Commitment to Capacity
In summarizing the Capacity and Preparatory Review, it is our view that San José State University is, by those factors most critical to the measurement of institutional capacity, prepared to move to Educational Effectiveness Review. We have documented that the University has the structures and procedures in place to provide the capacity to be an educationally effective university not just with respect to student learning but, for a university with SJSU’s constituencies, as a center for excellence in scholarship and innovative community service. The supporting data demonstrate that the university is fiscally sound. The reflective essays provide examples that demonstrate that the potential provided by these resources can, in fact, function powerfully in ways that support an effective institution. However, it is also important to note that the University, as an institution of higher education in California, faces challenges that might alter significantly or even partially derail this support for effectiveness. This summary will both make the case for our capacity and preparedness and will identify some of the challenges that we continue to work to overcome.
San José State University’s commitment to capacity is well-documented in the four reflective essays. The illustrative examples are supported by the comprehensive information available in the portfolio. The long history of the University provides a record of adaptations to changes in mission, student body, and both local and global society. Not only has the institution evolved from a normal school to a metropolitan university, but the diversity of the students, faculty, and staff has expanded massively along several dimensions, and the needs of society as expressed by its educated members have changed dramatically. One measure that SJSU is prepared for the Educational Effectiveness Review is the degree to which the campus community has become engaged in the self-study process during the preparation of the Capacity and Preparedness Review. The campus-wide forums, begun in Spring 2003, have been attended by faculty, staff, students, and administrators (typically 120 - 150 at each forum this 03/04 academic year). Input for the self-study, portfolio, and appendices has engaged the full range of university-wide Academic Senate Committees, the Senate itself, administrators, faculty, staff in all four divisions of the university (academic affairs, student affairs, administration and finance, advancement), and directors of a wide array of university programs and services. The engagement of this broad range of constituencies revealed that one major challenge for the campus is communication, both internally and with the surrounding community. Although information flow was enhanced by the forums and other activities for this review, permanent and more comprehensive mechanisms are clearly desired.
Reflective Essays
As described in Essay 1, SJSU has evolved structures that strongly support the Mission and the Goals of the University, and that address its concerns for personal, educational and fiscal integrity. There is a well-developed set of policies and procedures that provide this support and monitoring such as those concerning program review, general education, assessment, selection and review of administrators, academic freedom, financial audits and reporting, and a variety of judicial processes. The Case Study of the multi-faceted response to rapid changes in student diversity demonstrates how well the campus can draw upon its normal procedures and its resources to respond to newly identified campus needs.
Essay 2 documents SJSU’s commitment to achieving educational objectives through core functions by reviewing many of the policies and structures that monitor and support these objectives. The University has demonstrated its capacity to examine and review its core functions at every level. The Academic Priorities exercise examined in a single process the capacity and role of each department and each program within a department to support the core university mission. In addition, it examined the structure of the colleges and the range of degrees offered for completeness and redundancy. The initial effect was consolidation and elimination of programs, even though significant financial savings were not at first realized. More recently, however, the long-term effects of this review have freed capacity to allow for the development of new programs such as those outlined in the mission statement of the Academic Affairs Division. Individual degree programs have now developed assessment plans and have a regular university-wide review within the Program Planning process. The General Education Program has similar oversight by the Board of General Studies, with the GE Policy coming under periodic review by the Academic Senate. Recent changes such as the first-year experience MUSE and Peer Mentor Programs, the Global Studies Program, the Center for Service Learning, and the required freshman Orientation/Advising Program document the University’s ability to change in response to identified needs.
SJSU also has a well developed set of programs to support student learning, most located within the division of Student Affairs (e.g., MOSAIC, the Student Health Center, the Disability Resource Center). Some are located in Academic Affairs (e.g., the Learning Assistance Resource Center, Academic Advising), and some are located under the President’s Office (e.g., Presidential Interns). These programs have structured oversight within their divisions , but the formal oversight specified by Academic Senate policy that is characteristic of the curricular programs of the university is generally lacking for these support programs.
San José State University has the capacity and infrastructure to support the scholarly and creative activities of its faculty. The nominal teaching load for tenured and tenure-track faculty of 4 courses per semester is high, but it is actually about 3.5 because of the use of assigned time, and a substantial amount of the assigned time is for scholarly activities. Additional support comes from a variety of sources. Graduate Studies and the Foundation assist faculty in obtaining research grants which provide support for approximately 130 faculty per year. Sabbaticals and other leaves provide additional scholarly time. The University has 32 Organized Research Units and participates with NASA-Ames in a variety of formats, and all of these provide financial and/or infrastructure support for research. Although the University does not systematically collect a complete listing of scholarly and creative accomplishments, departments, colleges, the library, and the On Campus electronic newsletter regularly report faculty achievement. Individual achievements are monitored by the Retention, Tenure, and Promotion process, and by Post-tenure Review. Faculty achievements within departments are monitored by the Program Planning process. Inclusion of students in faculty projects is explicitly valued and rewarded by many departments in the RTP process, and, as a department strength, is highlighted in the Program Planning self study.
