Transcript of September 24, 2003

John Douglass called the meeting to order at 1:55 p.m.

Present: Professors Ahrens, Arneson, Burke, Cochran, Douglass, Fagelson, Flug, Forst, Heintze, Jacoby, Jennings, Karch, Langbein, La Salle, Loesberg, Olmsted, Richardson, Riley, Rosenbloom, Schaeff, Swallow, Vogelsong. Provost Kerwin.

Absent: Professors Fantie, Streitmatter

The minutes of the September 10, 2003 meeting were approved.

John Douglass (School of Communication and Chair, Faculty Senate): We’re going to be dealing with the Middle States Draft Report today, and I think we’re going to have a chance to have that discussion. I don’t anticipate this to be a very long meeting, but I appreciate your all coming and giving attention to this very important matter. At this point, I would like to turn it over to the provost.

Remarks by the Provost
Cornelius Kerwin: Thank you, John. I would imagine that everybody is sick of listening to me talk about Middle States process at this point. And I’m not going to take up much of the time with introduction, except a brief introduction of David Culver in a minute. What I would like to focus on is where we are in the process, because it is a critical stage. Talk a little bit about what’s expected of us, and ultimately, of the Commission, from here on in. And maybe project a little bit beyond even the site visit.

The entire process is driven by something called the “Characteristics of Excellence,” which was promulgated officially as a new set of accreditation and re-accreditation standards by the Middle States Commission last year, after several years of assessment of their own process and a set of standards that had been in place for, at that time, nearly 25 years. The document is substantial—it is this one. The characteristics cover 14 standards, 5 of which relate directly to the core academic mission and activities of the institution. The remaining 9 to a variety of university-wide concerns, ranging from mission, goals, and objectives all the way through the resources and administration of the institution. The one thing that’s striking about these characteristics, and distinguishes them from those that preceded it, is that there are not one, but two, separate standards related to what we can assessment. Assessment of the institution, as a whole. And in our case, that would be assessment of our progress toward whatever strategic plan is currently in place for the university—in our case the 15 points. And then a separate section on assessment of student learning. And David will talk more about that in a minute.

The process to Middle States is as important, in many cases, as the content of what they read. It begins with the formation of a steering committee that is broadly representative of the campus, at least those parts of the campus reflected in the characteristics. Our Steering Committee is so constituted, and it will be described for you in a moment. It’s in, of course, the self-study document. The steering committee is expected, if the institution is large enough, to delegate responsibility to task forces that deal with either discrete characteristics or some thematic combination of them. We’ve done that as well. And those task forces are also outlined in the self-study document.

The steering committee is tasked with developing a draft report, consulting with the community as it sees fit, drawing on whatever resources it can at that point. But once the draft is available, the community then becomes really a critical player, and ultimately, of course, the final authorities of the institution become critical players. We’re in a stage now called the public comment period. And while that can be conducted in a variety of ways, they expect at least one public forum. We will conduct, by the time we’re complete, nearly a dozen. One of the most important is this very afternoon. And the results of those public for a and the content of any communication received by the Steering Committee, by the Board of Trustees, the president or me, or any other person remotely connected to this draft report is going to be recorded and made available, in properly indexed format, for the site visit team when they finally arrive.

When the comment from the community is in, the Steering Committee is then tasked with developing a final report for consideration by the president and transmission to the Board of Trustees. The expectation is the Board of Trustees will approve this final report at its November meeting. And we are then prepared to submit, through the president, to the Middle States Commission in December. That’s earlier then we’re required to. We’re not required to submit until six weeks before the site visit team arrives. Our experience is that the longer the site visit team has with the report, the better they can absorb it. The cynics among us will think that’s the longer they have to ignore it, until they get here. Those of us who have chaired these committees know that committee members come to the task with varying levels of preparation. Which can lead to interesting dynamics on the site visit team itself. But that’s for another day. We’re going to assume that we’re going to have seven or eight really professional people, who have torn this document apart, visited our web sites, taken a look at all the bios, and all the rest. And when they get here, they will be able to begin with the self-study report and spend their days, more profitably, perhaps, digging below the surface, talking to constituencies.

