance and planning budgets.”
 “it will be important that consistent and clear goals be set against which individual units on campus can measure performance. Such goals would enable academic units to see for themselves where mergers or consolidations might be useful.”
While we understand that the University faces some hard choices, we believe that those choices should be based on criteria that relate to the university’s strategic goals and that these criteria need to be established in advance of a crisis rather than in the middle of it. If units are given “valid context-appropriate [and] cross-campus metrics” against which their performance will be measured, and if those metrics reflect an incentive structure that is strategically motivated, then units will either find a way to meet their goals or they will be found wanting, but campus leadership and unit heads would not be in the position of establishing and responding to goals and metrics after the fact, and a review committee would not be in the position of adjudicating arguments about the meaning and importance of institutional data.
For its part, the Graduate School of Library and Information Science understands the need to become less dependent on General Revenue Funds, and we believe (as the report also notes, and as former Provost Katehi understood) that establishing an undergraduate informatics major is a necessary step toward achieving that goal. With that in mind, we would like to underline this passage in the Academic Unit Review Committee’s report:
The University would be well served by exploring how it can best marshal and realign resources to support programs of teaching and research that are more responsive to the changing nature of skills and knowledge demanded for citizenship and adaptive to the evolving demands for integrative research and problem solving in an increasingly complex and global world.
Informatics is an obvious example of the sort of thing the report is discussing here—a program of teaching and research that adapts to a changing landscape of knowledge and responds to changing employer demands. From its founding in 1893 until today, GSLIS has been in the business of educating information professionals: our reputation and our ranking reflect our ability to keep up with the changing nature of information work, and to adapt our educational offerings to the needs of the world in which that work gets done. We see undergraduate education in informatics as a logical next step in that evolution. By pursuing that strategic goal, we can also achieve some important financial goals, like increasing average class enrollments (as recommended in the Meyer report and in the review committee’s report) and becoming less dependent on state funds. We’re more than happy to collaborate with other units in the process, as we have always done. And while we understand that (at this point) undergraduate majors need to be offered in a particular college,
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and we intend to offer an informatics major in GSLIS, we do still believe that the strongest and most distinctive version of the informatics major would involve serious ongoing participation from multiple colleges, with multiple tracks coordinated through the Illinois Informatics Institute (I3).
Interdisciplinary programs face barriers at an institutional level, because they don’t nest neatly within departments or colleges. Coordinating the graduate Bioinformatics Masters through I3 successfully lowered these institutional barriers and it seems that the same strategy could be applied with similar success to the undergraduate Informatics program.
With respect to the public comments that pertain specifically to GSLIS, there are a number of misconceptions or mistakes of fact that need to be addressed. There are a couple of comments that refer to a proposed undergraduate major in “library and information science,” or (in another case) a putative pre-professional undergraduate program. GSLIS has indeed proposed an undergraduate major, but it is in Informatics, not in Library Science—and, in fact, the agency that accredits our professional masters program expressly prohibits the delivery of undergraduate programs in library science, as they would undermine the professionalization of librarianship. We do not regard the Informatics major as pre-professional, and we have not described it in those terms. We do, however, think that broader engagement in undergraduate education would increase our average class size and decrease our reliance on GRF, as well as meeting a demonstrated market need
(attested to by potential employers in our proposal for the major) and responding to student demand (attested to by the strong growth in the minor).
The suggestion that GSLIS be moved into the Library misunderstands the nature of faculty, tenure, and promotion in both of those units and underestimates either the service obligations of library faculty, the research obligations of GSLIS faculty, or both. The suggestion that GSLIS be merged with Media ignores the conclusions of the report and the point made elsewhere in the current document that professional schools stand alone for a reason (otherwise we might have a College of
Law and Business, for example). Suggestions in various comments that it is intuitively obvious that mergers would save money disregard significant synchronic and diachronic evidence to the contrary presented, respectively, in the Meyer and Olson reports. One of these comments states as fact that the dean of GSLIS oversees between 200 and 300 students: this is an error perhaps copied from the Daily Illini in its salary study, but the number they used was our on-campus enrollment, which is less than half of our actual enrollment. That error, in itself, suggests one of the reasons it is important to have smaller units represented on the Council of Deans: because we are smaller, it is easier for us to innovate in areas like online education, and as we pilot these programs we encounter the barriers and inertia that need to be reduced in order for innovations to be adopted more broadly. In this case, our experience demonstrates the campus’s need to reconsider the invidious distinction between on-campus and extramural students that is implicit in the way student numbers and related data gets reported.
