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The University of Maine released the first draft of the Academic Program Prioritization Working Group criteria Monday, which the work group will use for examining academic programs at UMaine.
University President Robert Kennedy charged the work group in September with analyzing academic programs and units at UMaine to increase their efficiency and optimize them to fit the current economic and academic climate.
The eight criteria are programs’ scholarly productivity; their external funding; the student credit hours they offer; degrees awarded over the last five years; links with other programs; links outside the university; characteristics of students coming into the program; and the costs and revenue ratio of each program.
“This has been a difficult process, without question,” said professor Judy Kuhns-Hastings, president of the UMaine Faculty Senate.
Provost Susan Hunter said there are no benchmarks that will determine when the work group will recommend changing a program and that there likely never will be any. Kuhns-Hastings said the process will be more of a discussion than a systematic evaluation.
“It’s not that the group comes up with a score sheet with numbers on it and if you’re above the line, you’re safe and if you’re below — it’s never going to be that way,” Hunter said.
Kuhns-Hastings said she is concerned programs won’t be strong enough to appear beneficial to the work group because of the amount of budget cuts that have taken place recently.
“Departments and units have become so small — more than bare-bones — it is important to me that these decisions don’t get made because an important department has just gotten so many cuts that they can’t be strong, because they don’t have enough faculty to be strong,” Hastings said.
Hunter said the work group will meet Thursday to discuss the weight of the criteria — or which ones are more pressing than others. Kuhns-Hastings said it’s impossible to predict which ones may gain more weight than others.
“My concern is that, not just nursing students, but also all students continue to have a broad education. Because the students need to not only be grounded in their discipline, but they also need that broad liberal grounding,” Kuhns-Hasting said.
Much of the criteria are based on data the university collects every year.
“It’s been really important to us to not just put numbers on things that would also make that qualitative judgment,” Kuhns-Hastings said.
Hunter said in September the point of the work group is not to find programs to eliminate.
Professor Michael Grillo, president-elect of Faculty Senate, said one of the work group’s subcommittees has been focused on creating a system of metrics for measuring academic programs and units, which are being designed to be fair across all departments.
“One of the concerns — this being most worrisome — is that it is easy to collect data on some things and other things are a lot more slippery,” Grillo said. “To set up a series of indicators gives an automatic precedence to numerical data, and the committee has reiterated several times to itself and to others that these indicators and numerical sensibilities will be taken as part of a discussion. But I do have concerns that numbers carry weight.”
Grillo said he is concerned a focus on numerical data will dictate what programs get the most attention from the work group and the president. He said it’s difficult to quantify intangibles such as an “educated citizenry” or “the state’s responsibility to the state and to its people in terms of democratic action.”
“They are tangible in the sense that you can see where they would weigh out where an educated citizenry would act with certain foresight and responsibility, but they would be very hard to do a quick data collection on,” Grillo said.
Hunter stressed that the criteria released Monday is a draft and does not represent the final version.
“The ones we have on the sheet of paper tend to be very quantifiable — it doesn’t mean that there aren’t qualitative and subjective pieces of all of this,” Hunter said.
Hunter said the scholarly productivity of programs will be measured within the context of each discipline.
“In some fields, peer-reviewed publications, journal articles are the metric,” Hunter said. “Art is producing artwork and participating in juried exhibitions, music is producing creative works … in sciences it could be map-making. There is some level within a field where people recognize and agree upon what are the high indicators of scholarly productivity.”
The work group’s efforts will complement University of Maine System Chancellor Richard Pattenaude’s restructuring plan, which the board of trustees approved Monday.
Hunter said the review process will focus solely on UMaine. The work group will not compare UMaine to other universities or institutions to determine its recommendations to the president — who will make the final decisions concerning academic programs.
“None of these criteria are stand-alone as the make-or-break,” Hunter said. “They are meant to holistically analyze units, because units have varying strengths, units teach more or some units have greater scholarly output and lower teaching. I mean, it’s a composite image.”
The UMaine community will have a chance to provide input to the work group on Dec. 2 in DPC 100 and, from Jan. 8 to 28, the work group will collect further comment from the campus to analyze and include in their recommendations. Anyone can e-mail the work group at achieving.sustainability@umit.maine.edu. Its Web site is umaine.edu/achievingsustainability. Hunter will submit the work group’s findings to Kennedy on April 2.