The document you have here is a hundred and forty some pages long, two sides of the page. It is still, I think as everyone knows, in need of some refinements, just in terms of sheer text editing. But I think from a content point of view, my personal opinion is that certainly as far as the Characteristics of Excellence are concerned, we have addressed all of the general issues that the Characteristics raise. And while I may have varying levels of comfort with some of the recommendations, the fact is I don’t think a significant issue confronting the institution has been dodged. Or not treated in less than candid fashion, which is the charge that this steering committee had at the outset. We still have lots of very important constituencies left to weigh in, although we have met with the students. We are hearing from the Staff Council. This group, the Faculty Senate, is obviously critical. So whatever, as I said, transpires today, will be available not just to the Steering Committee, but the full transcript of the meeting will be available to the site visit team, and its chair, when they arrive.

Brian Forst (School of Public Affairs): Do you see the Senate having an actionable role in the process?

Kerwin: That’s up to you. To the extent of what? Voting on the document?

Forst: What would be the range of actionable options that you see us having?

Kerwin: I think that’s up to you to decide. But I think the transcript of the session itself and the recommendations from the senators would be the critical issue. From where I sit, anyway.

I want to thank the Steering Committee. And I want to tell you, this Faculty Senate and last year’s had 12 members contribute, either as Steering Committee reps, or as task force members, to the document. So the Senate has contributed already, beyond what transpires today.

I want to introduce Dave Culver, who is the chair of the Steering Committee. David, I think most of you know, is a professor of Biology. He was Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, prior to this. He has been responsible for directing the Steering Committee to this point. And will present the overview of the self-study, and then it will be open, John, to whatever discussion, or however you want to proceed.

Douglass: Thank you, Neil.

Discussion of the Middle States Draft Self-Study Report
David Culver: Well, I’m sorry the provost had to start by saying you may have sick of hearing him talk about the process, because some of you are extremely tired of hearing me talk about Middle States and hearing the summary. But let me just start by—this will be repetitious for some of you—a little bit about the background of the draft document.

As every institution of higher education, American University undergoes a decennial review and re-accreditation through a regional accrediting agency, which is Middle States Association for Higher Education, in our case. As a community, and this includes students, faculty, staff, central administration and the Board of Trustees, we review the changes that have occurred over the past 10 years and look forward to the future. So the self-study is designed to be an objective analysis, one that looks at successes, failures, and controversies. What it is not is a document to lobby or coerce the central administration, or the provost, or the Board of Trustees, or even the deans, to take a particular action. That is, Middle States will not resolve our disputes. Rather, it is a reflection of a consensus on the campus of where we stand. And it’s a message then to the Middle States Commission and the visiting committee that AU should be re-accredited.

Now if all we had to do was write a long essay, we would have been done long ago. Because one thing most of us are good at is writing long. And, instead, as the Provost pointed out, we have to follow a very detailed set of guidelines set forth by Middle States, that’s called “Characteristics of Excellence.” I have a few summary sheets, if you haven’t seen this and are interested, pass those around. There is the complete version, which is on the Middle States website, which is just www.american.edu/middlestates. Now besides the detailed questions we must answer, there is an overarching theme, as well as questions that are imposed by Middle States. And this has to do with assessment. And in the words of Middle States: “The new Characteristics of Excellence reflects the renewed and enhanced emphasis on student learning. The process that the framework institutions use to demonstrate learning is called assessment, or outcomes assessment.” So the emphasis is on student learning. And the buzzword is assessment is the way we look at this.

Among the standards set forward, and these are required standards, are articulated expectations of student learning at various levels—including the institution, degree, program and course—that are consonant with the institution’s mission and with standards of higher education and relevant disciplines. Another required standard is there is a plan that describes student learning, assessment activities undertaken by the institution.

