News

Kennedy charges work group with analyzing UM academics

Posted on Sept. 28, 2009, at 3:01 a.m.

The University of Maine administration and faculty plan to take campus academics and turn it on its head.

The Academic Program Prioritization Working Group, or APPWG, has been created and charged by UMaine President Robert Kennedy this semester to look at the academic programs the university offers and find ways to optimize them and make them more efficient. The work group was formed after the 2009 accreditation committee — following its annual review of the university — suggested UMaine take a look at its programs and find ways to restructure them to better serve the campus community.

“I think we have all realized we’re in what you might call a non-sustainable structure organization. The approach of endless tuition increases is not feasible; you are all very aware of the current economic climate … and so in looking at that we realize we have to take a sort of broader look at academic programs on this campus,” said Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost Susan Hunter. “I wanted to make the point, though, that we just went through our tenure reaccreditation process … [and] one of the areas they identified in their analysis of our campus is academic program prioritization.”

Kennedy charged the work group to present him with a plan by Feb. 26 to reduce Academic Affairs’ budget by $24.5 million to $28 million during the next four years. The written charge says, “The goal of this process will be strong support of our highest priority degree programs funded by a reduction in those ranked as our lowest priorities.”

Hunter said the work group’s primary focus is academics but that it also has a financial underpinning. The group consists of the college deans, seven faculty members, Vice President for Administration and Finance Janet Waldron, Director of Budget and Business services Claire Strickland and Hunter. Several other UMaine administrators are unofficially part of the group. The committee has met twice this year and during the following months it plans to meet weekly.

“This isn’t Lake Wobegone. Everyone can’t be above average, and there has to be a distribution,” said College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean Jeffrey Hecker. “My point is that not every program can be found superior, because if you’re rank-ordering things, something has to fall below something else.”

Hunter said the point of the group is not to find programs to eliminate, but to find those that the university needs to adjust or change in some way.

“I think it’s the right thing for the provost to do,” Hecker said. “I think, in some ways, the college stands to benefit from this kind of analysis. I think a lot of what we do here in the college is essential to the university, to the university’s success in every area. Every student, regardless of their major, regardless of what college they’re in, takes required courses in the college of liberal arts and sciences and I think a review like this will demonstrate that.”

When asked whether this process could possibly change the university’s general education requirements, Hecker said it could.

“I guess my opinion is I hope it will,” Hecker said. “My own opinion is that it’s time for this campus to do that, and it’s time to revisit the goals of general education and to evaluate them. How well are we achieving those goals, and are there other alternative means for achieving them?”

Hunter said the accreditation committee gave no example of what they felt the university should strive for throughout this process.

“There’s a lot of interaction across the spectrum on campus, and we have to be able to weight all that and make sure we’re appropriately accessing and valuing all that,” Hunter said.

Hunter said there will soon be a Web site containing the work group’s charge from the president, its criteria for analyzing programs and areas to follow and comment on the process. The work group intends to facilitate public comment on the process some time in the future, according to Hunter. John Rebar from Cooperative Extension is working with Director of University Relations Joe Carr to schedule those public comment sessions.

“It’s not about the people. It’s not about ‘Oh, this is a good faculty member and that’s a bad one,’ it’s not that at all,” Hunter said. “It’s really looking at the programs themselves and how they relate to the 21st century. … One of the things that I think that we’ve all talked about is … are there some interdisciplinary programs that we should be thinking of creating out of some of the units that we currently have that are perhaps disparately partitioned on campus.”

Currently, the work group’s 10 categories of analysis include the history, development and expectations of programs; their internal and external demand; their quality, size, scope, productivity, costs, impact on the university, and justification; and their overall essentialness to UMaine academics.

The group’s members have been asked to read a chapter of “Prioritizing Academic Programs and Services,” a book designed to provide a framework for measuring and evaluating classes. The book includes the 10 categories of analysis and ways faculty and administrators can create measurable criteria from them that fit UMaine.

“Our first task, either now or next week, is for smaller sub groups to come up with specific criteria — measurable criteria — that we could use to evaluate those 10 categories,” said professor of education Eric Pandiscio, a member of the work group. “The deans will probably have to present information about their own colleges.”

The other faculty members on the work group include professors Gail Werrbach, Aria Amirbahman, Judy Kuhns-Hastings, Mary Tyler, Michael Grillo and Francais Amar.

“A university should be always reinventing itself,” Hunter said. “It’s not that we’re outdated, but periodically, the same way you update your wardrobe … you have to update a university as well.”

The group hopes to finish its work by the mid-point of spring semester, 2010, Hunter said.