Position for budget and faculty records staffer

HR has posted an announcement for a budget and faculty records staff member. This person will work for COAS this fall, then move to one of the new colleges in January.
 
Here's the link: tinyurl.com/UWGbudgetrecords-job


As the job description says, this requires knowledge and interest in both budget and personnel functions. Good interpersonal skills will be even more important than with most jobs like this because of the challenges involved in helping get a new college off the ground. Those same challenges, though, could make the job more interesting. It should be interesting to work on starting something new.


Another job with the same description should be posted in the next few weeks, since each of the 3 colleges will need a budget/faculty records guru.

College names

The faculty in each of the new colleges were asked what they would like the name of their college to be, and the votes are in. In alphabetical order, the names they selected are:

• College of Arts and Humanities
   
• College of Science and Mathematics
   
• College of Social Sciences

These names will be included in the next task force recommendation. 

Comments on the 2nd recommendation

• Re IDS: Aran MacKinnon points out that "these programs belong neither practically or pedagogically in any one of the colleges or departments...This can all be worked out in an easier, practical way by simply creating a separate listing in the catalogue for the IDS programs that is not parsed out among or attached to any college."
  
  That makes sense to me. I'll check out whether that would be allowed. It's hard to think why it wouldn't be, but often policies are odd.
   
• Re scheduling of rooms: Can we put some kind of guidelines for departments early scheduling of rooms to prevent... small classes in [lecture halls]?"
  
  Good idea. We'll look into that.
  
• Re lecture halls: "What about TLC 1-200 and 203?"
  
  A sin of omission, which is to say, I screwed up and forgot to list them. They should be scheduled like the other lecture halls.There are probably others. Just let me know what's missing. I'll also check with Annette Pritchett in the COAS office.
  
• Staffing: this got the most heated reaction.
  
  Randy Hendrix sent me this summary of what the A&S chairs said about this:
  "Chairs at this morning’s Chairs Council meeting expressed a great deal of concern over the Task Force Recommendations for staffing the new colleges.  They urged a rewriting of the recommendation to argue that to meet RPG and other needs the three new dean’s offices need to be staffed on par with the dean’s offices of RCOB and COE.   They noted that it will be difficult to get all three specializations that Tim, Duane, and Denise currently bring to the office in any one person.   They worry about the Deans’ offices becoming black holes where important matters disappear or bottlenecks where important matters get slowed, and cripple the new colleges at the outset.  They question whether an interim Dean can make a successful case for additional staffing needs."
  
  Another chair made some specific suggestions:
  "I think your recommendation for staffing is going to put all 3 new colleges at a severe disadvantage. It looks like you are saying: 1 associate dean, and 2 other 'clerical' staff. That is probably less staff than the English dept. It is also much less than RCOB and COE.
  This plan also seems be contrary to the idea you mentioned that each new college, and its interim dean, may choose to use its staff resources in different ways. With such a minimal staff, there seems to be no flexibility to do this. I'm thinking, for example, that one college may want an Associate Dean for students and curriculum, an Associate Dean for Research and Grad studies, a budget person, and a 'part-time' assistant dean for budget matters (these are just hypothetical examples - not intended as real titles). With exactly 1 associate dean, 0 assistant deans, and only 2 'staff, I believe these new colleges will be unable to do anything more than just survive, and survival will even be in doubt."
  
  Those seem like reasonable arguments. Our charge is to recommend an initial structure that will get the new colleges off the ground, and to leave making the case for individual college needs up to the interim deans, as the other chair mentions. That's why we included the recommendation that the President and Provost should "consult with the interim deans to determine any additional staffing needs for their colleges.
  
  If a college needs additional staff members beyond the skeletal crew that it is our task to outline, its dean should have no trouble coming up with convincing evidence and metrics about RPG, grants, fund-raising, or whatever the needs may be. I expect that return-on-investment arguments would have the best reception, and making them should be no problem for a dean-ish type person.
   
• Randy also mentioned that the chairs want the task force "to address the cost of conducting the search for interim deans and interim associated deans internally.  They recommend we put in writing that departments that lose chairs and faculty in the process will have to be adequately compensated to meet class and other workload demands."
    
  Yep. We're working on that. I've met with Kimily Willingham and Lucretia Gibbs, and have exchanged emails with Liz Baker in Business and Finance.
  
