In wake of chancellor’s challenge, departments plot new directions
More than two years after Chancellor David Ward outlined a vision that challenged the university community to embrace change and innovation, the enthusiasm for doing things differently continues to grow.
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The vision
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The evidence can be found in the wave of grassroots initiatives being developed across campus. Maury Cotter, director of the Office of Quality Improvement, says a team from the provost’s office is offering assistance on dozens of projects, and change is moving at a rapid pace.
“We are seeing many trends that seem to be fostered by the campus vision priorities,” Cotter says. “The most significant has been the rise in strategic planning. The vision priorities ask questions about the future that people are finding valuable to address at their own levels.”
The 1995 vision document is a negotiable set of themes for the campus community, which campus units can use to help shape their own reforms. The administrative role is one of encouragement, through providing staff and financial support and removing barriers to progress.
The offices of the chancellor and provost, the Graduate School, International Programs and the Division of Information Technology have all devoted staff to helping promote the vision process.
“The important rule is that vision is not a top-down process,” Cotter says. “It’s an overarching system that provides guidance for change.”
Learning from alumni
In the spirit of doing things differently, campus departments are turning to voices of experience for help.
This summer, for example, the psychology department began its first-ever survey of recent alumni, focusing on about 400 graduates from the Class of 1993. Psychology Professor Keith Kluender, who’s leading the project, says the survey should be especially useful in learning the many different ways graduates are using their psychology education in occupations.
“We want to know what we’ve done well for graduates and what we can do better for future graduates,” Kluender says. “We’re going to try to use the results to motivate new thinking about the curriculum.”
The department is also interested in learning whether alumni would be willing to find internship opportunities for students, he says.
A second vibrant example of change can be found in industrial engineering, which revamped its curriculum in recent years with guidance from alumni. “Quality is a topic we teach and believe in here,” says IE Professor Harry Steudel. “To measure quality, you need to identify who your customers are, and our alumni are certainly among them.”
The department developed a questionnaire and sent it to more than 500 IE alumni who graduated within the past 10 years. They questioned the group about their most and least useful courses, what skills best fit their workplace and what skills they found deficient.
The responses yielded some eye-opening revelations for the department, Steudel says. Many alumni reported that they lacked some basic accounting skills needed in their work, like how to read balance sheets. They also reported that their knowledge from mathematical modeling classes was hard to put into practical use.
The department responded with more than a dozen different ideas for curriculum improvement. For starters, they added a new course on accounting principles from the School of Business. They also resequenced their courses, giving students the applied courses first, followed by the theory-based ideas. Steudel says the change is helping students visualize how the mathematical models and theories can be used in the work environment.
While Steudel says it’s too early to see the academic fruits of their reforms, alumni input is now a regular part of the department’s assessment.
 Veterinary medicine students can expect increased exposure to problem-solving exercises that simulate clinical situations during their first three years of study enabling them to adjust smoothly to clinical teaching in the fourth year. |
Early experience in vet medicine
Problem-solving is the heart and soul of the practice of veterinary medicine. The School of Veterinary Medicine is working to make problem-solving more of a conscious process for its students.
Karen Young, an associate professor of veterinary medicine, is part of a faculty team working to enmesh problem-solving challenges throughout the four-year curriculum. The school may be taking a page from the curriculum in human medicine, through a problem-solving approach developed at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine. Young says that school developed an explicit, step-by-step flow chart that can help students become comfortable with making difficult decisions and diagnosing problems.
The goal is that by the student’s fourth year, when they begin their clinical training, they can hit the ground running and have a system in place for diagnosing animal health. “In their fourth year, they won’t have to struggle so much with the process,” Young says. “They will be able to concentrate on refining their medical skills and using their clinical year as an experience-builder.”
Young says most faculty do a good job of teaching problem-solving skills, but it’s usually done in bits and pieces rather than in a fully realized process. She hopes the survey will lead to a more explicit approach to solving tough problems students will see every day in veterinary practice.
All-for-one at Russell Labs
Russell Laboratories is home to four distinct but professionally related science departments – entomology, forestry, plant pathology and wildlife ecology. Lately, the department chairs have been working together on some ambitious plans to pool resources and share ideas.
John Wedberg, chair of entomology, says the chairs have instituted monthly meetings to discuss cooperative ventures. Ideas so far have included sharing administrative staff for handling travel expense reports, reviewing graduate admission records, sharing word-processing staff and providing oversight for the copy office.
Wedberg says many of these tasks are things departments may struggle with independently, but could do more efficiently as a group. Another major goal is to employ a shared-staff accountant. Wedberg says the departments need help to coordinate the tens of millions of dollars in grants their faculty generate.
The all-for-one approach makes practical and economic sense, he says.
“Lately, we’re discovering ways that we can function as one mega-department, and we have the logistics to share these sorts of things,” Wedberg says. “We have always had joint projects and professional interaction in the past, but this represents a new spirit of cooperation.”
For most departments on campus, Wedberg suspects these types of quid-pro-quo relationships will become more necessary.
“What’s really driving this is the increased accountability the university is being held to,” he says. “Departments are asked to maintain more records and have more administrative work than ever before. This is one workable solution for us.”