Now many of you are aware that we have increased activity on campus with regard to assessment. And this is really focused on two structures. One is the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, which is headed by Karen Froslid Jones, who is also on the Steering Committee and is standing back there listening to this talk, I believe, for the ninth time. And the second is a newly formed Task Force on Learning Outcomes and Assessment, and I’ll say a little bit more about that in a minute. I think we need to talk honestly about the history of assessment and learning outcomes at AU. It’s not that we haven’t done assessment, but that we’ve done it in a rather unorganized way. The part that has been unorganized, that is well organized, has been what we call program review. And the kind of assessment that we are used to here is the kind where programs face termination. Summative assessment, in the language of the assessment community. And we’ve just completed an important round of this, which resulted in the termination of a number of masters and Ph.D. programs. I don’t want to open any old wounds, but rather I want to focus on another kind of assessment—it’s really the kind that Middle States is looking for. And this is where units look at their successes and failures in achieving the objectives of the programs. And assessment can be used not to eliminate programs, but to identify weaknesses and fix them. And also to identify strengths and use this information to promote programs, to get better students, and so forth.

So what we need is to use assessment to improve programs, not to eliminate them. And this will be the business of the Task Force on Learning Outcomes and Assessment. And this will be under the leadership of Cathy Schaeff and Lyn Stallings, who are going to be the co-chairs of this newly appointed task force.

Well, there is one final focus of this self-study document, and this is one that we imposed upon ourselves. The Steering Committee decided that what reflects the uniqueness of American University is encapsulated in the phrase “engagement.” And we have used this both as a theme and as a separate chapter—not the summary chapter, but the concluding regular chapter of the self-study.

The document that you have was a product, in the end, of a nearly 20-person Steering Committee of students, staff, faculty, and administrators. We developed the outlines. We served as chairs for task forces. And we had nearly 100 people who took part on the task forces. The Steering Committee reviewed each chapter, and at this point is ultimately responsible for the draft. We’ve now sort of moved to entire community, and that’s why we view these comment periods as so important. It is a draft, as it says very clearly. If you’ve read it, you can identify spots…that it’s a draft. We, in fact, deliberately sprinkled mistakes throughout the document, to make sure that people have read it very carefully. And I’m glad to say that many people have.

Now, in February, the visiting team will be on campus to do the final review. As they wander about campus, I have two things I want to say to you about the visit. If anyone says to you, have you heard of Middle States? You say, “Yes.” And if anyone says, have you heard of assessment? You say, “Yes, and I like it.” OK. If we can get everyone on campus to say this, I believe we have half of the battle won.

Kerwin: Just remember it’s a full text transcript.

Culver: Well, it’s probably a little late now for me to remember that. The visiting team will give an oral report, and two weeks later they will provide us with a written report, which we can comment on, only with regard to issues of fact. The ultimate recommendations of the visiting team are presented for approval before the Commission of Higher Education in June of 2004, and they research their decision by July.

What are some of the highlights of the report? I first urge you all, if you haven’t done so already, to read the Executive Summary, which contains the recommendations from each task force. I need to say again that this is only a draft. We inadvertently, and this was Karen and I, left off the recommendations of the Graduate and Professional Task Force in the Executive Summary. You should read nothing more into that. But you do need to read those recommendations at the end of chapter 8, to complete the summary of recommendations.

There are three overarching recommendations that emerged from the various task forces.

• The first one is to make improvements to overall student experience, while, at the same time, preserving the many facets of the current curriculum to make American University an excellent institution. This strikes a balance with what we have—General Education, the Honors Program, majors, double majors—and what we propose, particularly enhanced Study Abroad and the University College.

• The second overarching theme is to lessen our dependence on tuition and generate new sources of revenue. I assume no one will disagree with that. We’re constrained not so much by our vision and our ideas, but our resources to carry them out.

• The third overall recommendation is to improve the channels of communication and to provide even more opportunities for input into the decision-making and planning processes of the institution.