• One chair asked about the next open meeting. We were waiting until the first hectic weeks of classes are over, so maybe week after next would be good. We also need to meet with the chairs again and with the department's budget managers. Let me know if you'd like a meeting with your department, unit, or group.

2nd recommendation; college names; budget consultant

• We've sent our second recommendation to Dr. Sethna and Dr. Hoff. It is available online at sites.google.com/site/andstaskforce/home/recommendations. Please post or email your comments and suggestions.
   
• A number of you have made suggestions to your chairs and to task force members about college names. There seems to be some consensus in the sciences, but there are several suggestions to consider in humanities and in social sciences. I'm going to email the chairs in each of the new colleges to ask them to work with the faculty of those colleges to make final decisions.
  
  Knowing the names of the colleges will not only be kind of nice, but will also make possible steps like updating Banner, creating budgetary accounts, and working with ITS.
   
• We're very relieved that Kimily Willingham, the former COAS budget person and current Department of English budget and personnel staffer, has agreed to consult with the task force on budget issues. Kimily knows COAS finances better than anyone, and will also be a help as we negotiate the thickets of policies and procedures. 

COAS budget data

We got some A&S budget data from Kimily Willingham in the dean's office. Check it out at sites.google.com/site/andstaskforce/home/documents. There are 2 spreadsheets attached at the bottom of the page:

• FY11COASBudgetOverview.pdf
•  FY11SummaryOfBudgetCommitments.pdf.

 After looking at the data and meeting with the chairs, our inclination is to

1. Allocate the committed money to the college of the department to which it is committed.
2. Divide the uncommitted funds equally between the 3 colleges.

What do you think of this idea?

Chairs' meeting tomorrow; interesting article

• The task force will meet the the A&S chairs at the dean's monthly chairs' meeting. I expect that the big topic will be budgets.
  
  
  • Liz Baker and Kimily are still working on the COAS budget sheets. We'll post summary data when it's available.
    
  
  
• The Chronicle has an interesting article this week entitled "Why Universities Reorganize." You may recognize UWG in much of what it says.
  chronicle.com/article/Why-Universities-Reorganize/123903/
  
• On a more personal note, thanks for all the encouraging and/or commiserating notes about our 1st recommendation and last week's COAS meeting.
  
  
  • Right after the meeting I was peeved with myself for not keeping the discussion more focused on the recommended college structure and makeup.
  • After thinking about it, it's probably better that I didn't do a better job of staying on task. It's more important to have people express their frustration, doubts, and opinions, even when - maybe especially when - they seem directed at me. I can learn a lot from those willing to point out my faults!

What we're doing now

• Now that our recommendation on the college structure and makeup has been accepted, we have a clearer direction on how to think about budgets, staffing, and scheduling processes.
   
• Interdisciplinary studies, discipline-specific writing, and shared facilities like the lecture halls don't belong to any one college, though, so are still toughies.
   
• It's good to see that the process for appointing interim deans is underway.
   
• Kimily in the Dean's office is organizing some budget data for us to post. I was a little surprised and disheartened to see how close to the bone they operate. The Dean's slush fund, if it exists, must be kept in a loose change wallet.

Questions and comments sent after the COAS meeting

Several interesting questions and comments have come in since the meeting.

• Where does IDS belong?
  
  Very good question. Aran McKinnon, the director of IDS, is contacting interdisciplinarians to see when we can meet to think about this. Do you have any suggestions about where it should be housed?
    
• What about DSW (discipline-specific writing)?
  
  Another good one. Inter-, cross-, and multidisciplinary activities don't have an obvious home.
   
• Can we be assured that the money to pay for all this won't come out of COAS?
  
  We can be certain that it won't come out of the COAS budget, because there's not enough uncommitted money to take from it.  In a broader sense, though, money spent on one thing can't be spent for something else.
   
• "[O]n the budget, this was a very legitimate concern as the split will almost certainly add several hundred thousand dollars to the overhead of Academic Affairs. Hopefully Dr. Sethna is prepared for this..."
  
  Yep. The only things the task force can do are to identify costs and to try to hold them down while not hurting the colleges' ability to do their jobs.

• "I believe the split that was proposed is as relatively fair and closely aligned to 'perspectives' as we can possibly get."
  
