Arts, Sciences & Engineering Standing Bylaw Committees

Executive Committee (AS&E) (Elected)

Executive Committee
Faculty of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering
Higher Education Initiative Review
2001-2002

Responses to Questions Posed by President Bacow

Question 1: What was the HEIs charge?

1. Straight-forward response
   
   In the Spring of 1997 the preliminary work was initiated by the VP, who asked the departments to reflect on threats and opportunities facing liberal education at Tufts and to translate this into department-specific issues and concerns in their annual reports. This was followed in the Fall by a September faculty meeting in which the VP discussed the premise for the Higher Education Initiative, which was to

   address pressures of affordability, relevance of curricula, the impact of IT; examine our short-term goals and long-range directions; ask, analyze and answer in Tufts terms, pivotal academic and structural questions; reinforce planning activities of faculty committees and of departments and programs.

   Subsequently the VP sent a memo to all faculty detailing the premise, process and schedule for the HEI and urged them to participate.
    

2. Identification of incipient problems
   
   The charge to pursue the Tufts Higher Education Initiative came out of the Vice President's Office in the Spring of 1997. It did not come from "the bottom" up, and certainly did not seem to reflect a set of pressing concerns shared by the faculty and the student body. Instead, the Initiative seemed to be designed to respond to national problems regarding the public perception of higher education. Something was wrong, or perceived to be wrong, in the academy, and we were "charged" to change our institution - to fix the problems at hand. The charge was both vague and at the same time rather negatively framed. It was not clear what the ultimate goal of the HEI would be. Would we be helping to plan the future of the university? Would we be merely pointing to problems, forming wish lists that would be pared down during the process? We never knew what stake we had in the HEI.
   
   When Vice President Bernstein asked the departments to discuss the challenges facing liberal education at Tufts, he framed his request to the faculty using the phrase, often repeated throughout the HEI process, "threats and opportunities." Asking the departments to reflect on the threats and opportunities facing Tufts, he then asked us all to prioritize specific needs in departmental discussion. Departmental priorities would then be reported in their annual reports. Perhaps it was the word "threat," but this charge from the very beginning seemed to many of us ominous. We were implicitly made aware of "unrelenting pressures" to justify the cost of a liberal education from the outside world, diminishing resources, and a changing "taxonomy" for students, faculty and staff. Responding to the vague but threatening charge, many of us imagined that some sort of pie was going to be cut into some number of pieces. Threat or Opportunity? The charge produced, perhaps completely unintentionally, a spirit of competition between the departments and the programs, all of which looked to greater opportunities and feared the threat of diminished power and responsibility. This spirit also produced a defensive attitude of cynicism. Was this, we asked each other, merely spin? Were we doing all of this to produce a public relations document justifying Tufts' existence? And of course, since most academics are still necessarily idealistic, we looked, at the same time, for "opportunities" to make the process worthwhile.
   
   The charge was always related to the growing national concern over the high price of education. Was a liberal arts education affordable? Was it relevant? Was tenure becoming anachronistic? What impact did Information Technology have on our teaching and our system of education? We would be asked to decide how we wanted Tufts to answer such questions. Many of these questions were developed, apparently over the summer, by the administration, and presented to the faculty in September 1997. The Vice President sent a memo to the faculty outlining the premise and the process of his charge. Questions of cost and value, the relevance of a liberal education, the impact of changing faculty and student demographics, and the impact of IT and long distance learning were raised. Twelve topic areas would be discussed in work-study groups of faculty, students and the administration. Interestingly, almost immediately, three more topics were added: Pre-professional education, Interdisciplinary education, and Graduate education. Advocates of these "topic" areas were determined not to be left out of the conversation. Their insistence on being included suggests the nervousness that was developing around the HEI initiative. Many faculty members imagined that if they were not part of the HEI process, they would surely be cut out of the short and long-range goals. Since the Vice President's memo suggested that results of the HEI workshops would "serve as the framework for the development of a comprehensive strategic plan for A&S," departments and programs began to see each other as adversaries rather than collaborators. Most members of the 15 workshops would remain faithful to the priorities of their individual topics throughout the HEI process. This was the result of an early wariness and suspicion about the charge, and its meaning for individual departments and programs. Since from the start, it was clear that there would be winners and losers in the "filtering and winnowing process," energy was expended in not being "winnowed." In hindsight, it would seem that the charge was too broad, (all of those opportunities) and at the same time, promised eventual threats of diminished opportunities.