Now, I would like to give you just a couple of examples of recommendations from individual task forces, to give you, I hope, something of the flavor of the report. Let me start with the Graduate and Professional Education Task Force. Among their recommendations are that the university should take a break from further overall graduate program reviews, for at least a five-year period. The Faculty Task Force recommended that the university reduce faculty teaching load. The Task Force on Learning Resources and Student Life recommended that we continue to invest significant financial resources in improving the library. The Undergraduate Task Force recommended that we affirm and enhance the centrality of the General Education Program. The Task Force on Engagement recommended that we include a plan for assessing engagement initiatives and related outcomes. The Task Force on Institutional Resources recommends that we improve budget transparency. And the Task Force on Leadership, Governance, and Administration recommends that the Board of Trustees, through its Trusteeship Committee, formalize its current process of assessing performance of individual trustees.

Now, of course this report is about more than recommendations. It should not surprise you that in the process of studying AU and the changes that have occurred in the last 10 years, that we found many, many things to be proud of. And let me just highlight a few of those changes. One is that the institution’s commitment to becoming a global university has been strengthened through the creation of a vice president for international affairs. Secondly, full professors reached AAUP level 1 status for the first time in the fall of 2000. In the fall of 2003, the admit rate was under 60 percent. I read in the minutes, it’s actually 59.05 percent, compared to 77 percent in 1994. The university was awarded a Phi Beta Kappa chapter in 1994. There have been major renovations of buildings, including Ward Circle, Battelle-Tompkins, and Kogod. The institution received an A rating from Standard and Poor’s in 2002. And the budget has gone from $180 million dollars in fiscal year 1995 to $272 million dollars in fiscal year 2002.

I hope now that you will make some comments. We’re interested not only in what’s wrong; we’re also interested in if anything is missing from the document. And we’re also interested in anything that we got right. And let me just close by introducing the members of the Steering Committee that are here: Haig Mardirosian, Karen Froslid Jones, Nana An, Tony Ahrens, and Pat Wand. And so I will be happy to take any questions at this point. You can also submit written comments to our e-mail address which is middlestates@american.edu. You can also leave anonymous notes in my mail box. And you can also comment right now.

Douglass: I’d actually like to ask a question for this group. As I recall, when we did this before, the visiting team met with the Executive Committee of the Senate. I think I remember that. This body is its own Executive Committee. So do you have any idea of how we will function vis a vis the visiting team when it comes.

Culver: I think it’s very likely that they’ll want to meet with the Senate. They actually set who they want to meet with.

Douglass: So we’ll have a session.

Culver: I think it would be very unlikely that you didn’t. For obvious reasons, we’re not the ones that set the whole agenda. It’s very important to let the visiting team set the agenda. If it’s like we anticipate, they’ll meet with formal structures, like the Senate, as well as groups of faculty.

Jill Olmsted (School of Communication): I noticed this because I was on the task force, but I really do think the recommendation under governance and administration, the second one about the Board of Trustees formalizing their own process of evaluation is a significant improvement and change. Because we all know that we get evaluated on multiple levels. Everybody else around the university gets evaluated on multiple levels, and there was really nothing, when we looked at the structure of the university, there was really no system for evaluating the trustees, who make the decisions that ultimately govern us. So that alone is a significant change.

I do have a question on good old Datatel. Page 34…it is about information resource needs. And it talks about the introduction of Datatel in 1997. And I don’t know if this is out of context or it does indeed—under that section it says: “The overwhelming success of these projects…” And I’m just wondering. I haven’t seen anything in here that has talked about the considerable difficulties that I’ve always heard we had with that system. And I don’t know if we still have. But I didn’t see anything that talked about potential weaknesses. Maybe I haven’t seen it. Or maybe they didn’t address it. Or it’s gone away. I don’t know.

Culver: That’s a good point. Let me say I’ll bring all these comments back to the Steering Committee. Sometimes I’m tempted to say, Oh yeah, we’ll fix that. And it’s clearly inappropriate for me to say what will be changed. But we will certainly look into the questions.