Various comments emphasize the value of GSLIS as it is currently organized, from the point of view of students, faculty, and alumni. And finally, as one emeritus professor points out, GSLIS does a substantial amount of externally funded research (with expenditures of about $3M/year), and although we provided some information about this to Academic Unit Review committee, the figures provided to that committee by the campus did not include research funding. Since research activity, like teaching or service, has implications for staffing and expenditures, to look only at costs without also considering income is misleading. We note that the section of the current document that discusses Social Work makes a similar point.
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School of Labor and Employment Relations Response to the Academic Unit Review
Committee Report
The School of Labor and Employment Relations (LER) concurs with the findings of the Academic
Unit Review Committee, which did not support merger or consolidation with other units. As the
Committee found, such an action would “significantly undercut LER’s identity, strength, and mission.” The three leading programs in the field are free-standing (Cornell, Illinois and Rutgers) and other prominent programs that are embedded in academic units are limited in various ways by such arrangements. Indeed, leading scholars in labor and employment relations would view a merger or consolidation at Illinois as a potential loss to the field.
LER’s operations are oriented around the professional development of human resource professionals and extension services to workers, union leaders and communities. One of the analytic reports submitted to the Review Committee, which was prepared by Professor Craig Olson, did find that the administrative costs in LER were between $50,000 and $92,000 higher than would be the case if LER were not an independent unit. We accept this as an accurate representation of the investments we make in student services, which yield a strong community atmosphere in our
Master’s degree program and placement rates that are consistently above 90% with top employers, including Boeing, BP, Caterpillar, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Ford, ExxonMobil, Frito-Lay, GE, General
Mills, Merck, Microsoft, NLRB, Proctor and Gamble, Raytheon, Rolls Royce, Sara Lee, Shell, Texas
Instruments, YUM! Brands, and many others. In exchange for these additional administrative investments (and the associated results), we are able to charge a tuition differential that generates additional revenue that is over five times the administrative costs.
As an independent unit, LER has been able to achieve a 125% increase in tuition revenue over the past five years, from $639,000 in AY2004-05 to $1,428,000 in AY2009-10 through a combination of enrollment increases, tuition differentials, and scholarship policy changes. The change in scholarship policy is crucial as a professional program, where we reduced or eliminated master’s degree tuition waivers by converting corporate fellowships to scholarships and eliminated the final semester of tuition waivers for endowed fellowships – all in consultation with the relevant corporations and donors. This has generated an increase of approximately $350,000-$400,000 in annual revenue, which we are reinvesting in new student scholarships and other aspects of operations. In parallel, we are in the process of replacing/hiring faculty to match the growth in enrollments in our master’s degree program. Further, we are continuing to advance the application of distance learning technologies at the undergraduate level in the domain of Global Labor Studies, in professional development for labor and in mid-career learning in the Human Resource
Management Field. All of these gains are a reflection of dedication and innovation by faculty and staff that would have been at risk under a merger or consolidation.
Although there is not a merger or consolidation that would be appropriate for LER, we are and will continue to be integrated with other units in the University. This includes our joint Master’s degree programs with the College of Business and the College of Law; coordination of Doctoral education with Business, Economics and Psychology; joint faculty appointments with Economics, Engineering, and Psychology (and additional zero time appointments in other units); and research collaborations with scholars from across the university. Our extension efforts, through the Labor
Education Program and the Center for Human Resource Management, connect with other units and are central to the land grant mission of the University. These and other connections reflect the highly interdisciplinary nature of labor and employment relations. Even though there are core aspects of our operations that would be at great risk with any merger or consolidation, there are no barriers to our cooperation with others across the campus.
