Address to the Board of Regents

August 19, 2008

Wynne Chin

Chairman Wilson, Vice-Chair Stephens, and other distinguished members of the Board,

Thank you again for providing our Faculty Senate the opportunity to provide an update on our activities.  In my last address, I talked about how both faculty excellence and student success are intertwined as we endeavor to become the premier metropolitan university. Faculty excellence is not an easy thing to accomplish.  It takes extraordinary investment in resources to attract, develop, and retain “tier one” level research active faculty. This is equally the case for student success, which is the topic for today. 

As I indicated last time, our faculty senate committee on education policies and student affairs headed by Dave Mazella has been coordinating with the administration to help improve student success.  Specifically, he’s been trying to work closely with Dan Gardner on determining what I would term the critical success factors that lead to the outcomes we desire. Graduation rates, first time persistence rates, time to degree, and student satisfaction are what we consider final outcomes. What is equally as important beyond locking down these final student performance outcomes, is determining how we get there and those key milestones along the way. In other words, what are the intermediate success measures we ought to ensure we are capturing to know we are headed in the right direction? How do we know the resources we plan to direct towards success are making an impact?  For example, should we not also be interested in measuring how our faculty and support staff in the various student service departments over time are or are not becoming more familiar with the needs of our students, getting to better understand the challenges our students face, and hopefully develop a sense of ownership for the success of our students?  Are these intermediate steps or goals not just as critical as the final outcome measures?  Determining the set of critical intermediate success outcomes is but one aspect of what our Senate has been working on.  And to do so, involves reaching out to faculty.

Clearly, one might argue that our faculty, who have been termed by some as the street level implementers for the University, are in a key position to know what support services can best assist students to overcome the full spectrum of educational, emotional, social and financial barriers to their success.   The Senates position and goal is to tap into the faculty knowledge base.

Take myself just as an example.  I was in Toronto this past week to provide one of the keynote talks on how to manage one’s academic career as part of the Ph.D. Project for Minority Business Doctoral Students. The development of management educators and future business leaders within the African-American, Hispanic American and Native American communities is the cornerstone of The PhD Project's holistic approach to workforce diversity. The shared mission for all involved is to increase minority representation among business professors, business schools graduates, and ultimately, practicing management professionals. Since 1994, The PhD Project has more than tripled the number of minority business school professors…from 294 to over 898.  Attending this three day conference was a two way street.  It allowed me to help share my expertise, but it also helped me understand important areas we as an institution can focus on to enhance success among minority doctoral students.  Who knew I had this insight until just now?  Will I have an opportunity to direct this understanding to support administration?

My situation is not unique.  There is an incredible amount of knowledge embedded among our faculty and the Senate hopes with the aid of our administration to be able gather, collect, tap into the collective wisdom of our faculty in order to make the best decision towards achieving our goal for greater student success.

Beyond our own faculty, we are also still gathering and compiling information from other top universities in an attempt to synthesize the various programs out there in order to produce a best of breed profile for achieving success.  This is through scanning websites, reading published reports, talking to personal colleagues. We are essentially attempting to gather additional information complimentary to what our administration have pulled together.  This, of course, requires spending time to coordinate with administration on what they done thus far so we don’t duplicate efforts.

In terms of our Cougar Nation group, which is a unprecedented collaboration of faculty, staff, and student working together to increase the spirit, morale, and culture befitting a top tier institution, we are entering the second phase of expansion.  The charter group, consisting of the officers of the Faculty Senate, Staff, and Student Council, has put together a mission statement and brainstormed an initial set of action ideas to focus on.  This coming month, we are expanding the membership to include alumni input and additional faculty, staff, and student representatives to draft out an operational plan.  There are some really great ideas, but it would be premature to spill the beans right now.  Of course, if you corner me during the break – I suppose I can toss a few out.