Philip Jacoby (Kogod School of Business): I just wanted to pick up on Jill’s comment and commend the task force on leadership and governance. I’m very happy to read the recommendations pertaining to the Board of Trustees. As we all know, boards of directors are getting a lot of attention these days, because of corporate financial reports, executive compensation issues. And if I were in Middle States, it’s probably one of the areas that they don’t look at that deeply, but they might take a longer look at it this year, because the whole issue of governance is something that has caught national attention. And it appears that we’ve done a very good job of addressing that in this report. So I was happy to see it.

Culver: Let me just say that I would like to give some credit to Professor Howard McCurdy because he chaired the task force, particularly for that section looked at that.

Cathy Schaeff (CAS/Department of Biology): That was the committee that I was on. Mechanisms exist for the Board to assess the members. It’s just it is more internal methods currently. There have been external mechanisms associated with the Methodist Church, because of the way the school came out it. So it’s more catching up with changes that we propose.

John Richardson (School of International Service): Before focusing a lot on the recommendations, I wanted to ask about the recommendation process. We have various documents. We have annual goals. And the 15 points and so on and so forth. So these recommendations would of particular weight if there were some follow-on process, in terms of accreditation, which attended to the degree to which the recommendations were followed. My question is if consider our last accreditation report and its recommendations, to what degree did those carry weight in the subsequent development of the university and also, as a practical matter, will these recommendations—where will these recommendations fit into our more conventional priority and goal-setting process?

Culver: You’ve got several questions; I’m sure I’ll forget some of them, John.

Richardson: How did it work last time, and how do you think it will work this time?

Culver: Well, last time, and I’m sorry Professor McCurdy isn’t there, because he chaired that committee. One of the main recommendations was that we really needed a strategic plan, and that there was a lot of emphasis on development of a strategic planning process. This was just at the time when President Ladner was taking over. So, those of you who were here remember that was a very unsettled time, if I could just put it that way. And that there’s really a feeling that we needed a plan, a mission statement. And so that happened, as a result of that. As far as what will happen with these recommendations, part of it will be covered by the Task Force on Learning Outcomes and Assessment, which the Provost formed. And presumably, they will take those ones that have to do with assessment forward. We don’t have a formal structure, and we’re still in the process of discussing, how the others will go, except I would point out that since this is approved by the President and the Board, that they cannot be ignored.

Richardson: I guess my question was—I know we have an intermediate review. Will Middle States come back five years from now and say: These were your recommendations. Please tell us how well you did.

Culver: Yes.

Kerwin: I can help you with that. I think that the Middle States site visit team will probably do a sort on those recommendations that they think are substantial enough relative to accreditation to include in their recommendations to the Commission. Those we would be especially responsible for. David is right. The reason why the Middle States Commission expects the president’s direct involvement in this process and hopefully, approval of the self-study by the Board of Trustees, is the quite explicit endorsement of the content of the document at that point. My memory of the 1994 report was that it was more than strategic planning. It was strategic planning—it was also a heavy focus on graduate programs at that point. The 1998 update of that, the five-year, addressed what we planned for graduate. And I would expect, John, coming out of this one, it would depend very heavily on what occurred between now and the submission of the final report to the Board and approval by the Board. And then ultimately what the site visit team determines when it’s here. They could decide, for example, that the statement that’s been made here about faculty teaching loads is so central that they want us to not only report on it at the five-year mark, but report on it before hand. This is speculation, but I would be very surprised if there wasn’t an expectation of reporting on assessment. The reason why our older report is less helpful to us than it might be otherwise is because we’re the first group in under the new set of characteristics. So we’re kind of walking on the cliff here. That’s probably not the right thing to say either. The fact that we’ll be the first of the schools through on a brand new set of criteria will be very instructive, and I think the first set of site visit team reports back to the Commission will be a good test to the Commission itself on what it expects for places like us to do with the assessment guidelines especially.

Laura Langbein (School of Public Affairs): Another issue that I recall from last re-accreditation—if I were on the site visit team, I would read over the other report, the last report that we gave five or ten years ago. The big issue which seems to have disappeared—the big issue then, and a great concern of Middle States, was the increasing ratio of administrative to instructional expenditures. And partly because of the refocus of this on assessment, that seems to have disappeared. If I were on the site visit team, it would be on my radar screen.

