Comment on Caudill College Audit Report

Last week, faculty members received the Caudill College of Humanities audit report. Given that it's summer, I haven't seen much of my colleagues in either GGH or other disciplines. So, I don't know what other people are thinking.

But I thought I'd write up some of my reactions to the Caudill College Report, focusing on the parts that touch on my area of knowledge--the government program.

The evaluations were done collaboratively by the Dean and the chairs. I believe, however, that the Dean wrote the final document himself. As a result, I'll be referring to the Dean as the author of the Caudill College of Humanities audit.

1. Blowing Off the Upper Administration. The first thing that jumps out about the Caudill College report is the extent to which the Dean and chairs ignored the upper administration. The most important area where they blew off the administrators who designed the audit was in ignoring their criteria of evaluation. The people who designed the audit created five criteria for evaluation. Here's what the Dean said about those criteria.

The academic dean and department chairs did not define categories by definitions such as, “Enhance the program through resource reallocation, “Maintain the program and continue to explore continuous improvement opportunities,” “Maintain the program but with some modifications,” “Maintain the program with conditions,” or “Delete or phase out the program.” The reason for this decision was partially due to the vagueness in meaning between programs requiring “continuous mprovement,” “modifications,” or “conditions,” and to the fact that several programs in the Arts would require resource reallocation to improve regardless of category distinction due to the disparity in expense for supporting programs in the Arts compared to supporting programs in the Humanities or Social/Behavioral Sciences.

Needless to say, the first three of those five criteria left a lot of room for interpretation. But the purpose of the evaluation system was clear--the audit intended to define a hierarchy of programs according to effectiveness. Likewise, the meaning of the final two of those criteria--"maintain the program with conditions" and "delete or phase out the program" was also clear. They defined "bottom feeder" programs that were either in danger of elimination or recommended for elimination. "Maintain the program with conditions" means that the program needs to improve its performance if it's not to be eliminated in the future. "Delete or phase out" means the program's a goner now.

So what did the Dean and chairs replace the five "vague" categories with. Here's what the Dean says in the report.

Instead, programs were placed in categories based upon application of the weighted criteria established during the audit process, SWOT analyses, estimated expenses needed to achieve strategies for program improvement, and nature of issues needing to be discussed and resolved beyond the Caudill College of Humanities.

In other words, the evaluation was going to all be very ad hoc and the criteria were going to be even more vague than the "vague" criteria proposed by the upper administration. It turned out that "application of weighted criteria" did not mean establishing relative weights for criteria 1-9 and actually scoring those weights. At least that's what I gathered from my chair when I asked him how the government program scored on the weighted criteria. As a result, Caudill College audit evaluation ended up as a "little bit of the criteria," a little bit of SWOT, a little bit of estimating expenses (without providing any actual numbers) and a little bit of fencing the "issues."

In fact, the Dean and chairs seemed averse to the whole idea of evaluating program "effectiveness" or "quality" at all. Here's a note that the Dean attached to his discussion of the process for ranking the programs.

The process did not result in a priority ranking of strong to weak programs, but rather a delineation of programs based upon the aforementioned criteria used in guiding discussion and decision-making.

Specifically, the programs rated #4 were not seen as low-quality programs but as programs "that have issues needing to be discussed and resolved beyond the Caudill College. "

To conclude, the Dean and chairs not only refused to use the upper administration's criteria for evaluating program quality, they refused to evaluate program quality altogether.

I was the audit team member for the government program and wrote the government audit report pretty much by myself. As soon as I read that, I came to the obvious conclusion that all the time I spent researching and writing about the government program was wasted.

But I also wonder what's would happen if the other colleges did use the evaluation criteria set up by the upper administration and did rank their programs according to scores on the various weighted criteria. Wouldn't the Caudill College report look rather half-baked and work to the disadvantage of the programs in the college?

2. Eviscerating IRAPP (and why not Business as well). The primary recommendation was that the Caudill College of Humanities be broken up into two colleges, a College of Arts, Media, and Design and a College of Regional and Global Studies. Given that creating yet another college might not be entirely welcome during a period of belt-tightening, the Dean proposes to pay for the move partly by integrating IRAPP within the College of Regional and Global Studies. The proposal would eviscerate IRAPP by folding most of the IRAPP faculty into the Government and Geography programs and downgrading the IRAPP dean into a "director." Likewise, IRAPP's regional stewardship funding and other money streams would be shared with other programs. In this sense, creating two colleges out of the current Caudill College would be paid for by wiping out IRAPP as a separate unit.

But the Dean also wants to suggest that money could be saved. So he throws in the possibility of the Business College being folded into the College of Regional and Global Studies.

It is anticipated that a College of Arts, Media & Design, and a College of Regional & Global Studies, resulting from a merger of two colleges and IRAPP could be managed with two rather than three deans. In addition, a School of Business could function with less administrative support if part of a larger college, especially in the number of department chairs, assistant deans, and clerical support.

As I understood it, the original idea for the audit was to take resources from poorly performing programs and direct them to the top-rated programs. The Dean of the Caudill College (Mike Seelig) has a different approach. He assumed that the arts programs would be getting additional resources from private endowments and the university's capital campaign. That was one stream of additional resources. The second stream of resources that was IRAPP and possibly the Business school. Implicitly assuming that Caudill College units are more worthy repositories for resources than Business or IRAPP, the Dean proposes to create new streams of revenue for the Caudill College units in the proposed College of Regional and Global Studies by draining IRAPP of most of its resources and dramatically lowering the number of administrators and administrative support personnel in the Business School.

3. The Government Program. The evaluation of the government program had several features. One feature was that the evaluation was one paragraph long and actually had no "evaluative" quality at all. In particular, the evaluation hardly tried to relate the government program to the audit criteria. What the evaluation did basically was list several facts about the program. Most of the list was composed of the government program's virtues and the list did get several of those virtues right. Likewise, the "evaluation also listed us as having two problems, the fact that we had lost five faculty over the past year and "administrative issues" with IRAPP. And that was it.

Given the extreme brevity and lack of evaluative quality of the Dean's evaluation, I was once again left with the conclusion that all the work I did on the government audit was a waste of time. I wonder how many other people felt the same way.

Here was the strategy recommended by the Dean:

"Strategies (merge all 4 existing Government and Political Science faculty lines into a single administrative structure that would include the masters program in Public Administration with a pipeline of quality undergraduate Government students to recruit to it; hire faculty into vacant Government positions only if a merger with IRAPP does not occur."

There's a huge problem here. The GGH Government program has about 80 majors and teaches about 3000 credit hours per semester. That's considerably more than a faculty of four (Caric, Green, and two instructors) should be handling. The Dean seems to believe that IRAPP political science faculty (Hail, Lange, and an instructor) would just be added to the government faculty and could fill the gaps in the current government program.

But it wouldn't work that way. The IRAPP MPA program also lost two faculty last year and (according to Mike Hail) is slated to have about 50 graduate students in the fall. As a result, IRAPP has been scrambling for adjuncts and help from us in order to have people teaching its graduate classes. In other words, putting the Government program and the IRAPP MPA program together would mean combining two short-handed programs. Assuming that the university wants to have quality programs, a combined B.A. in Government/MPA program would need at least two more replacement faculty.

Color me unhappy with the Dean's recommendation for the government program.

Ric Caric