Essay 3 documents that SJSU has the resources and organizational structure to support educational effectiveness. Like most public universities, fiscal constraints provide limits on human and physical resources, and it is expected that the fiscal constraints will be more extreme for the next few years. As part of the multi-campus CSU system, SJSU shares in budget reductions to the system on a pro rata basis of approximately 7%. The University’s portion of a 2003-2004 mid-year budget cut of $23.8 million was $1,477,100. The proposed 2004-2005 Governor’s Budget includes reductions and unfunded mandatory costs for the CSU of $300 million offset by increased student fee revenue for a net reduction of $195 million.
In the current fiscal context, SJSU’s record of managing its resources and the processes that have produced this record provide an important framework for predicting how the current challenges will be met. The declining operating income ratio (Data Element 6.3) means that enrollment increases cannot be fully matched by faculty increases (which has workload implications for both faculty and staff). Further, if currently projected budget shortfalls do occur, SJSU may be forced to reduce enrollments in order to maintain the quality of its educational experiences, thus putting further demands on budgets because system funding is, in large part, enrollment-driven. In the forums, workload was identified as a crucial problem by both faculty and staff. In the current funding environment, finding more efficient ways to deploy limited resources is the primary response to this issue. A secondary response is to expand the search for sources of non-state funds to augment resources.
Within the fiscal constraints, SJSU has an excellent record of managing faculty resources. While a goal, supported from the previous WASC review, the institution has not been able to substantially increase the proportion of full-time faculty. In the near-term, the proportion may increase if the numbers of temporary faculty are decreased because of severe budget cutbacks, but in the long term SJSU expects to change the proportion by increasing the absolute number of full-time faculty. Another indicator that the University is developing an appropriate faculty composition is that the racial and gender diversity of the faculty has increased, although it does not yet approach the diversity of the student body. The recruitment, retention, tenure, and promotion system for faculty, and the recruitment and annual evaluation system for staff assure the quality of both components of the workforce. A broad range of faculty development and staff development programs provides the opportunity for skill enhancement in both groups.
Just as for human resources, fiscal limitations pose challenges for physical and information resources. Essay 3 reflects on some of the creative approaches the University has taken to provide appropriate infrastructure such as the joint university-city library, the Campus Village, and the Common Management System (CMS) Project. While there has been significant attention to improvement of classroom spaces in recent years, and the general surface renovation of buildings, the age of the campus and many of its facilities means that there are still important improvements yet to be made in some laboratories, in technology support in many classrooms, and in faculty office space - both the “doubling up” that still occurs among some regular faculty, and in those departments with high enrollments where many temporary faculty “time share” single offices. SJSU faculty and staff are dedicated to their students, and they are creative, so despite important pockets of physical need those same faculty and staff see to it that educational standards are maintained. But help is needed if long-term effectiveness is to be maintained.
As a member of a university system that exists within a Master Plan that defines three systems of higher education in the state, San José State University functions under a set of constraints that are not of its own making. This is further complicated by being in a unionized system with contracts negotiated at the level of the Chancellor’s Office. However, within those constraints, the SJSU system for decision making is one of shared governance.
Essay 4 reveals that although SJSU does not yet have a traditional strategic plan, it has many successful examples of strategic thinking and planning that have led to ongoing improvement. The joint library project involved planning begun by presidential initiative. The Program Planning process is he institutionalized r but focused on small units (programs and departments). Some of the colleges have created strategic plans as have some other units (e.g., the Administrative Division). The extensive planning that takes place on campus is frequently compartmentalized. With the exception of the data that must be reported to the Chancellor’s Office, different performance indicators are used by different planning groups. Thus, these planning processes do not naturally lead to a set of plans with a prioritized order. These limitations have not prevented planning or prioritizing, but the process has an ad hoc flavor. Interim President Crowley has identified this as a key campus issue and in collaboration with administrators and faculty has begun development of a more formal planning process. Since the last WASC accreditation review, the campus has had two interim presidents, one permanent president (no longer here), two provosts, and an interim provost. Several planning endeavors, discussed in Essay 4 and in the response to the prior review, have been initiated but have not been fully realized. Interim President Crowley has set the stage for next permanent president, but further progress is on hold until President Yu takes office.
