Progress Update from Senior Vice Chancellor Couture

January 23, 2006

Dear Colleagues:

Welcome back to campus and Happy 2006! I know that this letter finds you deeply involved in the work of launching a new semester and anticipating your teaching and research activities for the remainder of this academic year. While you are working on these important efforts, I wish you to know about a number of on-going activities in Academic Affairs that will involve you in the upcoming months. With this letter, I am writing to bring you up to date.

Academic Strategic Planning

In December, we held a retreat with our chairs and deans on "Becoming a Strategic Leader." Our UNL Academic Strategic Planning process is a ground-up affair, building excellence by program, by department, and by college. At our December retreat for deans and chairs, several department chairs shared information about how they have worked with their colleagues to identify strategic priorities for their departments and move systematically to meet them. You can find information about these presentations at our UNL strategic planning website.

As you know, our academic planning process is iterative, offering a new opportunity each year for departments and colleges to adjust plans to focus on priorities that respond to new situations. This year's department plans are due to deans on January 31 and deans and directors plans are due March 15. Our focus is on refining unit strategic priorities to establish timelines, benchmarks, and resources required to meet them. In addition, in preparation for our North Central Accreditation Review, we have asked deans to describe how faculty, staff, and other constituency groups are involved in their planning process. In November, a subcommittee of the Academic Planning Committee completed their assessment of last year's unit plans; they were charged to identify areas and structures where we might encourage cross-unit collaboration. These ideas are now being developed further; the committee has also been encouraged to bring their suggestions to the General Education Planning Team.

In order to think more broadly about our strategic priorities, we will conduct some visioning sessions early this semester with our deans. We hope that this activity will result in creative ways to leverage resources to meet common aims and identify ways to demonstrate publicly the collective academic strengths of UNL. Stay tuned for more information on the results of this work. Please note also that strategic planning hearings for our deans and directors have been scheduled for April 19 and 20. Deans will present their plans to each other, the senior administrative team and representatives from ASUN, the Academic Senate, and the Academic Planning Committee.

General Education Revision

Good progress was made during our fall term in planning the revision of our general education program. You will receive regular updates this term from John Janovy, Chair of the General Education Planning Team and the General Education Advisory Committee. These two groups, with representatives from our colleges, the senate, ASUN and other constituencies, have now agreed on a statement of institutional objectives for a revised general education program; these objectives will provide the framework for the program design. You received a message last week from John Janovy naming the proposed objectives, but you can also find them at our general education website.

Faculty engagement in planning this program is essential. We need a gen ed program that will reflect the academic aims and aspirations of UNL and that will help students succeed in a global society beyond their time with us here. Faculty must drive this effort. And--as the Planning Team has said--the end result must be a viable program that is simple and transparent to students, faculty, and advisors. Our program must produce clear and demonstrable outcomes; allow students to graduate without producing barriers; enhance the undergraduate experience by providing broad exposure to multiple disciplines; complement the major, and help students develop important reasoning, inquiry, and civic capacities.

Harvey, John Owens, and I are committed to supporting a program that meets these criteria, but we are hoping for a program that does much more. What can our general education program offer to make our freshman year experience at UNL a unique opportunity? How can we create ways for students to demonstrate what they have learned after four years with us that also help us bring together faculty across units? What student-life experiences might complement our general education program?

We need our faculty to seriously engage with questions like these. I hope you will talk with colleagues in our departments and representatives on the Planning Team and the Advisory Committee to make your views known. Again, stay tuned for progress reports from John and the planning committee.

North Central Accreditation

We have received word from North Central that Dr. Phillip E. Jones, vice-president for Student Services at the University of Iowa, will serve as the chair for the visiting team that will come to UNL from November 6-8, 2006 for our North Central Accreditation visit. Dr. Marlene I. Strathe, Provost and Senior Vice-President at Oklahoma State University, will coordinate the special emphasis part of the review. The remainder of the team will be named in February.

Shortly, drafts of the chapters "Who We Are," "Developments Since 1997," and "Criterion One -- Mission" will be posted on our North Central Self-Study web site [www.unl.edu/svcaa/accreditation] for review and comment by all on the campus. The task forces working on our responses to Criterion Two (Planning), Criterion Four (Life of Learning), and Criterion Five (Outreach) are getting close to completing their documentation for these chapters; Kim Hachiya of University Communications will develop a first draft of each chapter. We are preparing multiple "visuals" to illustrate important information and make the Self-Study more attractive and accesible for our reviewers. Preliminary work has been done on the Criterion Three (Teaching) chapter and the Special Emphasis -- Academic Strategic Planning chapters. We are also are nearing completion of the "Federal Compliance" and "Institutional Snap Shot" sections, required sections that will appear as appendices to the Self-Study.

In addition to chapter drafts, work also is underway to develop the Virtual Resource Room. This is a large undertaking that will require us to make numerous inquiries of colleges and other units to identify materials they have which respond to North Central questions. We want this Virtual Resource Room to be a campus data resource that is useful not only for the visiting team, but also for faculty, students, and staff. You can find information about the accreditation effort at our accreditation website.

Programs of Excellence

The Programs of Excellence schedule for requesting proposals has been altered to comply with the NU system time schedule for allocating funding. This semester, we have issued a call for pre-proposals, due February 20, to deans and department chairs. Copies of the call and pre-proposal requirements can be found on the SVCAA website at: http://www.unl.edu/svcaa/poe/. Proposals must build on existing, funded PoE priorities or support priorities that are endorsed by deans, Vice Chancellor Couture and Owen, and Chancellor Perlman, following their review of existing strategic plans. Criteria for successful proposals include:

• Relationship to strategic plan and/or existing priorities.
• Investment from supporting colleges/departments.
• Potential for external support.
• Progress achieved with past funding.
• Use of budget to build permanent capacity.
• Excellence funding that will directly and measurably build programs of excellence and/or respond to needs in the state of Nebraska.

Final proposals will be reviewed by the Academic Planning Committee before recommendations are made for funding, and awards are limited by funding available in each budget year of the program.

If you have questions about any of these initiatives, please feel free to contact me or our Academic Affairs office. Best wishes as you continue your work in teaching, research, and outreach for the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Barbara Couture
Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs.