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?