Report: Focus on grad education, faculty

The university should reorganize graduate education and examine time constraints placed on faculty and staff, a new campus report says. The report, published as part of the 10-year campus reaccreditation, says the university must add graduate education and demands on faculty time to its four priorities adopted in 1995 as part of Chancellor David Ward’s A Vision for the Future.

Details To review the reaccreditation self-study or for more information, visit: the New Directions web site, or call 263-9233.

Those priorities are rethinking undergraduate education; maintaining research preeminence; engaging the global community more effectively; and updating the Wisconsin Idea.

“This is the next step after ‘A Vision for the Future’,” says Joseph Wiesenfarth, chair of New Directions: The Reaccreditation Project. “We have looked at the Vision document, examined what has held up well and tried to promote those items. We have also added to it the need to look at graduate education in a new context, and the need to examine the faculty reward system as it relates directly to the university’s traditional and emerging values.”

The 270-page self-study says graduate education should be retooled to promote professional and capstone master’s degrees, enhance entrepreneurial outreach with those programs and collaborate more with the private sector on research.

The report also says the university must take a hard look at its core values and reward system related to faculty and academic staff as they balance research, teaching and outreach with new initiatives, professional development and family life.

“New agendas will be adequately addressed only if, as an institution, we make time, which means deciding as a university what faculty and staff are not going to do as well as what they are going to do,” the report says.

In addition to helping cast a vision for the next decade, the self-study documents how the university meets the reaccreditation criteria of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.

As part of reaccreditation, a team of faculty and executives from other universities will tour UW–Madison April 11-14. The site team’s report, along with the self-study, will form the basis for the university’s new strategic plan, Wiesenfarth says. The university hopes to compile the strategic plan for the first decade of the new millennium during the 1999-2000 academic year.