Learning from last year”s Focus For the Future process, Provost and Executive Vice President John Wiencek intends to improve communication and clarity through a new program prioritization committee composed of faculty, staff and students.
“I think we need a bit of a fresh start in this,” Wiencek said, during a presentation at a Faculty Senate meeting Tuesday.
As part of a new policy from the State Board of Education (SBOE), all state colleges and universities must incorporate program prioritization into their annual budget and review processes.
The SBOE initially sent this order in 2013 after Idaho Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter mandated all state agencies to do so in order for the government to prioritize where to put their funds, Wiencek said. Under a different interim president and provost, UI developed FFF under Katherine Aiken, interim provost and executive vice president, and Don Burnett, interim university president.
Wiencek
“The interim president and interim provost at the time said, “Well we don”t want to call it program prioritization again. Let”s change it because this is intended to be a living process,”” Wiencek said. “So the president, I believe, President Burnett branded the effort Focus for the Future.”
Under FFF, all UI programs were sorted into five individual groups based on their level of priority. Wiencek said the placement of the programs into the five groups was based on self-assessment and quantitative data primarily relying on student headcounts.
“I think we have to move away from self-evaluation,” Wiencek said. “I think we should put together teams that do the evaluations. These teams should have some basis to judge, but should provide almost a peer evaluation that”s outside the unit.”
As a result of FFF, multiple changes were made within UI, including the discontinuation of 19 degree programs. Wiencek said the largest impact in terms of the university”s budget came from the closing of the Office of Community Partnerships, which saved the university about $460,000.
Yet, the SBOE found UI”s process for program prioritization to be unsustainable due to the excessive amount of paperwork included for participants of the process, Wiencek said. He said he plans to go about program prioritization differently in the future.
Due to a lack of communication with the SBOE and within the university itself, there were a lot of misunderstandings created throughout the process, Wiencek said. He said communication and clarity is something he will focus on going into a new process for program prioritization.
“We really have to open up this process and not have it being held in secret in central administration,” Wiencek said. “It really has to be something that has broad university participation in.”
For the sake of clarity, Wiencek finished his review by asking a question to the members of Faculty Senate. He said the programs that were sorted into the fifth, and lowest, quintile were informed about their rank, but he wanted to know if the members of Faculty Senate thought it was a good idea to let all the programs know where they stood in the data collected for FFF.
Though there were some mixed feelings, the majority of Faculty Senate members agreed with the argument to not publish the data, which was posed by Vice Chair of Faculty Senate Liz Brandt.
“I think that publishing the quintile information ends up labeling programs based on data and analysis that we suspect its integrity, and I think that that”s a potentially destructive thing to do,” Brandt said.
Multiple Faculty Senate members raised concerns of how UI would deal with programs ranked in the lowest fifth.
Jodi Nicotra from the College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences said programs in the lower fifth might feel a lack of motivation to improve upon hearing the news.
Wendy Couture from UI”s Boise campus was worried about the allocation of resources, as many of the programs were ranked into the fifth quintile based on their access to resources. She asked what Wiencek thought about working with lower fifth programs.
“It could result in the poorer get poorer and the rich get richer result,” Couture said.
As part of his plan going forward, Wiencek said he wants to put time into lower fifth programs to improve them instead of hurt them further.
“That”s part of what the committee needs to do,” Wiencek said. “They”ll have an evolution in the four or five years that are to come of “How do we deal with people in the fifth quintile?””
Erin Bamer can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @ErinBamer