By Midori Davis | Editor-in-Chief
Are faculty and administrators successful in doing their jobs? It’s not so easy to know. Now, WSU Provost Chris Riley-Tillman wants to know by having all academic departments undergo self-assessments intended to set the bar for success and failure in reaching their missions.
Sound bureaucratic? It is. But it’s also a reckoning about quality: how well faculty and staff are doing their jobs in supporting defined goals within every academic realm – at WSU campuses from Everett to Tri-Cities to Pullman to Vancouver.
Riley-Tillman calls it the Academic Affairs Program Optimization initiative. It is run by a committee of faculty and administrators from all WSU campuses, including Vancouver, that will in the coming months meet with academic departments to identify goals and data-driven metrics by which to measure attainment of the goals. The data will go directly to Tillman and be used in tracking whether the colleges and departments have been successful. Upon approval by the next WSU President, expected to arrive this summer, this process will then become an annual evaluation.
“If we have actual outcome data streams, that means that [faculty’s] work in relation to those areas can be demonstrated,” Riley-Tillman said in an interview with The VanCougar. “In the absence of data, it’s all just kinda, ‘Well, I think this department’s good,’ or, ‘I like this [department] chair better,’ so it really gets back into kinda really old-school power dynamics. So, you know, I think you could start having much more honest conversations about where your most successful faculty are.”
WSU currently has a program review process every five years, but Riley-Tillman emphasized that the Academic Affairs Program Optimization initiative is different from the usual academic program review.
“This is way different than program review, this is not built review, this is not built to close departments,” he said.
Vancouver’s Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Renny Christopher is on Tillman’s committee, which had its first meeting on Jan. 16. The committee is made up of four subcommittees, one each for areas of instruction, outreach, research, and service.
“Our goal is to come up with just three to five indicators in each of those areas that are, as the provost put it, broadly predictive of performance,” Christopher, who is on the service subcommittee, told The VanCougar. “I think that there’s generally a good understanding and agreement with the need to produce this, but where things get less clear and where there’s less agreement is on what those indicators should actually be and what importance they should have.”
Christopher said the research area is the most controversial because it is heavily grant-supported compared to other departments. Standards will vary by field, as grantmaking could be a metric of measuring success in the sciences but may not be a big deal in other departments.
“…There are other disciplines where not very much even exists in grant funding and faculty carry on their research without receiving grant funding,” said Christopher. “My own discipline of English is an example of that, but so is business. And so people who are in disciplines where there’s not a lot of grant funding always feel left out or undervalued when a great deal of emphasis is put on dollar amounts of grant funding as a performance indicator.”
Despite such differences between departments, every academic department will be able to evaluate itself on some of the key performance indicators the committee assembles, according to Christopher.
The subcommittees will meet every two weeks during February and March. The committee as a whole will submit a report on their recommendations for evaluations to Riley-Tillman in May.