August 27, 2024
Dear Colleagues,
I hope the first week of the new school year has been energizing for you—I always love the energy that comes with the start of the academic year and seeing the campus full of students, faculty, and staff!
I am writing today to follow up to the Transformation 2028 (T28) messages I sent on , , and . In those messages, I asked you to get involved in determining how we will tackle our budget concerns and elevate The Division of Academic Affairs for the next generation by providing your ideas to several survey questions:
- Are there opportunities that you would recommend to make С»ÆƬÊÓƵ more efficient? When responding to this question, think about duplication of efforts, opportunities for shared services and other opportunities to meet our students’ needs within academic and non-academic areas.
- Thinking about duplication of similar courses (not course sections) university-wide, how can we streamline our course offerings to be efficient while still addressing student needs and providing opportunities for success?
- To increase efficiency across the university system, think about how academic programs can better collaborate or coordinate their efforts, while maintaining clarity of those programs for students and providing opportunities from cross-disciplinary synergies?
- What are barriers you have experienced regarding making С»ÆƬÊÓƵ operate more efficiently or barriers that inhibit new, creative opportunities from developing?
- Imagine the Division of Academic Affairs as a blank slate where you could build up academics from scratch. How would it look? What might you create? What might not be around, or might be combined? What colleges might you create? What programs would you add into our portfolio and what would you take away to make room for new?
Your responses have been tremendous! To date, you have offered more than 780 ideas and suggestions for moving Academic Affairs forward. Thank you!
Survey Impressions. You gave recommendations about how to centralize some of our work related to areas such as IT, advising, and course scheduling to be more efficient, as well as reducing the number of administrators, and ensuring appropriate faculty and staff workload.
Another recommendation was to grant employees (both faculty and staff) the ability to reduce their FTE. That is, faculty and staff could choose to work fewer hours at a reduced salary if their roles were amenable to such a schedule. We are reviewing this suggestion and will work with staff organizations, the bargaining units, and the Division of People, Culture, and Belonging to assess the viability of these suggestions.
You discussed the importance of streamlining processes and reducing the duplication of products and programs, as well as consolidating our building use and sharing administrative oversight. These are all areas we can, and will, make changes in to be more efficient moving forward. Thank you for these and so many more suggestions.
You also provided ideas related to collaboration and coordination within our academic programming and organization. Suggestions such as decreasing Kent Core course options, adding more multi-disciplinary courses to serve multiple majors, eliminating low-enrolled programs, decreasing the number of options for elective courses and concentrations within programs, and reducing the duplication of very similar courses offerings across degrees (research methods courses was a common example of courses that could serve multiple majors) are ideas that could be explored within the curriculum processes to help reduce redundant or under-enrolled courses. Ideas such as these, and the many more you offered, can, and will, make meaningful change. Thank you!
In relation to barriers, our RCM budget model in the colleges was far and away the most named barrier to change. Given your input, and work that has been conducted over the past several years with FaSBAC, the Division of Finance, and academic leaders, I am committed to identifying a budget model that will disincentivize the competitive decisions that prohibit the types of changes that you advocated for in your responses. My aim is to work with our faculty leaders, deans, and finance advisors to develop that model before the year’s end.
You had many insightful suggestions regarding how to transform Academic Affairs, including how to organize colleges and programs so that they reflect our students’ and communities’ current and future needs, as well as highlight our distinctiveness as a university. Many noted that health-related programs (e.g., public health, nursing, health sciences, podiatric medicine) might be able to share one college structure. Some of you promoted a college that pulled design programs together and some thought a college that focused on technology and science would be beneficial.
Of course, these are only a few of the most often repeated suggestions and not a summary of all the great responses you provided. Importantly, this is not an announcement of any decision. Our Communication Committee of T28 is in the process of conducting a more thorough analysis of your ideas and will report out on the findings soon. I just wanted to make sure that you are kept up to date and provided feedback as we were going through the deeper dives.
We have also solicited input from Academic Affairs Leadership. I want to update you on conversations I have had this summer with academic leaders during deans meetings and in our annual Academic Affairs Retreat with our college and Academic Affairs leaders. The most important way we can realize efficiencies is by strategic reorganization of our academic structure and administrative reduction; and the most important way we can ensure that our academic offerings are meaningful, relevant, and future-oriented is to arrange our current programs in such a way that we can realize synergies among them and to create space to offer new programs that are critical to our students and society by eliminating currently low-enrolled programs.
In these meetings, I asked our leaders to imagine creating colleges from the ground up, to position our current offerings that align well and provide opportunity for shared resources and information together, and to offer ideas for programs that we could consider for adding over time. The only caveats were to create fewer colleges with fewer administrative units within them.
I was humbled and grateful to see our academic leaders come together for the good of the university. Knowing that restructuring would, in many cases, mean that their individual position might look different or not even exist, they nonetheless provided their very best thinking and suggestions for how we move forward together. I am so very thankful for and in awe of our selfless leaders.
In reviewing their suggestions, there were many similar configurations, and we are currently in the process of creating a way to show you the ideas that were most prevalent. In a few weeks, we will send out another message that will provide you with the ability to review the ideas and comment on them. Please know that your voice matters. My goal is to be transparent throughout this process and engage you at every decision-making point. I need to hear from you.
Please Engage. So please continue to send suggestions to the so that your thoughts are known. I realize this is a difficult process, both personally and professionally. I also want to encourage you to remain involved in both the T28 process and the important College, Department, and School work around such actions as:
- sunsetting courses and programs;
- identifying efficiencies within colleges;
- exploring staff job-sharing;
- determining and adhering to appropriate course section sizes;
- creating course offering prioritization and rotations; and
- realizing accurate workload assignments.
I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that our future depends on all of us coming together to envision a leaner and even more relevant С»ÆƬÊÓƵ. I appreciate you sharing ways we can reach our objectives of being leaner while continuing to be distinctive in our academic programming.
Also, please mark your calendar for September 19th from 12:30-2:00 when I will host a forum with our faculty leaders, Sue Clement (President, AAUP-KSU FT NTT Unit), Tracy Laux (Faculty Senate Chair), and Deborah Smith (President, AAUP-KSU TT Unit), as well as members from our T28 Communication Committee. During this forum, we will discuss T28 work to date, present additional findings from the open surveys, and answer questions you may have.
Thank you for your engagement and for putting С»ÆƬÊÓƵ’s welfare and distinctiveness at the core of the suggestions you are providing.
My best,
Melody Tankersley, Ph.D.
Senior Vice President and Provost