FROM: Interim President Joseph S. Wood
Newsletter #14: Academic Programs To Be Evaluated
Friday, February 8, 2008
Dear Colleagues:
Effective immediately, we will be evaluating 26 academic majors, certificate and degree programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels in an effort to ensure that they are responding to student needs.
We’re taking this action because it is our firm belief, after consultation with faculty leadership and deans, that any prudently managed university should, as a matter of course, evaluate its academic offerings to ensure that we are responsive to the needs of our students and the community at large. Our students who pay tuition and Maine citizens who support us with their tax dollars and private monies deserve nothing less.
A memo that Interim Provost Mark Lapping is sharing with the Faculty Senate outlines the issue in detail, and includes the full list of programs. (Click on http://www.usm.maine.edu/mcr/update/0708/lappingmemo.2.8.pdf).
I want to reinforce some key points in this latest “Moving Forward.”
No final decisions have been made on the status of any of the programs that are listed. Our intent is to ask faculty in those programs, in consultation with their respective deans, to develop plans, which will lead to several goals, among them increasing the number of majors and graduates.
Plans to achieve these goals, including annual assessments with benchmarks, must be completed by April 1 of this year. Failure to develop a satisfactory plan, and set in place strategies to implement it, will result in programs being moved to a suspension-of-admission status by July 1 of 2008. Suspension-of-admission status is the first step toward full suspension and elimination of a program.
This action does not affect any students currently enrolled as majors in these programs.
Furthermore, suspension of admission would not lead to layoffs of tenure-line faculty, nor would elimination of a program necessarily do so. It would, however, decrease our dependence on adjunct, part-time and fixed-length faculty in many disciplines. It also would lessen the need to fill full-time faculty positions vacated through attrition. We still would need full-time faculty to teach courses for other programs as well as general education courses. In addition, courses still would be offered in many, if not all, of the disciplines identified in the lists of affected programs. That said, we don’t necessarily need a major in each of these disciplines.
Finally, I want to stress that inclusion on the list of programs to be considered is not a reflection on academic quality. Students across many disciplines have told us in focus groups and other settings that our faculty members are engaged teachers and mentors. Rather, this action is the result of low student demand for majors in these programs, or already inadequate instructional resources. In 2007, these 26 programs graduated fewer than 65 students in total.
Clearly, we must evaluate, in a strategic and deliberate fashion, proposals to reorganize, reduce, eliminate, or when warranted by market conditions, develop new programs. It’s a long process. But in the end, we will be a more sustainable university, and one better positioned to serve our students.
Sincerely,
Joe
For more information, please click on http://www.usm.maine.edu/mcr/update This site includes the breakfast speech; the latest digest of ideas e-mailed to movingforward@usm.maine.edu; our work plan; and notes from the recent series of town meetings.
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