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Dear Colleagues,
At last Monday’s leadership meeting, we carried out the exercises originally planned for the college meeting. I wanted to respond to the widespread desire to add greater specificity to the general model introduced in my update on the college structure initiative. To ensure a broader representation, we invited students, advisors, staff, and faculty. The group of 35 participants worked in small groups, first reflecting on the 4-school model before turning to the internal structure and processes of the schools.
To capture the reactions and concerns of all participants, we engaged in an exercise where everyone contributed what they liked, wished, and wondered about the general contours of the model introduced so far and the design for the structure and processes that will animate these schools.
What participants liked about the model include the forming identities of the schools, and subsequent sense of belonging, the possibility for faculty to be affiliated with more than one school, the coherence of the different schools while maintaining programs, the possible efficiencies and quality of processes consolidated.
What participants wished the model had was facilitating double majoring for students, inclusive DPAC, maintaining budgets with departments/programs, policies and structures to incentivise innovation and interdisciplinarity, specific steps for maintaining disciplinary integrity, chairs, shared governance, no one-size-fits all, and school of SWCA.
The question “I wonder how we will …” naturally generated a long list of questions going from the conceptual and general (e.g. how will the institutes interact with the schools) to the operational and detailed (e.g., how will we allocate budgets).
From these questions, each group selected one to explore further—three focused on internal school structures, one on curricular workflow, and one on faculty promotion and tenure. There was commitment to this effort, indeed so much so that the process continued beyond the meeting and the groups developed preliminary internal models that very clearly capture the feedback to the first step of the design process and manage the tensions identified in the Wished list.
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