Issues and Recommendations
The issues raised in the review process all relate to the underlying theme of the Institutional Proposal: Aligning vision, resources, and priorities. Also, they encompass and support the four specific initiatives identified by Interim President Crowley: a planning board that helps set priorities and make the budget more transparent, a new philanthropic foundation to improve fundraising, examination of the current IT infrastructure to increase efficiency and the flow of information, and a task force to assist in setting enrollment goals and strategies. The overarching recommendation, then, is that the permanent President be asked to identify as a top priority, and provide substantive support for campus-wide planning. One of President Yu’s strengths is his past experience in strategic planning, and it is expected that he will be strongly supportive of this recommendation.
Many concur there is a need for an Enrollment Management Plan that integrates recruitment, admission, and retention with clear academic unit enrollment goals to serve as the focal point of campus resource prioritization at this time. As the Enrollment Management section of the Portfolio reveals, progress has been made during this year, but not as much as the University had anticipated. The campus clearly has the capacity to address this issue, and is doing so, but substantial progress is yet to be made. The overarching goal is to provide an organization and integration of planning processes that currently exist (e.g., at the department Program Planning and division Planning Council levels) to establish both campus-wide priorities and an enhanced pattern of assessment of effectiveness that will guide future priorities. This integration is needed to set the overall priorities that allow the effective establishment of targets like enrollment goals, that is, priorities must be coordinated with the University vision.
Effective planning requires the availability of appropriate information to guide planning and evaluate effectiveness. The preparation of the Portfolio revealed that SJSU has an inadequate set of campus-wide performance indicators to guide a priorities and assessment process. The Portfolio provides the information to review the current indicators, but a process should be established to propose and evaluate an expanded set of indicators for the whole campus. Second, the campus forums in particular, among many sources, raised issues about the communication of the information that is available. Ideally, the Institutional Portfolio will be a living entity that is used for ongoing assessment, review, planning, and action for the entire campus. We expect the Institutional Portfolio to evolve between the Preparatory and Educational Effectiveness Reviews. The advent of the Common Management System (CMS) means that for the first time in the university’s history important data on individual students from first outreach contact to post-graduate success can be compiled in a single data base, whereas previously, as one example, to track the long-term academic success of freshmen who required remediation and who participated in a First Year Experience program we had to draw upon and integrate information from seven databases. Our WASC portfolio committee has been responsible for initial preparation of the Portfolio. The next step is to work with the academic senate as they develop an institutional planning policy for consideration by the University President. The policy would include articulation of a process with clear delineation of administrative responsibility for each component as well as the cycle on which update of portfolio and performance indicator data will occur. Finally, for these processes to function well, there must be good data and analysis of the performance of units and the outcomes of initiatives. The further development of performance indicators provides part of what is required to provide the necessary feedback and to make ongoing improvement possible. The three entities that presently gather data and conduct analyses are the Director of Assessment in the Office of Undergraduate Studies, Institutional Planning and Academic Resources, and the Survey and Policy Research Institute. Thorough discussions are needed among the Academic Senate, the President and Vice Presidents to determine in what way the institution can best determine and obtain the information the university needs to plan more effectively.
A third set of issues is focused on the resources component of the vision, priorities, and resources theme, in particular how to expand resources and use them efficiently. A particular example is the development and coordination of information technology. Although many innovative projects have been accomplished, substantial redundancy and some problems with incompatibility suggest that a single oversight structure needs to be developed to plan and prioritize projects. A similar lack of coordination has been noted with respect to fund raising. In the current state funding environment, non-state funds to support key activities has taken on increased importance. A new Vice President for University Advancement is forming a philanthropic foundation, the Tower Foundation, that will be responsible for fundraising. The key goal is through coordinated efforts to increase yield, to reduce redundancy, and to focus efforts on projects with the highest priority.
Preparedness for the Educational Effectiveness Review
San José State University is prepared to move forward and complete the Educational Effectiveness review. Although we have identified issues and areas that need improvement, the core capacity of the University as defined by WASC - clear purpose, integrity, fiscal stability, and organizational structures - is very strong. This core strength provides the basis for addressing the areas that need improvement. Several of the case studies document a history of the institutions ability to respond and improve. We also believe this core capacity provides the basis for examining our current educational effectiveness and planning strategies to improve it. Although not as well organized and integrated as we would like, the campus has a strong history of evaluating its' needs, planning initiatives to address those needs, and then assessing outcomes to further improve the University. This culture of ongoing improvement, in the context of a stable, well-developed university infrastructure, provides the foundation needed for the Educational Effectiveness Review to be a valuable component of SJSU’s continued growth in the years ahead.
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