  I sure hope so. All the feedback we've gotten on the recommended structure since we posted it has been good.
  
  Are we ready to move on to the next tasks?

COAS faculty meeting

We had a good discussion at the COAS fall meeting. There were questions about:

• the process, about which several people expressed reservations;
• budget issues, including both matters we are charged with thinking about, like how the COAS budget will be divided, and matters outside our charge, like how this will be paid for.

We would really like more feedback on the first recommendation, the makeup of the new colleges.

• If you like the proposed organization, please say so. 
• If you have ideas for improving it, let us know that, too. 

This has to be settled soon if we are to be able to make recommendations about budgets, scheduling, deans' office scheduling, etc.

The search for and appointment of the interim deans depends on the college structure, too.

• The how and who of that is up to Dr. Sethna and Dr. Hoff, of course, but appointing interim deans soonish would increase the chances of the split-up proceeding painlessly.

Please chime in.

Meetings and responses

Responses to comments and some questions from email:

• "Are they going to hire new staff members for the new colleges?"
  
  The news colleges will have staffs, but those staffers will not necessarily be new hires. The existing dean's staff members will provide a source for staffs of the new colleges.
   
• "How many people are we hiring?"
  
  That will depend on the size and makeup of each college and on what the existing staff members decide to do. Some may choose to take other jobs within UWG.
  
  Of course, the task force will only make recommendations for initial staffing; the new deans may rearrange things after they get oriented and after their first budget cycle.
   
• "What is the timeline for hiring them? If they aren't hired by January 1st, to whom will the existing staff members in the dean's office report as they can't report to all three new deans?"
  
  We don't have a timeline yet, but I hope decisions will be made well in advance of January. Each college will need a budget person, for example, and they need to know what's what very early on.
   
• Will this be included in the task force's formal recommendation?
  
  Yep.
   
• "When will new deans be selected?"
  
  I would expect that Dr. Hoff will announce a selection process and timeline fairly early in the semester. We'll certainly recommend an open, inclusive process and prompt selection.
   

Meetings:

• We had a very useful meeting with Dean McCandless, the associate deans, and Kimily, the COAS budget expert, yesterday. We focused on budget issues - college budgets are messy and, at least for me, tricky to understand. A&S budgeting has always been a bit opaque, so it was good to see such openness and willingness to help.
   
• We have a slot at the COAS meeting Tuesday. Please ask questions and bring up concerns.
   
• Later that afternoon, Kathy Kral and Blake Adams from ITS will meet with us to talk about tech support. There probably won't be much change in day-to-day support, but we need to think about the more administrative side of it.
   
• We're scheduled to participate in the first A&S chairs meeting of the semester the first full week of school. We've already met with the chairs' council once, but it will be good to talk with all the chairs.
   
• After we get some more budget materials from Liz Baker in Business and Finance, we'll met with the departmental budget people to look that stuff over. We don't want anything to fall between those infamous cracks.
   
• Let me know if your department or group wants to meet. We'll have another open meeting soon after the semester starts, too.

Next steps

Budgets:

• We have a meeting this Friday with the COAS folks to discuss budget issues. 
• We're waiting on department budget sheets from Business and Finance.
  When we get those, we will meet with the departmental budget people so that they and the chairs can start figuring out what's right and what's wrong on the sheets.
   

 Scheduling: We need to figure out how shared rooms will be scheduled.

• Some people have suggested a centralized solution, but that makes others nervous.
• What do you think?
   

Space: Where do we put the fannies of the new deans and staff?

•   The COAS office seems big enough to split in two, but not in three.
   

College names: the faculty in each college need to select a name for it.

• How should this be done?

Reaction to the 1st recommendation

Thanks to all who have mailed or posted comments on  the first recommendation. (Especially to those who said nice things!)

• "One query from a supposed social scientist: wouldn't Mass Comm have more synergies with English than with the social science folks? I'm assuming that split is designed to even out the numbers between colleges, but it did seem a tad unusual."
  
  It was actually at the request of the Mass Commers. They wrote that "Mass Communications scholarship and faculty research are primarily informed by the scientific method, including positivist and interpretive approaches, typically employed in the social sciences."

