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Edna Mora Szymanski
Annual Report
In 16 months as the University of
Maine’s Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost,
I have been privileged to meet and work with a great many of the
faculty members, staff members, students and administrators who
make UMaine such a wonderful community and an outstanding
educational institution. Working together, we have accomplished
a great deal, creating structures and processes that improve
communication, foster transparency and set the stage for even
greater achievement in service to our students and the state.
This report summarizes some of that
progress, in general terms. I look forward with enthusiasm to
working collaboratively with others who care deeply about UMaine
to continue progress and develop more new ways to help UMaine
move forward.
Structures and Processes
As UMaine grows and evolves, it is
important to continually monitor and upgrade the structures and
processes that guide much of our day-to-day work. This
constitutes some of the “heavy lifting” that university
administrators and faculties must work through to assure the
development and communication of the voluminous information that
provides the foundation for much of our academic enterprise. In
these areas, we have made good progress.
We have begun to create a solid
infrastructure for data-informed planning. This work has
involved developing a series of reports and formats to use in
budget planning, program review and annual reports.
Importantly, this effort aligns periodic program reviews, annual
unit reports and learning outcomes in a way that will serve as a
baseline for NEASC accreditation and other institutional
reporting. This effort, which also involves new standardized
report formats, will also minimize the need for additional data
collection and increase the usefulness and consistency of all
UMaine data reporting.
The creation of a new Academic
Affairs Advisory Process, including input from the new, highly
inclusive Academic Affairs Budget Advisory Team, represents
another important step forward. This team plays a significant
role in all budgetary decisions related to UMaine’s academic
programs, and it provides invaluable input and vital
perspectives.
During the past several months, we
have also developed a significant new infrastructure to promote
the improvement of undergraduate retention and graduation
rates. This multi-faceted series of programs includes the
Graduation and Retention Rate Improvement Team (GRRIT), which
includes associate provosts, academic deans, the dean of student
affairs, faculty members and others, all working together to
develop the strategies that will lead to progress in this area,
benefiting students and the institutions. Highlight
accomplishments in this realm include the establishment of the
First Year Residence Experience (FYRE) program, the development
of new living learning communities, improving registration
processes, fostering greater communication between the provost
and students and improving our ability to collect and use
appropriate data.
We have also made good progress in
developing structures that increase transparency and better
inform the provost’s decisions in the critical area of faculty
promotion, tenure and reappointment. The most important step
involved expanding the work of the Provost’s Promotion and
Tenure Advisory Committee by modifying the structures that guide
that group’s work and providing more opportunities for input.
The new processes also involve ways to react quickly to cases
that may involve a negative recommendation and develop any
additional information that may be needed to make appropriate
decisions. We have also taken steps to involve the Assistant VP
for Human Resources in the process and to formalize and
publicize the peer committee criteria.
Important work with the Faculty
Senate has resulted in a mutually agreeable trial process for
collaborative consideration of academic and college
reorganizations. We have also completed some reorganization
processes, involving the School of Economics, the School of
Policy and International Affairs and the School of Biology and
Ecology.
Moving forward, the University of
Maine must make its important decisions based on good planning
and agreed-upon strategies. To that end, we have formed an
Implementation Advisory Committee related to the recently
completed faculty-driven strategic plan. Along similar lines,
for several months, we worked with a task group to examine the
university’s budget and incentive structures and to benchmark
workable, effective models at similar institutions. We will use
this information as foundation for research related to growth
planning.
Academic Affairs Unit
Leadership
We have taken steps to modify the
communications infrastructure within the academic affairs unit,
establishing regular monthly meetings with the Faculty Senate
president and the Faculty Senate executive committee, in
addition to creating the Provost’s Faculty Advisory Committee (ProFac)
These initiatives have been successful in improving
communications between the academic affairs administration and
faculty leaders.
A series of “town meetings” have
also served to open new lines of communication and to create
avenues for the provost to have access to the varied
perspectives and insights brought forth by thoughtful, committed
members of the UMaine community. Numerous visits to academic
departments, departmental facilities, Cooperative Extension
offices, Experiment Station facilities and employee groups have
also served to open lines of communication and invite highly
valued input.
Another important focus has become
the preparation process for New England Association of Schools
and Colleges (NEASC) accreditation. We have formed the
committees, all with significant faculty involvement, to prepare
the information building up to the 2009 NEASC accreditation
visit. We have scheduled a mock site visit for next year, and
begun developing the infrastructure to support the ongoing
assessment of student learning outcomes, a critical area with
regard to NEASC review.
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