Culver: I actually think that’s it not correct that it was a focus of the last…it was a focus to a certain extent of the faculty, but the visiting team did not—in fact, they explicitly said they were not concerned about it in one of the reports.

Langbein: That’s not as I recall.

Douglass: Any further comments?

Langbein: Actually, two concerns that I had. One was that I thought the section on faculty research appeared to have been given short shrift, compared to section on teaching and service, and I thought it was easily remediable, with data that we routinely collect. And we certainly have colleted some. My other concern was that the data ought to show not only average salaries but median salaries, but that may not be possible. It’s possible for us, but in terms of comparing us to other universities, it may not be possible. Just something I thought of for consideration.

Culver: Thank you.

Douglass: Thank you very much. I think we can for the record that we appreciate very much the work of the committee, the ongoing work of the committee, and certainly endorse the process that has been going forward. And look forward to working with you when this thing finally comes to rest. Any other comments? Or anything for the good of the order?

Olmsted: Just a reminder that this is one of those things that people should be bringing back to their schools to try and get some comment from. I’ve only leafed through this, and I’m sure that everybody else is in the same boat, because of various things that have been going on lately. So I suspect that we’re going to get more specific feedback for the task force from our own schools. And if we can just do whatever we can to push this there.

Douglass: And channel the comments to David.

Culver: Let me just say that it’s important to do this quickly, because we have to work backwards from the Board of Trustees meeting and so really the comment period will end October 1st. So, it’s important that we get those done, because at that point, the Steering Committee must then prepare a final draft, which then goes to the Board of Trustees for their approval or change. And then goes to publication after that. So it’s not that we want to impose a short deadline, but we really have no choice in it. The other thing I would urge is that, sometimes people say to me, well I’m sure you’ve caught this. And almost, inevitably, we have not caught it. So don’t assume that somehow we said what a terrible mistake, we missed a number or something. So please let us know, because there are a lot of numbers here. And even though we like to think we are, we are not all knowing on the Steering Committee. So no matter how trivial it seems, or what an obvious glaring error we’ve made, please let us know.

Diana Vogelsong (University Library): I do have some comments from the library, which I’ll send you separately, but just in general, are there areas you have concerns about, where we could provide additional information from our units?

Culver: Our main concern is the general area of assessment, and that’s why trying to move forward on that. There are a lot of issues that come up that are not in this report; we’ve tried to strike an even level of what rises. We’ve emphasized the university as a whole, rather than individual colleges and schools, for example, because we felt that that was an appropriate level of analysis. We think that we included what we needed to include. And at this point, you need to tell us if there’s something that’s missing, given the general level of detail. There’s always more detail that’s possible in any one of the sections. We worked hard, but obviously there’s still more to be done to keep everything at the same level of analysis. I will say that, one example, when the Middle States representative was here last year, and we had him meet with a group of faculty and a group of students, the issue that the students came out with that caught us all by surprise was women’s lacrosse was a club sport rather than a team sport. Now, that’s actually an important issue for people involved in that. But that’s not, in my view, an issue that rises to the level that we’re going to go through each individual sport, for example, and try to do an analysis.

Tony Riley (CAS/Department of Psychology): Once it goes to the Board of Trustees for their evaluation, they can approve or disapprove or comment on the document. It goes back to your group for redrafting?

Culver: The trustees have the document now. So they are also part of this public comment period as well. And we hope that, in fact, they will approve it. If they don’t, they it must go back to the Steering Committee, and there are a variety of possibilities of how we could proceed then. I think about those enough. Let’s not go there, Tony. I think it’s important that we consult, and we have worked hard to consult at that level, to hope that any issues will be ironed out.

Kerwin: There was a trustee on the Steering Committee. Pete’s a very active member of the Board. So I think David’s is a fair assessment.

Douglass: OK. Dave, thank you very much for coming. All of us appreciate that. If there is no other business, I would entertain a motion to adjourn.

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The meeting was adjourned at 2:35 p.m.