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President Corrigan's ViewPointViewPoint by President Corrigan is published in First Monday for the faculty and staff at SFSU on the first Monday of the month during the fall and spring semesters by the Public Affairs and Publicatio ns offices. EXT 8-1665. pubcom@sfsu.edu |
We started this academic year with a keen sense of shared purpose, bred of CUSP, and a clear blueprint for our initial efforts to implement our strategic plan. It has now been six months since I presented to the faculty the 10 academic priorities that were intended to guide our year. It is time to pause for a kind of mid-year report to ourselves on our progress and our concerns, so that we can see clearly where we need to concentrate our energies in the remaining time.
Let me say, first of all, that despite an extraordinarily busy semester, we have made excellent—in some areas, remarkable—progress. There is enough to report that we will need to finish this review in next month’s "Viewpoint." For now, I will concentrate on the first five of our 10 priorities, providing a capsule account of where things stand.
Where so many faculty, staff, and administrators are working together on these initiatives, naming individuals is problematic. I want to give credit at the outset to the strong Academic Affairs and Student Affairs teams that have been central to so much of our progress on these priorities. While I do mention some of those who are leading or coordinating major efforts, I and the campus realize that a true account of participation would add scores more names.Priority: Required Advising. Our goal was to implement required advising at the five pivotal points—orientation, declaration of major, achieving upper division status, facing academic challenges, and pre-graduation—by the end of this academic year. We are on schedule, and starting next fall, our students will have something we have talked about for years: structured advising from admission to graduation. This semester, in an effort led by Dean Susan Taylor and including the Advising Center staff, student/peer counselors, department chairs and college deans, we are refining our advising objectives, delivery mechanisms, and compliance strategies. We are using technology creatively, developing two web-based advising programs: Virtual Orientation, which allows out-of-state students to complete the summer orientation program at a distance, and Web-based Advising, a template which will allow students to plan GE, major, and other requirements, in consultation with their advisor. Much credit here goes to Julianne Tolson of Computing Services. All of this will be in full operation by fall.
Priority: Structured First-Year Experience. Here, too, we are exactly where we need to be. We have spent the year planning a rich pilot program which will start with Liberal Studies freshmen next fall. Features of the program include the Web-based advising system mentioned above, linked classes (GE basic subjects), an electronic portfolio, an orientation course, enhanced support for students in remedial math and English, and group co-curricular activities and special events. This last element is no add-on, but a central part of our program. As we have seen wit h the Presidential Scholars, a structured co-curricular program draws students together—and draws them into the University. The benefits are both personal and academic.
Priority: Basic Skills. Starting last fall, we coupled a requirement that students take ELM and EPT before enrolling with a guarantee that we would provide the English and math sections they needed. We have done that, and more. To ensure the necessary seats, we add sections as needed through the first week of classes, investing some $500,000 of new money for remedial courses this year. We provide an extensive support network for students in these classes, especially through the Intensive Learning Program, English Tutoring Center, mathematics department, EOP, Community Access Program and Learning Center. We are concentrating now on determining which programs are most effective, revising the math curriculum, improving the student tracking system, working even more closely with community colleges, and increasing our outreach to high schools. Summer programs and faculty training are other new initiatives in support of remediation that are in the works.
Priority: Diversity. Yes, we are already diverse, but as I said last fall, we can always do more to diversify the student body and to provide students with more support once they arrive. In addition, we faced particular challenges this year. We were determined not to let our diversity—or our enrollment—suffer as we started last fall to implement all four subject requirements for transfer students, and the CSU’s one-year remediation requirement intensified retention concerns. Thanks to the determi ned, creative, and tireless work of many people—chief among them Tom Rutter and Frieda Lee—we met our enrollment target and continued our success in recruiting underrepresented students. This did not just happen; it resulted from such strategies as Enrollment Services’ targeting of applicants from underrepresented groups who lacked one or more subject requirements and calling each one of them—often several times—to offer encouragement, answer questions, and keep these students on track to enroll.
Retention is as critical to diversity efforts as is recruitment, and here we are adding to an already-strong range of activities. In an exciting and ambitious project, a broad-based Academic Affairs and Student Affairs team is constructing a comprehensive recruiting and retention program that will build on our considerable success in these areas. The group is refining some programs and creating others. Among the new ideas being considered or developed this semester are freshmen seminars, a junior exchange program with historically black colleges and univ ersities, creation of learning communities and interest groups to link stu-dents, and development of effective early identification and intervention strategies for at-risk students. In the new program, enrolled students, faculty, administrators, and alumni will all have active roles in recruitment and retention. What is making this project so power-ful is exactly what made CUSP work so well: a coming together of people across organizational lines, bringing varied expertise and perspectives to a common purp ose.
Priority: Restoring Faculty Positions. We lost 78 faculty positions in the budget cuts of the early 90s, and Provost La Belle and I have com-mitted ourselves to restoring them all by the year 2000. Achieving this takes a budgetary commitment, which I have made, the provost’s engagement with departments and programs, and well-planned, successful searches. The results: We filled nine of these faculty positions last fall and have searches under way for 26 more, to be filled effective next fall. We w ill increase our pace next year, and we will meet our goal.
This is the first half of my report. To come next month: a look at our progress in the remaining five priorities: teacher education, technology leadership, library acquisitions, instructional technology through partnerships, and—the priority that may be the most important of all—increasing faculty support.
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