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FSEC discusses decanal review process
By MARY COCHRANE
Contributing Editor
The performance of deans at UB will be reviewed every five years, enabling the administration to review three deans per year, the Faculty Senate Executive Committee was told yesterday.
The senate's Governance Committee reported on a meeting it had with Provost Satish K. Tripathi this week to discuss what the administration would like to include in the university's decanal review process.
Committee chair Marilyn McMann Kramer, head of the cataloging department, University Libraries, and Claude Welch, SUNY Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Political Science, gave the report.
Tripathi told them that the five-year cycle of reviews would be supplemented by annual, smaller reviews conducted by the provost's office. Each review committee will include eight or nine members, with the chair coming from outside of the decanal area being reviewed, Kramer said.
This year, there are three review committees in various stages of the process of evaluating the deans of the Law School, Graduate School of Education and the School of Informatics.
Kramer said that Tripathi outlined four categories for decanal reviews, including academic leadership, which includes student recruitment and retention; strategic planning; faculty development and research; external relations, including fund raising and resource allocation; diversity of faculty staff and students; and institutional citizenship.
A discussion followed of what outcomes from the review process should be shared with faculty. Kramer said the provost indicated that deans' self-reviews would be shared, "but in order to ensure candor and also fullest participation (of review committee members), the comments and so forth would not be shared."
William H. Baumer, professor of philosophy, said that it would be best if there was "an executive summary of the outcome of the review" because the results are "going to get out one way or another, more or less accurately, because people are going to talk once it is over.
"It would be better if there were a nice, clean 'this is where we came out, this is going well, this is going satisfactorily, this needs improvement or these are the areas we particularly addressed,'" Baumer said, adding "If it's a negative response, we are all going to know that because we've got a dean who is returning to teaching or research."
Baumer said he suggests releasing only an executive summary because once you distribute the report to "any significant number of people, you might as well publish it" on a Web site.
He noted, for example, "There are 450 faculty in CAS. There are 36 people on the college policy committee. Of that 36, 27 are representatives of their units. It can be reasonably expected that a number of those, if not all 27, will believe that if they get a report on the assessment of the dean of the college, they have certainly the right and probably the duty to distribute it, make it available, report it somehow to their colleagues in their department. In effect, what you're saying is that if you make this report available to the policy committee, you've made it available to 450 faculty. By the time you've done that, why not put it where anybody who wants to look at it can look at it?"
Samuel D. Schack, Martin Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics, urged the committee to explore the idea of whether "some small group" of faculty could receive the outcome of the decanal review as a confidential document and "then serve as a consulting committee to the provost about progress on the points that are raised within the assessment.
"I think there is a difference between the assessment of a school and an assessment of a dean. And if you assess a school, you assess the College of Arts and Sciences: what are its strengths and weaknesses, what should be appropriate goals for it, how is it progressing towards those? Then you can say that that, by definition, reflects the dean's leadership. But it doesn't do it in a one-to-one way. I don't have any trouble with that being a pretty public document. But when you get down to a level of assessing the dean's performance in the dean's job, of trying to steer things in that direction, I think that first of all there will always be a mixed record because we're human beings, and second of all, the wide dissemination of that will have the effect of undermining the ability of the dean to look forward in a reasonable way."
Barbara A. Rittner, associate dean for external affairs for the School of Social Work, recommended that the decanal reviews include an indication of what each dean has to work with.
"I have some concerns when you measure people against expectations without any kind of indication of what the resources are as part of that evaluation, then often what you do is you evaluate people on what they've been told to do, not what they are actually able to do. So I would think that part of this evaluation process should be something that also includes the resources available to achieve whatever those points are that you've made in terms of their leadership. As Howard Doueck (a professor in the School of Social Work) says, 'Provosts come and go, agendas come and go, but resources never follow.'"
In other business, John Grela, director of public safety, presented and discussed the annual campus security/crime report. He and Kramer, chair of the Personal Safety Committee, noted that keeping UB campuses safe involves not only preventing liquor law violations and actual crimes, but maintenance of lighting, emergency phones, fire alarms and sprinkler systems.
But student alcohol abuse remains "the biggest problem of any college campus," according to Grela, who said the university has worked vigorously with local and state authorities to prevent liquor law violations, accidents and other safety threats as a result of drinking.
One development in this area involved the closings of South Campus neighborhood bars that were cited for serving alcohol to underage students or as the site of student fights as a result of drinking.
Debra A. Street, assistant professor of sociology, questioned what she considered a low number of sexual assault crimes on the report. There were three "forcible" sex offenses reported in 2004, and no "non-forcible" offenses.
Grela said that the sexual assault crime totals are those "where a crime report is completed," adding that students and staff can elect to file anonymous reports through UB's proxy report system.