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In the public comments, there were a few positive comments on LER and no negative submissions specifically on LER. The one note did mention a merger of LER with Business, but this was specifically rejected by the Review Committee report. In LER, we were copied in on a number of additional positive letters that alums submitted to the Stewarding Excellence Review Committee.
Of course, many top labor, management, neutral and scholarly leaders would provide additional positive comments if solicited.
Maintaining LER as an independent unit signals that this University values the central roles of labor and employment relations in our society. At a time when “jobs” are among the greatest challenges facing society, we are proud of a world-class research faculty providing leading-edge scholarship and teaching on all aspects of the challenge, including health care, executive compensation, pensions, collective bargaining, training, health and safety, workplace dispute resolution, employee selection, generational dynamics, corporate social responsibility, labor studies, public sector employment, and technological change.
Social Work Response to the Academic Unit Review Committee Report
We appreciate the diligence of the Review Committee and the thoughtful approach they applied to their charge. We concur with the findings of the Academic Unit Review Committee that there is no empirical evidence of significant administrative efficiencies to be gained from consolidation or merger of Social Work with other units. The findings of Meyer and Olson strongly support this conclusion. Remaining as a free standing School of Social Work will preserve our program quality, professional identity, and competitive standing in our field. From this position of strength we will continue to contribute to the mission of our land grant university and to academic excellence at
Illinois.
The Illinois commitment to addressing the needs of our most vulnerable citizens (e.g., those coping with poverty and unemployment, suffering from mental disorders, and recovering from the trauma of child abuse or domestic violence) is best reflected by its commitment to the School of Social
Work. Our MSW students do at least 1000 hours of internship each, which provides agencies in
Illinois with at least 100,000 hours of unpaid services per year. Our faculty and PhD students are committed to applied social science research that responds to critical social welfare needs. This commitment, reflected in the research program of every faculty member without exception, is exemplified by our Children and Family Research Center. The CFRC was created twelve years ago as a partnership between the School and the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services
(DCFS) to monitor the agency’s progress in meeting the requirements of a federal court consent decree and to conduct research on child welfare innovations. The Center’s research not only benefits Illinois but the nation. For example, its research on subsidized guardianship led to major federal legislation signed into law in 2008 (PL 110-351).
The quantity and quality of faculty members’ research exemplifies Illinois’ academic excellence. In the most recent rankings of scholarly productivity in social work, our faculty ranked #1 (Ligon,
Jackson, & Thyer, 2007) and #9 (Green & Baskin, 2007). In recent years, faculty research has increasingly been supported by highly competitive grants from NIH institutes including NIMH,
NIDA and NICHD. We have created an administrative infrastructure that facilitates and supports our high level of external funding and, in turn, is partially supported by that funding.
Our faculty members are sought out for national leadership roles, for example, as consulting editor of the major journal of the profession and for service on federal grant review panels. The dean has
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served two terms on the Commission on Accreditation of the Council on Social Work Education
(CSWE), one as its chair. She served as president of the St. Louis Group (the association of deans of schools of social work in research intensive universities), on the board of the National Association of Deans and Directors of Schools of Social Work (the association of heads of the 200 MSW programs), and now serves on the board of CSWE.
We fully support the synergies and innovation that come from bottom-up work of the faculty. As the report noted, our faculty have many such collaboration with colleagues in a wide variety of departments and colleges – but these do not suggest benefits to be accrued by a merger.
In conclusion, our School of Social Work has thrived as an independent unit, and we look forward to continuing our contributions to academic excellence at our land grant university.
Additional Notes on Public Comments
A total of 38 public comments were entered in response to the Review Committee’s report. Many of the comments were positive, reinforcing the value of the four academic units remaining independent. These comments are consistent with our own perspective and reflective of the views of a broad array of stakeholders associated with each of our units. Indeed, the small size of the units under review emerges from many comments as a virtue for fostering community and individualized treatment in a large university.
Additional comments are addressed at one of the four specific units and these have been joined in the unit comments in the above separate sections. Finally, some of the comments are critical and these points do need to be addressed here. In particular, a number of the comments are critical of the report for not recommending change at a time when substantial changes are needed in the university. We agree that major changes are needed for this University to cope with an anticipated continued decline in public resources. This is the work of each unit and of the Council of Deans and the top administrative leadership.
