More Golden Shovels

Groundbreaking for the new student services building took place yesterday, as the Southern reported. The aim is to put an end to the Woody Shuffle. Woody Hall is not an ideal structure for its current function (it was, I believe, originally a dormitory) and this building will no doubt be more functional and more attractive.

But anyone not brand new to this blog will know that I've become reflexively critical of new infrastructure on campus. As trustee Don Lowery rather sharply pointed out in his WSIU interview some time ago, SIUC has the infrastructure to support c. 18,000 undergraduates, though only 15,000 are on campus. So our priority is infrastructure? Paid for by student fees? As if the Woody Shuffle was due to the architectural shortcomings of Woody Hall, not to poorly functioning bureaucracy; as if that bureaucracy will automatically improve just because we've put it in a new building. We've lost hundreds (sic) of civil service positions over the last few years; would you rather go to bad old Woody with enough staff or the brand spanking new building with far too few staffers?  Thanks to the state's messing with pensions, and to low campus morale, the university will face something of a mass exodus of employees in all classifications in the near future. We will soon be coming up against our contractually mandated student-Faculty ratio of 26:1 (which the administration tried to raise both during and after negotiations). The answer? New construction!

Research space needed; books to return

The DE has an article on the return of books to Morris. This is good news. But missing from the article is the reason the books are coming back. It is not because they are valued, but because they are valued less than the McLafferty Annex itself, which is now coveted as a research space. The $1 million required to get the books back materialized once this became clear--or this at any rate is what I gather from comments by the Chancellor some time ago,* noting how many groups had expressed an interest in McLafferty. Of course research space is also a good thing, but this sequence of events seems to show how low a priority the library, and particularly its print collections, has around here. This is yet another reminder, for any needing one, that when an administrator says "we don't have the money to do x" it often means "I've decided to spend the money on y instead". 

The priority on getting the books out of McLafferty rather than in to Morris may help to explain the rather sketchy details in the story as to how exactly the books are going to get to Morris. From reading the story, one gets the impression that despite having had the books in McLafferty for three years, we have made no plan about how to get them back. But the confusion in the story may be as much journalistic as administrative: I welcome comments from readers with more insight into this. McLafferty itself is now closed to browsing, and its books lost in limbo during the transfer. Some such loss of access is necessary, but it will be interesting to see how long the limited access lasts.

* She made these comments at a Faculty Senate meeting, but I haven't been able to find them in the minutes.  

Faculty survey

This a quick plug for the survey being done by the Faculty Senate's "Faculty Status and Welfare" committee.  The survey is easy enough to take, and will as it happens introduce you to the Desire2Learn software package we will all need to learn to love as it replaces Blackboard next semester. It is not at all difficult to access the survey, even if you've never signed on to Desire2Learn before (as I hadn't) and the survey itself is as painless as you need it to be.  It basically consists of a couple of open ended questions which you can answer at length (my response--surprise!) or very briefly, and a single multiple choice question on morale. Results are to be confidential, something the software should guarantee (you may leave your department name blank to assist in anonymity should you so choose).

Here's the link: https://online.siu.edu.  Below the break, the email SIUC faculty should have received from Becky Armstrong.

Faculty Senate vs. strategic plan

This started as a comment in response to someone asking if I raised the points in the previous post during the FS meeting.  My comment went on so long that blogger would force me to cut it up, which I'm taking as a sign that it would be better off as an independent post. Still another comment, by the prolific and well-informed paranoid, linked to the accreditation report that precipitated this strategic plan.

I did raise these points, as it happens, joined by a number of others who were critical of other things. To the extent that a preponderance of intelligent and critical questions and the absence of vapid praise make for a good senate meeting, it was a very good senate meeting. Those answering the questions (Tom Britton and Peggy Stockdale) responded smartly and calmly but also, if I may dare say so, somewhat complacently.

When I made the point that this strategic plan had no strategy, for example, Peggy Stockdale immediately responded that that's just what she had said, repeatedly, in internal deliberations, but, well, that wasn't in the cards. Another senator, however, began the conversation by saying that he preferred this report to Southern at 150 precisely because it didn't outline some unrealistic grand plan. There are indeed worse things than a strategic plan that doesn't say much of anything--one that says significant, imprudent, and impractical things, for example. But I still think this looks like a missed opportunity.

Strategic planning

Below you'll find a link to the draft strategic planning document that is making its way around the Faculty Senate (which will discuss it today) and other campus groups. The plan was, I think, required by our accreditors, who found Southern at 150 in need of revision. I made some sage remarks on strategic planning in an earlier post; this plan and process do not fall into the worst excesses of the strategic planning racket, but the resulting draft plan is rather disappointing.

I'm just working through the plan myself. While my faith in the efficacy of such plans is limited, my initial reaction is that this is a strategic plan lacking a strategy. Love it or hate it, Southern at 150, Walter Wendler's import from Texas A & M, did promote a specific vision for this university; it was probably an impracticable one, and it certainly slighted undergraduate education in the service of high-profile research (at least in my opinion), but it did outline a strategy, with goals clear enough that they required specific means to reach them, and our success or failure in reaching those goals could be clearly measured.

This plan offers a number of ideas, many banal, some smart, some troubling. But there is, as far as I can tell, no attempt here to clearly articulate any overarching goal, new direction, change in emphasis or reordering of priorities. Other than a shockingly frank criticism of the SIUC foundation (more interested in controlling money than raising it), there is no effort at diagnosing our problems and planning to overcome them. If one believes that strategic planning is a real opportunity for an institution in crisis, as this one is, to turn things around, then this is a missed opportunity.
A Strategic Plan Feb 15 2012