 Back to questions.

Question 2: Did the various committees and sub-committees respond properly to the charge?

Once the charge was articulated in the Fall of 1997, the HEI unfolded in 3 distinct phases, discussed separately below.

STAGE 1

From the department's reports and feedback from the deans and faculty, the VP identified 15 topic areas:

1. Changing Expectations and Needs of Tufts

2. Undergraduate Core Curriculum

3. Excellence in Scholarship and Research

4. Diversity of the A&S Community

5. Student Demographics and Needs

6. The Student Experience

7. The Use of Part Time and Non Permanent Faculty

8. Role of Practice-Based Learning

9. Role of Public Service

10. Role of Information Technology

11. Budgetary Strategies

12. Shared Governance

13. Pre-Professional Education

14. Role of Interdisciplinary Education

15. Role of Graduate Education

The VP established 15 working groups, each charged with identifying the key issues and challenges in their area both now and in the future, discussing these with a large number of faculty and students, and issuing a report. He appointed 3 conveners for each group (faculty, student, staff), who in turn recruited other members from the above bodies and the overseers. This was a massive operation involving 36 administration members, 127 faculty, 88 students and 4 overseers, for a total of about 250 persons.

These 15 groups worked without much interaction with each other, and they had to respond to a problem that was not well defined. Yet, they demonstrated both the good will and the scholarly aptitude of the faculty; each of the groups met regularly during the spring of 1998, working hard, enthusiastically, and professionally. The various groups collected large amounts of background material and generated thoughtful interpretations and recommendations related to their area of concern. The products of their deliberations were 15 separate reports; these are attached as Appendix A. We believe that these documents are themselves a significant outcome of the HEI; collectively, they represent an enormous investment of time, self-review, and brainstorming about the state of various affairs at Tufts. Moreover, these efforts are relatively recent; hence, we think that many of the attached reports could be useful and valuable for the new Task Force to examine as background information or starting points for its work.

With regard to the HEI itself, however, the various group reports seemed to fall into a vacuum. They were sent up to Ballou and were never really examined in the context of one another, at least not in a forum that included faculty. The reports were posted on the web for the faculty; however, due to the difficulty at that time of accessing the web, most of the faculty were exposed to these reports only in poster synopses during the one-day symposium of Stage 2.

STAGE 2

This stage culminated in an one-day HEI symposium in April 1998, involving all the AS&E faculty and consisting of four primary components:

1. Interactive Poster Session: The 15 Working Groups boil their reports down to key issues and questions, and faculty and students "vote" on which are the most important.
    

2. On-Line Feedback Rooms are established for faculty to anonymously comment on 6 primary areas identified by the VP in consultation with the Faculty Advisory Board.
   
   These were:

   • Coherence and Connection in the Curriculum

   • Faculty Roles and Responsibilities

   • Research Goals and Faculty Development

   • Effective, Collaborative Decision-Making

   • Role and Contribution of Post-Undergraduate Education

   • Student Ecology.
      

3. Workshops for faculty, with some students and staff participating, are held during the day. These each develop and prioritize key issues and questions related to their topic. (Topics are identical with the on-line rooms).
    

4. Workshops report out to the participants gathered together at the end of the day. Finally a panel of Assessors (Eliana DeBernardez-Clark, Gilbert Metcalf, Sugata Bose, and Sol Gittleman) critiques the symposium and distills new directions for A&S.

STAGE 3

In the Fall of 1998, the VP distilled (some ideas were left out) and condensed (certain topics were fused together) the outcomes of the previous two stages into four broad areas and asked the relevant dean or committee to collate and prioritize recommendations and then develop an action plan for implementation. The four areas included:

1. Coherence and Connection in the Curriculum (Walt Swap, Dean of the Colleges heads this with EPC)
    

2. Undergraduate and Graduate Students: Community and Communication (Rob Hollister, Dean of Graduate School and Bobbie Knable, Dean of Students head this.)
    

3. Faculty Development: Teaching and Research (Susan Ernst, Dean of Natural and Social Sciences heads this)
    

4. Effective, Collaborative Decision-Making (VP and Faculty Advisory Board head this)
    

These four groups deliberate during the fall of 1999, and as with the groups of the first phase, each of these ultimate groups produces a report including sets of recommendations. Three of the four reports are enclosed as Appendix B (we could not locate a copy of the fourth groups report).

