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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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