ANAC Projects & Activities:

• ANAC CFOs Compare Financial Ratios and Benchmarking Data at Chicago NACUBO Meeting, July 22
• Faculty Work Project Report Manuscript and Dissemination Preparations
• Hewlett Project Plans National Dissemination Conference for January 17, 2001
• ANAC Data Exchange Readies Year II Data for Comparisons and Benchmarking
• ANAC National Media Relations Project the Focus of PR Directors and Presidents Council
• ANACSA Scheduled to Begin Operations in Summer 2001

ANAC CFOs Compare Financial Ratios and Benchmarking Data at Chicago NACUBO Meeting, July 22


For the third straight year ANAC member chief finance officers met at the beginning of the annual conference of the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO). On July 22, CFOs gathered for a full day mini-conference to interpret and compare institutional financial ratios prepared by Phil Tahey, Vice President of KPMG, on the basis of member 1998 and 1999 audited financial statements and to review data benchmarks CFOs identified at Rollins College in February for which Year II of the ANAC Data Exchange has gathered data. Greg Fawcett, President of Creative Analytics, ANAC's website home and strategic and technical consultant for the Data Exchange, explained plans to expand the usefulness of Year II data reporting by adding a data ranking feature and calculating the median for each data item. CFOs also discussed capital and financial issues with which they are grappling on their home campuses and shared practices that have worked well on campus in resolving these issues.

CFOs agreed to expand their February conference from one to two days for 2001 and to expand financial ratio analysis to include 1997 and 2000 member audited financial statements. Year II financial data from the ANAC Data Exchange will also be analyzed for benchmarking purposes and the conference will discuss ways of getting mounting student financial aid costs under control in ways that will not adversely affect enrollment while enabling members to protect investments in quality. The upcoming conference will be held at the University of Redlands, tentatively to begin the evening of Thursday, February 8 and to last through Saturday, February 10. The CFO steering committee will be developing the full agenda during the Fall and invites colleague suggestions.

Faculty Work Project Report Manuscript and Dissemination Preparations

Following review of the preliminary draft of ANAC's Faculty Work project report at ANAC's Woodrow Wilson Summer Institute at Ithaca College in June, the manuscript preparation team has almost completed a second draft for submission to potential publishers this fall. In addition to the report analysis and recommendations, the work will include member institution case studies and examples of best practices, essays on faculty work issues by national specialists on faculty work, and short responses to the report by invited speakers and panelists from higher education associations who participated at the Ithaca Summer Institute.

The report calls for a new compact between faculty members and their institutions based on reciprocal obligations whose fulfillment will enable colleges and universities to better achieve their missions and faculty to more fully achieve their professional potential as teachers, scholars, and servants of the institution and regional community. Although based on the findings of a two-year project period assessing perceptions of ANAC faculty and academic administrators and analyzing actual faculty work patterns through time motion studies, the report offers a vision for developing faculty-institutional partnership that higher education more generally may find valuable.

ANAC is arranging report presentation sessions at upcoming conferences of the major higher education national associations and has initiated conversations with these groups regarding possible future collaboration on the themes raised in the report. Linda McMillin, project manager, and Jerry Greiner, provost at Hamline University, will present a session at the Council of Independent Colleges' chief academic officer conference in Tampa, November 4-7. Presentation sessions and possible workshops on project results will be offered at the Association of American Colleges and Universities annual meeting, January 18-20, in New Orleans, and at the American Association of Higher Education conference on Faculty Roles and Rewards in Tampa, February 1-4. Presentations possibilities are being explored with other higher education associations, as well.

ANAC's faculty work project team of (l to r) Marion Terenzio, Sage, Linda McMillin, Susquehanna, Jerry Berberet, ANAC executive director, and Lawry Finsen, Redlands, met in July to work on manuscript revisions.

Hewlett Project Plans National Dissemination Conference for January 17, 2001

Midway through Year III of ANAC's project, "Professionalizing the Practice of Liberal Learning in the New American College," ANAC will sponsor with AACU a January 17, 2001, national mini-conference in New Orleans as a pre-conference to the AACU annual meeting, January 18-20. The mini-conference will focus on the implications for liberal learning and professional accreditation of case studies in all types of institutions that have experimented with integrating liberal and professional studies in the curriculum. The conference will be a follow-up to the April 6-8, 2000 conference that ANAC and AACU offered jointly at Pacific Lutheran University. The PLU conference presented an array of ANAC and other institutional case studies of curricular innovations, new directions being pursued in professional accreditation, and what employers are seeking in college graduates. Conference outcomes suggested that curricular designs for integration of liberal and professional studies and the desires of accreditors and employers alike are coming together around learning outcomes that reflect improvements in both student competence and reflective capacities and their ability to adapt, communicate, interact, and add value quickly in new employment contexts.

