To: Susan Herbst, Sue Faerman, and Carolyn MacDonald
From: Jim Neely (Chair, CAS Faculty Council)
Date: April 5, 2006
In our March 8, 2006, CAS Faculty Council Meeting we discussed your visit to our
February 15 meeting. We want to thank all of you for taking time from your very busy
schedules to come to our meeting. We are very pleased with the administration’s Compact
Planning process, which will add 100 new faculty lines over the next five years to promote
new research and to enhance some of the exciting research projects that have already
begun. These new faculty will be involved in a broad range of exciting new initiatives that
will enhance the University’s profile and attract extramural research funding. They will
also augment graduate education opportunities and add more full-time faculty to the
undergraduate classrooms. We believe Compact Planning will help fulfill our goal of
integrating research and classroom instruction and thereby help us attract some of New
York’s very best students to UAlbany. The Compact Planning process is very good news,
and we are confident that CAS will reap the benefits of this process when the successful
compact plans are announced.
Given that Compact Planning may introduce new undergraduate programs in units
outside CAS, we believe that it is important to point out some potentially unrecognized
consequences of its implementation. Specifically, new undergraduate programs will
generate greater demand for Gen Ed courses, the vast majority of which have been and will
be supplied by CAS. (CAS faculty currently teach 87% of the students enrolled in Gen Ed
courses, and this percentage is unlikely to change much, given the content and pedagogical
aims of the Gen Ed program.) This poses a challenge in achieving our shared goal of
increasing student retention and satisfaction, which depend on the availability of GEN Ed
courses that allow students to graduate in a timely fashion. This challenge will be further
intensified by the increasing enrollments the President is seeking (and which we accept as
necessary) outside Compact Planning.
As you allocate resources to the various colleges and units within the university in
next year’s budget, we ask that you give serious consideration to the data in the attached
table (which were provided by Greg Stevens and taken from Institutional Research,
Electronic Profiles). As strikingly shown in the last column of that table, we have inside
CAS a 6.8% increase in undergraduate enrollments and a 6.4% decrease in FT faculty and
outside CAS, the opposite pattern: a 3.2% decrease in undergraduate enrollments but a
14.6% increase in FT faculty. We find these strikingly different trends disturbing,
although clearly they arose during prior administrations, not the current one. We hope
that with the current administration’s emphasis on undergraduate education and student
satisfaction and retention, the above facts will be taken into account when allocating faculty
lines within the Compact Planning process and, more important, when you deliberate on
next year’s budgetary planning this month.
The faculty of CAS greatly appreciates the new administration’s interest in
improving the quality of undergraduate education and in funding our innovative research
initiatives through the Compact Planning process. We stand ready to help in any way we
can to meet the challenges that lie ahead. Once again, we want to thank all of you for
attending our meeting.
01-02
02-03
03-04
04-05
05-06
Enrollment, Undergraduate
Campus Summary
CAS
Outside CAS
11884
5083
6801
11953
5013
11796
5434
11388
5299
12013
5431
6582
Fall CASA FTE, FT Faculty
Campus Summary
CAS
Outside CAS
547.75 557.96 534.53 554.85
347.42 343.59 323.86 325.31
200.33
229.54
Office of Institutional Research
Version 1/25/2006
NA = not currently available.
NA
NA
Change from
01-02 to last
available year
+ 1.1
+ 6.8
- 3.2
+ 1.3
- 6.4
+ 14.6