However, some of the suggestions along these lines in the public comments are directly addressed and rebutted by the Review Committee report. Three individuals suggest that there would be savings by eliminating four deans. In fact, the analysis in the Olson study is definitive in suggesting that the administrative costs of running comparable departments is not necessarily lower. Indeed, there are a number of faculty and department heads who earn higher salaries than the four deans in question and a number of departments with higher overall operating costs. Further, the costbenefit approach taken by the Review Committee asks about benefits, as well as costs and clearly there would be reduced benefits under a merger or consolidation – resulting in a net loss from such suggested moves. Savings are more likely to be found in low enrollment programs, the architecture of doctoral education, and other such domains. Further, the University will not be able to “cost cut” our way out of this situation – even greater focus should be on building our capacity for new sources of revenue that are aligned with our mission.
One person commented on the small colleges being over-represented on the Council of Deans. The
Council is not a "representative" or voting body. Parallel to college executive committees, the
Council provides advice to the Provost and serves as a forum for discussion of key issues facing the
Provost and the campus. Similarly, the Provost informs deans about campus policies and practices that will impact the colleges. The members serve the best interests of the campus. Their disciplinary and professional experience and expertise inform those views, but campus needs are primary. The diversity of the Colleges reflects the diverse implementation of the campus mission.
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There is one comment submitted on behalf of the Dean of the College of Engineering, citing their positive experience with internal mergers. That comment says “we must ask, at many organizational levels, whether there are ways to organize to operate at lower cost,” and then goes on, immediately, to say that “campus must also take a hard look at academic programs and academic organizational structure,” and cites Engineering’s experience with internal reorganization, merging three departments into two. Implicit in this juxtaposition is the claim that
Engineering’s reorganization was undertaken in order to operate at lower cost, and was successful in achieving that goal. A performance review on this would likely be instructive – tracking the degree to which the College’s level of dependence on state support has been reduced as a result of the merger, the degree to which its level of APs on state funds and overall level of APs have also been reduced due to the restructuring, and the degree to which the College’s performance on various outcome metrics (ACTs, admission yields, degrees granted relative to enrollments, etc.) improved as a result of the restructuring. A preliminary look at DMI data for the College would suggest otherwise, but we have learned from the review process that it is important to not jump to quick conclusions when evaluating academic units through such data.
Moreover, we note that the reorganizations in Engineering were not imposed on the College from outside, but were the result of internal review and College-level decision-making. We urged that the issues raised under Stewarding Excellence instead be placed before us and other deans through a process of internal review and realignment rather than through an external, imposed review process. That would have been a much more appropriate way to proceed.
Conclusion
In framing its analysis, the Review Committee found that:
. . . questions of possible mergers and consolidations for reasons of intellectual alignment are entirely valid, even important, to consider for these and a much broader group of academic units on campus; however, the impetus for such alignments should stem from the University’s mission and strategic plan.
We are certainly committed to join with others in the University’s leadership in order to more fully link transformation and change processes to our overall mission and strategies. We join with the
Chancellor in identifying the land-grant commitment to society as the appropriate point of departure, paired with the University’s emergence over the past century as a world-leading research institution. In this context, excellent small academic units have a unique and valuable role to play.
Since all the units under review feature professional programs, it is of note that there are distinctive roles in a modern research university for a broad array of professional programs. Further, such units can be nimble innovators, constructive partners, worthy peers with the mid-size and larger academic units. Finally, since all the smaller units feature a high proportion of faculty trained in the social sciences, we note the important roles to be played by the social sciences in a 21 st Century university.
In sum, the review of the four academic units has been unambiguous in rejecting the view that such units are inherently inefficient or that there are benefits to consolidation or merger that outweigh the costs. We endorse this finding and stand prepared to address the many open questions still facing the University in these most challenging times.
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Submitted on behalf of our respective academic units by:
Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld
Dean and Professor, School of Labor and Employment Relations
Walter Harrington
Interim Dean and Professor, College of Media
Wynne Korr
Dean and Professor, School of Social Work
John Unsworth
Dean and Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science
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