Toward a Critique of the Strategic Plan

I have in fact read all of the Task Force Reports on the Web Pages, and attended most of the proposal sessions. These statements represent a concise summary on complex issues.

Executive Summary:

The following is a somewhat complex document. You may want to skip parts of it. The Sections are:

Part I) Task Force Reports : For each report, I discuss

• Major points.
• Points that were used in the Strategic Plan.
• Points that were not used in the Strategic Plan.

Part II) The Steering Panel Plan, in particular

• Proposals arising ex novo from the Steering Committee.
• Inclinations of the Steering Group.
• Dogs that did not bark.

Part III) There were Three Plausible Motions that the faculty could have discussed in April; I discuss Endorsements and Process Continuation separately.

• Motion to endorse the first plan.
• Motion to endorse the second plan.
• Motion to specify a format for continuing the process.

Part IV) Lessons for the future:

• What did not work as auspiciously as might have been hoped?
• What we should do differently next time?

Part V) Mini-sermonette: There are people who would like to eliminate faculty meetings, and replace them with a faculty senate, a body likely in my opinion to be less effective at representing the best interests of WPI. One of the most powerful arguments these people, some very highly placed, have is the observation that we do not get a quorum for every faculty meeting, so that the faculty do not care. I strongly urge you, no matter whether you have been here 40 years or four months, that it is in your personal long term interest to make a point of attending faculty meetings, even if you say nothing, no matter how much of a nuisance it is.

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Detailed Analysis of the Strategic Plan

Part I. USE OF TASK FORCE REPORTS

In summary, in my opinion

recommendations were systematically used from the Educational Technologies, Global Opportunities, and Learning Environment Task Forces.

recommendations were used in part from the Admissions, Assessment, and Precollege Outreach Task Forces.

recommendations were largely to completely ignored if they were from the Financial Resources, Graduate Programs, Information Infrastructure, New Programs, Project Based and Cooperative Learning, Enhancing Scholarship, and Support Services Task Forces.

The Task Force Reports in Numerical Order (This is detail work. You may want to skip to Part II:)

1) Admissions Task Force:

• Main points: methods of improving recruiting: new majors, new scholarship programs, new admissions criteria based on real experience.
• Points included in Strategic Plan: emphasizing diversity recruitment.
• Points not in strategic plan: New programs, admissions criteria, admissions standards.
• [Aside: Here time shortening is a problem. Should we have Admissions saying "we need a communications program", or should we have New Programs saying "give us steps to recruit more traditional science majors"? With no time, there was no possible way for task forces to interact.]

2) Educational Technologies:

• Main points: develop uses of technology.
• Points included in Strategic Plan: Center for Learning, Teaching, and Assessment, to support uses of technology.
• Points not in strategic plan: overall, the Steering plan captured this report.

3) Financial Resources Task Force

• Main points: zero-based budgeting. Penalize division heads for controllable overruns. Financial analysis.
• Points included in Strategic Plan: None at all.
• Points not in strategic plan: Report did not enter strategic plan in a visible way.

4) Global Opportunities

• Main points: Advance Global program.
• Points included in Strategic Plan: Increase commitment to global plan. endowed funds for various issues.
• [Aside: Some recommendations raise serious academic freedom issues. There are troubling pejorative references to inflexible course-driven curricula and faculty urging slavish adherence to courses. There are troubling suggestions that time for global programs must come from someplace, but cannot come from teaching or advising, leaving only one obvious source of that time. The requested sums (21 million dollars in report; my other sources say 16 million dollars) seem grossly out of proportion for a program that is drawing a decreasing fraction of our undergraduates.]

5) Graduate Programs

• Main Points: we have practice and research oriented grad programs. We need to improve both types.
• Points included in Strategic Plan: Well, none. The "Develop Creative Pathways to Graduate Degrees" slide is totally inconsistent with this report. In particular, the Steering Recommendation "Implement practice-oriented degrees" is opposite to the Task Force report discussion that we have many practice-oriented degree programs right now.
• Points not in strategic plan: The whole report.

6) Information Infrastructure Task Force.

• Main points: Lists steps for enhancing our information infrastructure, not only electronic but also our sadly-neglected Library.
• Points included in Strategic Plan: Almost none (appoint one administrator).
• Points not in strategic plan: The entire thrust of the report, on how to improve networks, computers, software, data,.. is gone. The CCC budget (fell from '95 to '96) indicts our financial control process.

7) Learning Environment and Campus Culture.

• Main points: Student Center, diversity, day care, multimedia and net enhancements, ombudsman, affirmative action.
• Points included in Strategic Plan: The upper priority points passed through. The "space for active and cooperative learning" recommendation perhaps came from here.
• Points not in strategic plan: (few)
• Aside: This is a good example of what Steve Weininger described as making WPI more like other schools, by adding a student center and worrying about minority recruitment and diversity.

8) New Programs for the 21st Century.

• Main points: recommended new programs in life sciences, humanities, management, non-traditional students.
• Points included in Strategic Plan: none at all.
• Points not in strategic plan: all of them. (Nor was it proposed that 'we haven't decided which new programs to fund, but new/enhanced programs should be a core effort.').

9) Assessment and feedback.

