May 4, 1998
Executive Summary
In its second-annual report the Strategic Plan Advisory Committee (SPAC) finds that good progress has been made in implementing three of the Plan’s five main initiatives. Recent innovations such as College Park Scholars, Gemstone, Honors Humanities, the World Courses, First-Year Book, and First-Year-Focus are providing a sizable number of undergraduates with the kind of enriched educational opportunities envisioned in the Plan. The academic profile of the entering class also continues to improve. But much more will need to be done before our undergraduate program can be said to be ‘on a par with those at the nation’s leading public universities’. Enriched opportunities for learning will need to become the norm, rather than the exception, for students on the College Park campus. For the most part, the program enhancements just mentioned reflect the contributions of individual faculty and deans rather than the fruits of a coordinated campuswide effort. During the coming year the President, Provost, and Deans will need to champion the cause of undergraduate education with greater visibility and energy; kindle enthusiasm for program reform within individual departments; find ways to encourage greater faculty-student interaction; and reward those faculty who make exceptional contributions. To improve the effectiveness of our recruiting efforts the administration should undertake to increase the amount of merit-aid support available for outstanding students, create additional living-learning programs and other attractive course offerings, decrease the class size of selected first-year courses, alter the mix of first-year and transfer students, expand current dormitory capacity, and develop a set of coordinated recruiting strategies.
In the area of graduate education and research, SPAC finds that the effort to build ‘cornerstone programs of excellence in graduate education and research’ has moved ahead on a number of fronts during the past year. The review conducted by the Graduate Program Review Committee, although controversial in some respects, has helped to solidify the campus’s understanding of its areas of greatest strength in graduate education. This understanding can be of enormous value if it is utilized in connection with concentrating available resources in our most distinguished and promising programs. During the coming year, the Graduate School should undertake to target current graduate fellowship resources along just these lines, while also addressing a range of issues relating to GRB programs, declining graduate enrollments, and facilities planning. The review of graduate programs must also become a regular part of campus life if we are to create and sustain a sizable number of ‘cornerstone programs of excellence’.
Efforts made during the past year to ‘rationalize resource allocation’ have also led to some identifiable improvements. APAC was able to utilize the program evaluations presented by the Graduate Program Review Committee in connection with its review of allocation requests from the colleges. More generally, campus resource-allocation and reallocation decisions have become much more focused, and more closely aligned with established priorities, than has been the case in the past. Continued progress in this area will require developing a detailed understanding of where our resources are currently located and how well they are being utilized, exploring possibilities for alternative organizational structures, broadening the pool of resources allocated in connection with the Plan’s strategic initiatives, developing a set of multi-year strategies for resource allocation, and assessing the relative degrees of centrality and academic excellence enjoyed by individual units. If the aspirations for national stature expressed in our Strategic Plan are to be realized, then the campus administration will need to set specific performance targets for the deans and colleges (utilizing the format of the Strategic Plan ‘report card’ recently prepared by the Provost), and assess performance on annual basis. It would also be useful for the deans of multi-unit colleges to conduct similar annual reviews with their departmental chairs to ensure that the goals set out in the Plan are being understood and broadly pursued by campus faculty and staff.
Sections
II: Offering a High-Quality Education to Outstanding Undergraduates
III: Building Cornerstones of Quality in Graduate Education and Research
IV: Rationalizing Resource Allocation and Administrative Operations