Proposal #57
Proposal Title:
Put SFSU on track to
excel as a University; best in CSU, better than many UCs.
Anticipated Savings/Revenue: unknown-depends on choices
Units affected: unknown-depends on choices
Impacted Degrees/Courses: unknown-depends on choices
Brief Description of Proposal:
What will be the measures of "best"? That’s the problem. Every department on campus has a different answer. Because I don’t know the rest of the campus very well, I can’t make reasonable recommendations about reorganization, so I will instead suggest a framework within which to make decisions.
The most important issue for me is
that the campus does not have any long-term goals, and as a consequence,
departments are random vectors heading in many directions. Some emphasize teaching,
others research, others it’s not so clear. One thing the reorganization
needs to establish is a clear, overarching goal for departments to strive
toward.
Second, that goal needs to be accessible for departments. We need to be distinguishable from community colleges, so we need to do more than teach. My bias is for the goal to be an increase in professional activity, or, in my department, research.
Third, to ‘professionalize’ the campus, there needs to be more resources available. If the reorganization’s intention is to eliminate programs to provide more resources to what’s left, then how will programs be evaluated? One way is to hierarchically assess departments and colleges. Which departments have a high proportion of scholars with continuing activity among their senior faculty? Which colleges have a high proportion of departments with a high proportion of scholars? Investment in departments that already has a high proportion of scholars will ensure a higher degree of success for any reorganization. Investment in colleges with a high proportion of scholars will similarly ensure a higher degree of success. How to evaluate those things is the harder issue, but clearly, if senior faculty within a department demonstrate continuing scholarly activity, then the ‘culture’ of the department is scholarship, and that’s the key thing.
Fourth, graduate programs are critical
in the long run for this to succeed for many disciplines (although perhaps
not all). What’s interesting about SF State is that there are two doctoral
programs, but in relatively weak programs. This requires leadership
from the top, as my department pushed hard for a ‘cooperative’ Ph.D. program
with a UC in the 1990’s, but there was not corresponding support from the
AVP of Research or the Provost.
Finally, for a reorganization
to succeed, it needs to ‘anticipate’ the future to some extent, and that’s
not very easy. What
will the future look like in California? Several things are obvious, increasing
population size, climate change will impact water supplies, sea level rise will
impact infrastructure, and the economy of the state will have to shift. That
sounds like to me emphases on departments that touch on environmental issues,
infrastructure, and policy. In a sense, the University could be thought
of as a really large ‘institute’ dedicated toward a few goals. While there
may be core departments, regardless of the quality of faculty at the moment,
there will always be a need for an English Department, a History Department,
a Biology Department and a Math Department and several other core departments. Building
around the more scholarly-oriented departments and core departments provides
a framework of some sort.
Note: Proposals are posted as submitted, without
editing other than to remove the submitter's contact information.