First recommendation to Drs. Sethna and Hoff

We've posted our first recommendation to Dr. Sethna and Dr. Hoff on the task force web site:

sites.google.com/site/andstaskforce/home/recommendations

We welcome any questions or comments, whether to the blog, by email, or in a meeting.

The nature and role of the task force

From recent comments, I don't think I've been clear about the nature and role of the task force.

First, we are not a committee-representative-of-faculty, a representative body in the sense of "persons who represent the views of the A&S faculty."

• We weren't selected by the A&S faculty or given our charge by them. 
• The task force was created by, and we were asked to be on it by, Dr. Sethna.

Second, this work is not part of shared governance. The UWG Policies and Procedures Manual gives the President, not the faculty or the Faculty Senate, the authority to determine organizational structure. It is not something to put up for a vote of faculty. We are asked only to make recommendations to Dr. Sethna on how he should carry out that authority, given his decision that COAS will be split up. He, of course, may accept or reject our recommendations.

Third, our job is not to consider the wisdom or the timing of splitting up the COAS. Our task is to develop implementation plans and procedures for:

• Division of the A&S budget
• Governance structures
• The names of the new colleges and their membership
• Facilities allocation
• Other relevant issues    

Fourth, we have been and will continue to be guided by what we learn from faculty, staff, and administrators, but the recommendations have to be ours. Thankfully, as we've worked on our first recommendation - what colleges to create and which departments should be in which colleges - we've been able to get a lot of input and craft something that reflects that input fairly well. 

Fifth, so we can keep on track, get more timely feedback, make mid-course corrections as needed, and finish up by mid-October, we will make interim recommendations at least every month, sometimes more often. Our first recommendation, on the structure and membership of the new colleges, should be out in the next few days.

• Are we acting in good faith? I believe that we are acting with honest intention, without any intent to defraud or to act maliciously, with the good of UWG in mind. 
• Are we rushing to make decisions? Not to my mind. There's so much work ahead, we'll have to be efficient to finish by mid-October. 

Timing

"Seems like the committee is pretty far advanced in its deliberations and in the construction of a draft plan to give to Dr. Sethna. Is my impression of this correct?"

• That's sort of right. We plan to make our recommendation this week on the division of the colleges and on which departments go in which colleges.
  
  That's just the first step, though. The bulk of the actual work comes after we know who goes where. Budgets, staffing, scheduling processes - all the details that we don't think of much but ensure that we get paid, receive our meager travel budgets and operating funds, have staff support, etc. - has to be worked on. We've started gnawing on them, but that stuff will take a lot of time.

"Many faculty are still away; none of us is under contract yet."

• Actually, about 75% of tenured and tenure-track COAS faculty were on contract this summer, so most people have been around.
   
• We've had pretty good participation so far. We've had open meetings for faculty and for staff in which good questions were raised. We met with the COAS chairs, and twice with the arts chairs.
   
• Besides, very few people are out of reach of the internet these days. This blog has gotten a good flow of comments, and we've also heard from people by email and face-to-face. We've heard a variety of thoughts on both big issues and implementation details.

Placement of the arts and Mass Comm

We've posted proposals from the arts departments and Mass Comm about their placement after the split on the task force web site.

• The arts propose that they be in a School of the Arts within the humanities college.
• Mass Comm would prefer being with the social sciences, but could live with a separate college for them and the arts.

Given the improbability of a fourth college, creating the School of the Arts and putting Mass Comm in the social sciences college would make sense. 

Class scheduling

Class scheduling is one of those issues that we don't think about much, but that bites our behinds when it doesn't go smoothly.

In the COAS we have a workable, though sometimes cumbersome, procedure:

• Departments have classrooms that they "own." 
• Some (mostly special-purpose spaces like labs) are for their exclusive use. 
• Many may be used by others if the department doesn't need them. 
• Each department schedules its rooms. After a specified date, shareable rooms that aren't booked are opened up to other departments, first-come-first-serve.
   
• Certain rooms, like lecture halls, are not owned by a department. They are open to all, first-come-first-serve.
   
• A designated staff member in the dean's office works with departments to resolve conflicts. 

The same procedure should work after the reorganization, except that it isn't obvious who should be designated the resolver of conflicts. 

• Should a staffer in 1 of the colleges assume the task?
• If so, what should we do to forestall actual or perceived bias in favor of that college?