In planning for Year III, ANAC's ten participating member campuses have used the summer to develop plans for project completion, mostly the implementation and testing of new courses and curricular objectives resulting from the project strategy of pairing liberal arts and professional studies programs in the major. Over the three years of the project these pairings have engaged in faculty development activities, rethinking of major program outcomes in order to integrate relevant learning experiences from each major in the pairing, and developing curricular changes to incorporate the resulting enhanced outcomes. Historically, projects of this nature have sought to enhance the liberal arts experiences of professional studies majors. The ANAC project is based on the assumption that valuable learning outcomes go both ways and has focused on efforts to "enrich" majors in each area with contributions from the other. Understanding and practicing the functioning of a professional community, methods of professional practice, and a professional code of ethics, for example, represent such contributions from professional studies.

During Year III each participating campus project will implement a plan for assessing student learning that has occurred in project curricula and for evaluating the outcomes of the campus project. Preliminary assessment and evaluation findings will be presented at the January mini-conference. Campus coordinators will meet during the summer of 2001 to complete evaluation of the project as a whole prior to submitting a final report to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Project coordinators and ANAC member deans and provosts will also be in conversation during the coming year to plan a second phase of the project that will both extend project findings and curricular, pedagogical, and faculty development best practices more widely across campus and engage ANAC member institutions who have not been participants in the current Hewlett project.

ANAC Data Exchange Readies Year II Data for Comparisons and Benchmarking

Plans are in place for ANAC members to complete institutional data entry early in September, following several months of Data Exchange refinements and data validation with the help of member institutional research directors, chief finance officers, and institutional representatives. As a result Year II data has been easier to enter than Year I, data definitions are clearer, and the resulting data will be more accurate and useful for comparisons and benchmarking. In addition to the Year I ability to obtain the ANAC-wide mean and to select a group of institutions for comparison purposes on each data item, the Year II reporting format will include the ANAC-wide median and a ranking of member institution responses on each data item. The Year II Exchange has also expanded the number of data items collected to more than 260 individual entries. Member institution Exchange users will be able to access the reporting program by late September by entering the institutional username and password. The Exchange is located at ANAC's website whose access address is http://www.anac.org.

ANAC National Media Relations Project the Focus of PR Directors and Presidents Council

ANAC member public relations directors will gather November 4-5 in Baltimore, just prior to the American Marketing Association annual Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education, to plan the next phase of ANAC's national media relations project. Efforts to date have been focused on arranging media sessions to introduce the ANAC model and member institutions to members of the national media and to identifying student, faculty, and program examples on each member campus that exemplify New American College characteristics and achievements. The project is focused on ways that member institutions might use the ANAC model to advance student learning, faculty effectiveness, and institutional performance in improving higher education's accountability to the American public. This is the story that ANAC would like to document for the media, as the basis for sharpening member institution identity, differentiating ANAC members in the public mind from other models of higher education, and raising national awareness of ANAC member institutions. The media project will also be a prominent item on the agenda of the Presidents Council, tentatively scheduled to meet just before or just after the annual conference of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU), January 29-31, 2001, in Washington, DC.

ANACSA Scheduled to Begin Operations in Summer 2001

The Associated New American Colleges Study Abroad program (ANACSA) is scheduled to begin operations with summer 2001 ANAC member foreign study programs. ANACSA is a cooperative listing of member foreign study programs able to provide spaces enabling students from other member institutions to participate. A student wishing to participate works with the study abroad office of the member college or university offering the program and the student's home study abroad office which verifies the student's eligibility. Each participating institution administers its own programs and agrees to charge institutions sending participants only the direct cost of the student's participation. As much as possible, institutions supplying students for the program will attempt to allow students to maintain their financial aid assistance.

Donna Cheshire, Director of International Programs and Services at the University of the Pacific, is acting as ANACSA coordinator. The program guidelines are receiving a last review by member institutional representatives and CFOs and a brochure is being prepared for distribution to member study abroad offices by October 1. During its initial year, nine ANAC members will offer eighteen programs through ANACSA in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. For more information, contact Donna Cheshire (email dcheshire@uop.edu or tel. 209-946-2246).