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ANAC Bulletin
Bulletin Editor: Jerry Berberet

Please submit letters, comments, and guest columns to: anacjberb@aol.com





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Betty Ivey, provost emerita at University of Hartford, completed two years as chair of ANAC's institutional representatives.

 

 

 

 

 

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Judith Ramaley praises ANAC's efforts to align faculty work and institutional mission in her Institute keynote remarks.

 

 

 


Steve Good, Drury University academic vice president (l), and Susan Traverso of the North Central faculty were a great team in promoting faculty-administrator listening skills.


 


 

 


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Randy Bass argued at the Institute for a mix of online technologies and personalized pedagogies to achieve optimal learning.

 

 

 

 

 

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President Rita Bornstein of Rollins College demonstrates that the 21st century college president also has time for students.
ANAC Bulletin Masthead
Red Rule Summer 2001 Edition

ANAC 2005 Planning Meeting Sets Priorities

Twenty-two ANAC member president; chief academic, finance, and student affairs officer; and faculty representatives participated in the June 13-14, ANAC 2005 planning meeting at Ithaca College to set goals and priorities for ANAC's future. Four central goals emerged for ANAC development in meeting deliberations:

  • Achieve a stable and engaged membership of twenty-five institutions, representing all major regions nationally.
  • Strengthen ANAC organizationally at both the national and local levels.
  • Create opportunities for major collaborations that bring significant benefits to ANAC and its members.
  • Realize full potential of current ANAC projects and activities, e.g., ANAC Data Exchange, faculty work project, and national media relations project.

(Story continued below.)


Participants at the ANAC 2005 planning meeting included (l to r), Renu Juneja, associate provost, Valparaiso University; Hal Wilde, president, North Central College; Linda McMillin, history department, and Warren Funk, academic vice president, Susquehanna University; Steve Good, academic vice president, Drury University; and Jim Malek, provost, Ithaca College.

Articles In This Issue:


In the Headlines:

ANAC Projects and Activities:

ANAC Members in the News:

ANAC Opinions &Commentary:

ANAC Upcoming Events:

ANAC 2005 Planning Meeting (cont.)

Regarding membership, ANAC will proceed actively to recruit new members from a list of candidate institutions approved by presidents and institutional representatives in the spring. Organizationally, the plan calls for creation of a steering committee of senior administrators and faculty leaders on each member campus and a strengthening of ANAC's infrastructure. Major collaborative efforts will be pursued in the areas of faculty development and information technology. Task forces will be created to assess the form these collaborations might take. ANAC's Presidents Council/Institutional Representative executive committee will plan specific ANAC 2005 implementation efforts over the summer.

Woodrow Wilson Summer Institute Focuses on Member Efforts to Improve Faculty Policies and Practices

Seventeen ANAC member institutions and more than 75 participants took part in ANAC's annual Woodrow Wilson Summer Institute at Ithaca College, June 14-16. Fourteen members sent teams of faculty, department chairs, and academic administrators who used Institute speakers and discussions to develop plans for addressing faculty issues on their home campuses. Teams focused on issues ranging from faculty workload and faculty community concerns to rethinking academic governance and developing a positive department chair culture. Two new Institute events were a "Marketplace of ANAC Best Practices" in which members shared what works well at their institutions and an evening panel conversation on what faculty and administrators might learn if they learned to listen more carefully to each other. Guest speakers and some of their questions and insights include the following:

  • Judith Ramaley (Senior Fellow, Association for Governing Boards), posed several questions around implementing ANAC's call for greater reciprocity—a "compact"-in faculty-institutional relationships:
    • What elements in faculty and administrative culture must be understood to implement ANAC's compact?
    • How might the liberal arts more reflect the ethos of professional education that "knowledge has consequence."
    • Does the curriculum reflect in its pedagogies the mission and core values of the institution?
  • Jacqueline Mintz (Director of Princeton's McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning):
    • "Being a faculty member is a lifelong process rather than a product."
    • "New faculty are increasingly seeking quality of life opportunities over prospects for upward ascendancy."
    • Quoting Donald Kennedy, "Transforming institutions breathe into life new kinds of institutions."
  • Tom Longin (Vice President for Programs and Research, AGB):
    • "ANAC's compact has more potential to make a difference in collaborative governance than anything that has developed in higher education in the past twenty-five years."
    • "If we just focus on the structure we will be transformative, but we will not be transformed ourselves. . . .Think about relationships and decision-making processes, not structure."
    • Definition of collaborative governance: "Collectively making authoritative decisions about how to allocate scarce resources (money, time, expertise, etc.) among contending interests and assuring that these decisions are legitimate because they have been reached through participation and consultation rather than coercion."