A School of the Arts?

An interesting suggestion is to create a school of the arts within the college of humanities.

• Note that those aren't proposed names. They're just labels to give me a way to talk about the suggestion.

The idea is twofold:

1. A separate identity for the arts could offer increased opportunities for growth, recruitment, fund-raising, and external relations that would help both the arts departments and the University as a whole.
    
2. A school of the arts could offer those enhanced opportunities at much lower cost than would a standalone college of the arts, since many administrative and clerical functions could be performed at the college of humanities level.

This makes a lot of sense to me. What's your reaction?

Responses to comments and questions

We've gotten some interesting comments on this blog.

Thoughts:

• "Why is the committee's timetable not published on any of the sites being set up?"
  
  It's in the letter from Dr. Sethna that's posted over on the website. We make monthly reports and finish up mid-October. Since our first task is to recommend the division of departments into colleges, that recommendation should be in our first report later this month.
   
• "Why are we worried about extra expenses of a fourth college when Dr. Sethna is not worried about it? He's initiating the split and stated publicly that three or four colleges would be the ideal for him."
  
  In the task force meeting with Dr. Sethna on June 22, he said that going to 4 colleges rather than 3 would require major justification. I believe his words were "there is a very high bar."
  
  In any case, we should all worry about expenses. Budgets are tight, and I can't imagine the state getting that ol' time higher ed religion any day soon.
   
• "Moreover, the cost issue is not only raised in reference to a fourth college (out of A&S) but the second and third (and fourth)."
  
  As I understand it, cost concerns did not motivate the decision, but we - all of us, not just task force members or administrators - do have to think about them.
   
• "...there are those of us in COAS who are not participating in this process because we believe that it is a rigged game."
  
  " I think it's time to STOP, THINK, and ASK why you see it as your job to consult constantly with Dr. Sethna to see if, before you put something in the proposal, he'll accept it."
  
  We are operating within a set of constraints, and we only recommend while Dr. Sethna decides. That's definitely so. The task force could make recommendations that have no chance of being accepted, but that's strikes me as pointless: better to engage and do what good can be done.
   
• "Dr. Sethna doesn't need a team of people to push his agenda on the college."
  
  His agenda is to break up COAS. That's happening. I can't speak for the other task force members, but my thinking is that we should deal with what is as it is and try to make the best of it, to do as little harm as possible. I am a pragmatist (in the ordinary sense of the word). In this situation, I believe that "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien." I hope that does not compromise me, but people will have varying opinions about that. I do myself.
   
• "Do the 6 of you have special qualifications that allow you to dictate what should happen to all of us?"
  
  Nope. We just agreed to be on the task force.
   
• "Committee, why can we not put in the proposal EXACTLY what the faculty say they want."
  
  Actually, faculty members have different wants and opinions. There are plenty who are in favor of the split, and others who really don't care all that much. Those who aren't angry, of course, are less likely to post to the blog, but they're out there.
  
  Even if there were no faculty members in those camps, I still wouldn't think it helpful to make recommendations that are DOA. (There's that perhaps not-very-admirable pragmatism again.)
  

Update and more comments

• I met with Diane Williamson in RCOB and Kimily Willingham
  in A&S to talk about staffing in those colleges. I can't see how
  a college can get by without at least a dean (who teaches 1
  course per year), an associate or assistant dean (who teaches
  1 course per semester), and 3 staffers: a budget person, a
  scheduling/facilities/records person, and a staff assistant/
  receptionist. That would be pretty tight, but probably doable.
  
  For those of you with administrative experience, do you
  agree?
   
• Thinking about staffing brings us back to money, of course.
  Several comments have asked about funding. As we learn
  more about which departments go where, we'll be able to
  figure out costs. Remember, though, that the split was not
  motivated by or dependent on funding considerations, so
  our job is to find out what it will cost, not justify the
  decision based on its cost.
   
• So far, we've looked at faculty numbers and credit production
  hours by department to come up with department sizes. They
  track each other pretty closely, with some departments with
  peculiar pedagogical needs as outliers.
  
  Eyeballing budget numbers, they correlate pretty well, too.

Response to comments

Thanks for the comments. Keep them coming.

Some thoughts on what you've posted so far:

• "it's redundant to say 'Humanities and the arts' for the college name."
  