Back to questions.

Question 3: Why were the recommendations not implemented? Were they ill-conceived? Were they not supported by the faculty at large? Were they disavowed by the administration? Were they crafted without regard to the problems of implementation or the resources necessary to implement them?

First, it is worth pointing out that SOME of the recommendations emerging out of one or another of the HEIs phases were implemented. A listing of these positive outcomes was compiled by Michaele Whelan (either for us or previously for the VP) and is provided as Appendix C. It is fair to say that some might take issue with crediting the HEI as the source for certain of the outcomes listed in Appendix C; nevertheless, the listed items represent revised or new features of life at Tufts which have been put in place within the last 3 years. Many of these items listed as outcomes of the HEI seem to us rather small in scope, more like quick fixes or cosmetic flourishes than sweeping, meaningful changes. Two outcomes in contrast are seen as larger-scale changes. One is the formation of the Executive Committee as an elected leadership entity for the faculty; this innovation has raised hopes for the shared governance and intercoordination of efforts that have long been seen as missing at Tufts. The second important outcome is the incorporation of Professors of the Practice as a genuinely new brand of educators among the faculty at Tufts. This innovation has already been implemented within the School of Engineering and is under discussion for extension to the College of Liberal Arts as well.

As for the recommendations which emerged out of one or another of the HEIs phases but which have NOT been implemented, we identified the following reasons why.

First, there were too many individual faculty members involved, too many separate groups, and too many diffuse reports supported by an inadequate organizational structure. There was a feeling that the VP did not have a sense of "ownership" of the outcomes of these committees. The committees did their work, reported out, and then what ? Furthermore, the "threats" implied by the charge to the committees led to a sense of competition among them -- which groups would get a bigger slice of a fixed or shrinking pie?

Second, the resources available (if any) for implementing the recommendations that would address the "threats and opportunities" were never revealed. Thus the working groups were left knowing little about resource availability while making decisions regarding recommendations. They were working with no reality checks or established boundaries. If limited resources were indeed the case, no one reined the groups in during their formulating, and no cross-cutting group was appointed to consider the collective recommendations and try to prioritize, synthesize, or resolve them after the individual groups had pled their cases.

Third, when the first reports (i.e., those in Appendix A, in which the largest number of faculty had participated) were finished, there was no general participation in weighing those results and recommendations. Instead, months later the VP's office came up with a smaller set of groups to proceed further. How was that winnowing done? The faculty was left out of this critical process, and it seemed that the reports themselves had fallen into a "black hole". In general, the transitions from one stage to the next were unclear and excluded faculty involvement. The administrative structure of this HEI undertaking was "top down", with the VP making decisions concerning which recommendations to implement and how to allocate resources. In the end, some faculty felt they had been co-opted as information collectors and think tanks, but not as full participants in the endeavor.

Lastly, in the opinion of many faculty, the Vice President's focus and energy shifted away from the HEI and its potential outcomes when it became clear that President DiBiaggio would step down. Unfortunately, this occurred at a time when his leadership was crucial. This adversely impacted both the consideration and the prioritizing of recommendations and also their potential implementation.

As a consequence of the reasons why noted above, the HEI seemed to grind to a halt. Instances where recommendations were implemented were not very visible, and the other recommendations appeared to be simply laid to rest in so many file drawers. Given so little apparent gain for so much effort, the good will of the faculty, which was quite high at the beginning of the HEI, was lost.

Back to questions.

Question 4: What can we learn from the process followed by the HEI so that we can avoid similar problems in the future?

Specific and concise lessons for any similar efforts in the future are:

1. The administrative structure should be transparent and should include faculty members in decision-making -- that is, in selecting among recommendations and allocating resources, not just in framing the problems and collecting data.
    

2. The charge should be clear and focused, rather than abstract and all-encompassing.
    

3. Resources that are or could be available should be stated at the outset by the administration. Recommendations should be developed within these identified constraints.
    

4. The reports deriving from the HEI that bear on undergraduate "life" should be read and incorporated into the planned upcoming review of undergraduate education at Tufts. These are/were a valuable product of the HEI, and referring to them could save a great deal of time and salvage many good ideas.
    

5. Strong, inclusive, and optimistic leadership will be required if the faculty are to be truly engaged in this kind of task again. The faculty would like to believe that we can be headed towards something good once more, but there is a residual cynicism to overcome and many faculty may be cautious to reinvest.

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