Tom Longin, AGB vice president (r), enjoys the dinner cruise on Lake Cayuga with North Central team members (l to r), Joan Der, Roger Smitter, and Shirley Wilson.
  • Randy Bass (Director, Center for New Design in Learning & Scholarship, Georgetown University):
    • "The single greatest barrier to innovation for faculty is the 'culture of autonomy' which leads faculty to believe that they must work it out for themselves as they do an article or a lecture. Everything CNDLS does is done as a team to reinforce the idea of faculty, staff, and administrators collaborating."
    • "Colleges and universities need to institutionalize the conditions for innovation by creating a teaching/learning infrastructure and imbedding technology in the institutional culture."
    • "Hybrids win out. Pure dot coms are not making it. Tie hybrid (online/face-face) educational experiences to core values regarding learning and academic community."
    • "Courses will not continue as the fundamental curricular unit. Units smaller than courses are emerging as modularity and granularity come to characterize learning units for teachers and learners who are increasingly mobile."

Faculty met during the Summer Institute to discuss creating a network to facilitate ANAC member faculty communication, exchange, cooperation, and expression of needs and recommendations to ANAC organizationally. The group concluded that there is a need for stronger connections among ANAC member faculty. Among the initial suggestions:

  • Each member should name a specific faculty delegate to ANAC and members might create faculty teams to continue and coordinate ANAC activities on campus.
  • ANAC should create an ANAC faculty listserv, expand the number of faculty on the mailing list, and recruit faculty to write for the Bulletin.
  • Create mechanisms for ANAC faculty exchanges, e.g., visiting professorships and sabbatical and leave replacements, and for faculty to act as consultants for a variety of institutional purposes where visiting faculty expertise is helpful, e.g., new program development, program review, sharing best practices.
  • Facilitate such activities as pairing departments or programs from two institutions for a year of sharing and discussion.

Linda McMillin has agreed to serve initially in a convener/coordinator role for ANAC faculty connections, at least until a mechanism develops for a more structured coordination process.

Completion of Pew and Hewlett Grants Signals End of ANAC Era

ANAC's grants from The Pew Charitable Trusts and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation ended on June 30, the former completing a four-year period of ANAC attention to faculty work that has culminated in a book, A New Academic Compact: Revisioning the Relationship between Faculty and Their Institutions, that Anker Press will publish early this fall. The Hewlett grant funded "Professionalizing the Liberal Arts in the New American College," a three-year project to enhance student outcomes in the major by pairing faculty in liberal arts and professional studies in faculty development and curricular change. The goal—to integrate the best of both academic traditions in order to increase both student analytical and reflective capacities and their competence in practicing their discipline. ANAC has several grant initiatives in the works and is pondering ways of integrating what has been learned about faculty, learning outcomes, and the curriculum in a new future project.


Washington Post Quotes Presidents Anderson and Bornstein on the American College Presidency

It all started when presidents Loren Anderson, Pacific Lutheran University, and Leo Lambert, Elon University, met in April with Jay Mathews, education reporter for the Washington Post, in an ANAC media project visit. When the Post asked Mathews to do a story comparing present-day college presidents with legends such as Robert M. Hutchins, James B. Conant, and Clark Kerr of decades gone by or, more recently, the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh and Derek Bok, it seemed natural for him to ask ANAC presidents for commentary. In the resulting story that appeared in the Post, June 8, ANAC member presidents Anderson and Rita Bornstein, Rollins College, were quoted extensively.

On the question of why college presidents are no longer giants in the news who provide leadership through the strength of their ideas and personalities, Anderson noted that "the job has changed. The stakeholders are more numerous and more demanding, the tolerance for error is smaller, the expectations for performance higher, the patience with failure is shorter, and the pressure to please divergent constituencies greater."

Bornstein, who has made the college presidency a personal study interest, argues that the demands of consulting with faculty and raising money leave little time for deep thought and original policy ideas. By contrast, she discovered that Hutchins "forged a national reputation by accepting a hundred speaking engagements a year and publishing numerous articles in popular magazines and scholarly journals. However, he left his office at 5 p.m. every afternoon, never entertained or attended social functions in the evening, went to bed by 9 or 9:30 p.m, and thus was able to write every morning from 6 to 8 a.m." Of Hesburgh, she observed, "When he accepted the presidency in 1952, Hesburgh decided never to attend parties or social events in South Bend."


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