Minutes of the University Committee
for August 28, 2002

The Committee met at 10:35 in D135 MOLN. Members present were John Buenker, Peggy James, James Kinchen, Don Kummings, Greg Mayer, and Gary Wood. Also present were Larry Duetsch and Jerry Greenfield.

Professor Greenfield, the Senior Special Assistant to the Provost, said the Provost has asked him to chair a task force on adult learners during the Fall semester. Her charge to the task force is to determine 1) whether there are things we can/should be doing for the adult (25+) students who comprise just over a quarter of our student body, and 2) whether there are other adult populations that we could/should serve. Professor Greenfield acknowledged that the history of efforts such as this has been fitful, and pledged that this effort will identify concrete steps that can be undertaken within a year. The task force will examine both undergraduate and graduate degree programs that could better serve an adult population. The Committee discussed the initiative and expressed support for it. A list of potential members was also discussed and it was agreed that the majority should be faculty and/or instructional academic staff. With that, Professor Greenfield thanked the Committee and left.

At this point, Walter Feldt, Michele Gee, Gene Goodman, Joann Goodyear, and David Holmes joined the meeting. The University Committee had asked the members of the Committee on Academic Planning to meet with them to discuss the Provost's proposal to establish an academic program appraisal process.

The purpose of conducting the appraisals is to better address budget issues that require the (re)allocation of scarce resources. The
appraisals are expected to make decisions more data-driven. Each time a significant allocation is made, other uses of resources (in other programs) should be considered.

There was extended discussion of the proposed program appraisal framework, most of it centered on the choice of indicators of success in meeting the evaluation criteria. It was thought that indicators should be chosen that are broadly applicable to as many departments as possible; indicators that apply to very few departments can always be supplied as supplementary information by those departments. Some thought that comparisons need to be made between programs here and similar programs in other institutions. There was a general recognition that data taken from the annual summaries of academic activity - especially that related to research and creative activity - should be reviewed and refined by the departments before it is used for this purpose.

It was agreed that the next meeting of the two groups on August 30 should concentrate on editing, removing, and adding indicators. In regard to the quality of teaching, for example, it was suggested that teaching-related publications, grants to improve teaching, teaching evaluations, teaching excellence awards, grade distributions and teaching loads might serve as indicators.

It was also agreed that weighting of the evaluation criteria should be discussed, otherwise enrollments may be the only measure used.

The meeting adjourned at 12:35.