Realizing the Vision:
College Reorganization

Updates

June 30, 2004

This is the first of a set of updates that the CCR will be posting on its public web site. The Committee as a whole has met twice since it was created. The first organizational meeting occurred on April 30, 2004, and then there was a full day retreat on May 26, 2004. A third meeting of the full Committee is scheduled for August 19, 2004 after the members have completed their summer Group cores. Here is what the four Groups have been and will be doing in July and the beginning of August.

Core Group

The meetings with the college advisory councils of CAL, CNS, SSC, CCAS, and CANR were completed by June 22 and summary notes posted for all CCR members on its ANGEL site. Arrangements for the public web site for the CCR have been completed. A planning meeting was held on June 30 for the Group Leaders and members of the Core Group to review progress to date, discuss interview and research schedules for July, and map out the writing tasks for each of the four Groups. The Working Group portions of the draft Progress Report will be turned in to the Core Group no later than August 15. The draft Progress Report will circulate among CCR members before being sent to Faculty Council and Provost on August 26. First public discussion will be at special meeting of Faculty Council on August 31, 2004.

Working Group 1

We have gathered formal organizational data from OPB detailing the resources and output of five colleges (Social Science, Natural Science, Arts and Letters, Human Ecology, and Communications Arts and Sciences) as well as a list of programs receiving joint support from more than one unit/department. We are currently in the process of interviewing college personnel in these units to assess the degree of informal collaborations across units.

Working Group 2

We are focusing on those statements offered in response to Vision 2004 that are organized around what we take to be inventive and promising interdisciplinary ideas rather than on those addressed merely to the question of why or why not a particular unit should be moved to another college. We are working with the Provost's Office to devise a better display of the responses (with brief abstracts we are preparing) at the website. We would also pursue these two areas of inquiry to complement the work of the other groups:

•  Exemplary interdisciplinary (or multi-disciplinary, or collaborative) programs and projects, formal and informal, based on responses to the Vision statement and other sources, including interdisciplinary programs at other universities.  Consideration will be based on the criteria the Group has previously established.

•  Other strategies for achieving the goals (e.g., more "connectivity") of the Vision statement, for example: the uses of campus space and buildings, hiring and reappointment practices, recognition and support in central administration for interdisciplinary programs, and reducing barriers in course registration across colleges and programs.

Working Group 3

We are looking at the question of college structure: what problems--intellectual, financial, procedural--might a re-organization effectively address?  How might alternative organizational structures address these problems? Are there other ways these problems might be addressed?  Over the summer group members will be interviewing deans, associate deans, financial officers and planners, and participating in CCR discussions with college faculty advisory committees.  We will also conduct interviews at peer institutions that have different organizational structures, as well as those which have recently reorganized.  We will look at the effects of organization on such issues as retention and recruitment of faculty and students, financial savings, curricular design.