  These aren't meant to be college names, just headings for the groups.
  It seemed to make sense to list both words since there have been
  suggestions to put the arts in their own college.
   
• "...why not develop colleges that mix disciplines that have some
  common interests..."
  
  We've kicked around some ideas like that, but couldn't come up with
  any that satisfied the constraints and made sense for all 17 departments.
  We're open to ideas, though, so suggest some groupings.
   
• "The history faculty are the best ones to determine which college
  they should belong to..."
  
  As long as we can satisfy the constraints, the alignments are fluid. A
  problem is putting 2 big departments like English and History into the
  same college and not having it much larger than the others.
   
• "How does Mass Comm end up in Social Sciences according to one
  scenario and in the arts in another?"
  
  I gather that Mass Comm is in a variety of colleges at different universities,
  depending on the type of research and courses the particular departments
  focus on.
   
• "Models for colleges like ours suggest that we either have one college or
  just two."
  
  We looked at lots of schools, and there are many different setups. Most
  have one or two, but a good number have 3 or 4.
   
• "Why are we constrained to three minimum?"
  
  That's one of the constraints set by Dr. Sethna.
   
• "the distribution above is predicated on splitting Mass Comm and Theater.
  Is this something that department wants?"
   
  From what I've heard, yes. Anyway, that's been in the works since before
  the split of A&S.
   
• "Since Mass Comm and Theatre may be splitting, what about Geosciences?"
  
  We wondered about them, too, so asked Dr. Hollabaugh when the task
  force met with A&S chairs. He said that they have no interest in dividing.
   
• "If English and Philosophy split..."
   We asked about that, too. They seem to be OK with their current structure
  for now.
  
  
• "Has anyone done an actual cost analysis of this restructuring?"
  
  Not that I know of. The task force will look carefully at budgets and
  expenses over the next few months. 

Welcome

 This blog is a virtual place for discussing the work of the task force charged
with planning the split-up of the UWG College of Arts and Sciences.

• We on the task force will post our ideas, proposals and questions, and,
  as we develop them, our recommendations.
  
  
• We don't plan to save everything up until mid-October, the due date
  for our report to Dr. Sethna. Instead, we'll regularly post what we're
  doing and what we're recommending.
  
  
• We hope the A and S community - faculty, staff, students, and friends -
  will give us feedback and suggestions.
  
  
• What are we not considering?
• Where are we off-track?
• What are we doing right?
  

• You may either:
• Sign your comments by logging in with your Google or OpenId
  ID.
• Post anonymously.
  
  
• Please keep comments PG-rated and avoid libel, defamation, calumny,
  aspersion, abuse, flames, and ad hominem arguments.

Posted by Will Lloyd

First task: college structure and membership

The first task of the task force is to recommend to Dr. Sethna the structure
and membership of the new colleges.

There are 3 constraints on the structure:

• The new colleges should be roughly the same size.
• The must be at least 3 colleges.
• Creating a fourth college would require very convincing arguments
  that show both the benefit to the University and how the increased
  expense could be offset.

The most obvious solution is to use the current model for assigning
responsibilities to the 3 associate deans.

• Humanities and arts
• Art
• English and Philosophy
• Foreign Languages
• Theater
• Music
   
• Social sciences
• Anthropology
• History
• Mass Comm
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Sociology and Criminology
  
• Sciences
• Biology
• Chemistry
• CS
• Geosciences
• Math
• Physics

That alignment groups departments sensibly and creates reasonable spans
of control, with five departments in one college and six in the other two. It
also gives each college similar faculty sizes:

• Humanities and arts: 110
• Social sciences: 85
• Sciences: 88

Those counts are based on the 2009-2010 UWG phone book, so may
be off by a few, but they are in the ballpark. (You can see my spreadsheet
at https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Amw-XUxBPBF8dDNSRjFsZTcwNWZhSlNtdkhmMFlmQ2c&hl=en&authkey=CP-b3uEE.)

I've heard two other proposals:

• Move History to Humanities and arts.
• Create a fourth college for the arts, which might include Mass Comm.

These make some sense, and would probably work best in tandem. The
problem, of course, is the expense of the fourth college. Where would the
extra several $100K come from?

What do you think?

Posted by Will Lloyd