Proposal #29
Proposal Title: Criteria for merging or cutting depts/colleges
Anticipated Savings/Revenue: not known
Units affected: All
Impacted Degrees/Courses: All
Brief Description of Proposal:
It seems critical that there be specific criteria developed to evaluate which departments or colleges might be considered for cutting or merging beyond the size of the program. Those criteria might include 'visions' for the university, but considering this university, those mission statements are not likely to apply equally across all disciplines, especially those currently in vogue.
A criterion applicable to all departments is scholarly productivity as each department defines it. In this way, departments might be targeted for insufficient scholarly activity, as much as for other usual types of measures, like numbers of students in the program. Productivity could be measured on a per faculty member basis or some other fair system.
Similarly whole departments could be assessed more on quality than quantity. It isn't clear how equivalent one Bachelor's degree is to another, or one Master's degree to another, and all will have vehement arguments for the strength and importance of their programs. Might there be some unbiased assessment, such as numbers of students going on for Ph.D. programs, or some disciplinary equivalent?
Another criterion might be the level of scholarly/professional activity focused specifically on senior members of departments. All untenured faculty work hard to gain tenure, but a measure of department quality is the extent to which senior faculty continue scholarly activity versus resting on their laurels. This could even be broken into broad categories by years since tenure.
I guess I'm suggesting that a series of criteria be developed that focus on the quality of programs, not from the student perspective as we always default, but from the perspective of the scholarly achievements of the faculty. Retaining the scholarly departments would allow SF State to reinforce the academic profession and increase the stature of the university in a time of progressive erosion over the last 20 years.
Note: Proposals are posted as submitted, without editing other than to remove the submitter's contact information.