• Main points: problems with accrediting agencies promote, need for formalized assessment practices on a large scale.
• Points included in Strategic Plan: The "Center for Learning, Technology, and Assessment" comes from this proposal.
• Points not in strategic plan: The thrust 'include assessment in what we do regularly' seems to be missing. (Aside: While a lot of assessment can be made to sound like bean counting and paper shuffling, the "Assessment at Other Institutions" description for Eastern New Mexico U actually shows assessment being used to make a substantive improvement in a real academic program).
• (Aside: once upon a time: the MQP was an assessment instrument, to tell us if our students were learning what they needed to become good physicists, engineers,... This requires reading the Projects for substantive content rather than format, critical thought, footnoting...)

10) Precollege Outreach Task Force.

• Main points: Very long list. The focus is on bringing K-12 students here, doing outreach via on and off-campus IQPs, etc. (The MNS program appears;, the MMa program is missing from discussion.)
• Points included in Strategic Plan: participation for STRIVE REACH,... to be improved.
• Strategic Plan Points not from Task Force: The recommendation "develop K-12 pipeline programs" is not in here. IMHO, if one believe that WPI draws students from the nation, not one small city, K-12 pipeline programs set in Worcester appear to be a backward step.

11) Project-Based and Cooperative Learning.

• Main point: Objectives of projects and courses are unclear. Faculty support, especially for projects, could be improved. Students either do not remember what they were taught in the first year or never learned it. Concern that WPI undergrad course work leaves undergrads weaker than their contemporaries.
• Points included in Strategic Plan: Restructure undergrad content distribution, restructure advising are *perhaps* from this report.
• Points not transferred to the Strategic Plan: The entire thrust of this report -- deep concern about our whole undergraduate program, at the substantive quality level -- seems to have faded from site.

Aside - the TF did a noteworthy job of rising above a highly prescriptive mission statement. IMHO, the detailed analysis of our projects will do much to inform CAPs analysis of the recent project board document on this topic.

12) Enhancing Scholarship:

• Main point: It is necessary to increase the emphasis placed on conducting active scholarship. A long list of Concrete Recommendations follow.
• Points included in Strategic Plan: Almost none (seed grants for new research).
• Strategic Plan points not from Task force: The entire Thrust of the "Integrate Education and Research" slide is not consistent with the task force, notably the Steering plan proposals to increase linkage of undergrad, grad, and Research programs, connect funded research and MQPs, minisabbaticals, develop pedagogical innovation.

13) Support Services:

• Main Points: Re-engineer support services. Appoint Chief Information officer.
• Points in Strategic plan: Restructure Support Operations. appoint Chief Information Planner.
• (In short, these proposals passed straight through into the plan.)

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Part II - THE STEERING PANEL PLAN

Part IIA. Proposals Arising ex novo from the Steering Committee : In short, the Steering Panel Plan is drawn at most weakly from the Task Force documents. Large parts of the recommendations came form the opinions of the Steering Committee members, not come from the Task Forces, and have never had an independent vetting by the community. Large parts of the Task Force reports never made it to the plan. Details follow. If you want to believe me, skip to Part IIB Inclinations of the Steering Committee or Dogs That Did Not Bark.

In particular,

• The Steering Report Guiding Principle '..cooperative learning will be central to the program' was actively rejected by the assigned Task Force (I thought that Task Force did a brilliant job of noting this was a hot potato, defending academic freedom, and not endorsing it).
• Under Innovate in our Undergraduate Program:
• "Major-related activities for freshman" was not a significant task force recommendation.
• "Future Leaders Investment Program" appears no place except from the Steering Committee. This idea was discussed at two open meetings, with unrelated descriptions being given. The first time it was a financial aid experiment. The second time it was like the pre-med program, with student activities on campus.
• The recommendations "Integrate Education and Research" are mostly from the Steering Panel, and reject the thrust of the Research panel report. "Connect funded research and MQPs" is, IMHO, only marginally consistent with the Task Force recommendations (and it is significant to the sincerity of my criticism that most of my collaborators on my published papers, which you can see listed at http://www.wpi/edu/~phillies, are *undergraduates*.)
• The Recommendations "Creative Pathways to Graduate Degrees" are not from the Task Force report. In particular, the Steering recommendation 'develop practice- oriented degrees' appears to imply that the Steering Committee thought the Task Force got its facts wrong, since the Task Force thought we already have lots of degrees of this sort.

Aside: As chair of CGSR for three years, and author of our current BS/MS rules, let me emphasize that (exception follows) the BS/MS program is tied to the job market: when jobs are good, students will take the BS and run. When jobs are bad, they will use our programs to develop their professional skills. Developing the BS/MS program is not clearly an accessible track, though many of our departments do have a record of retaining our best graduates. Sterling exception: FPE is recruiting High School students into Fire Protection engineering, which is a purely grad program, via HS recruitment of BS/MS degree candidates.)

• The recommendations "Creative Use of Information Technology", especially Stake out Leading Position, Asynchronous networked learning, and mixed project teams are hard to find in the Task Force reports. The notion that we are struggling to keep orthodox information paths going for regular faculty and students fades from view.

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Part IIB: Inclinations of the Steering Committee.

This is strictly my personal reaction. I am trying to describe the inclinations I hear in reading the final report. There is not perfect consistency in the documents; you can certainly find isolated points where Steering panel actions do not match my description of their inclinations. Also, a panel may have an inclination through group dynamics, even though not even one member of the panel has that inclination. However, if you see where a panel has tended to head in the past, you are more likely to see where unspoken assumptions are more likely to take us in the future:

You may want to skip to Part IIC. Dogs That Did Not Bark):

In my opinion, the differences between the Steering Committee and Task Force reports review a variety of inclinations of the Steering Committee. In particular,

• Fundamental infrastructure questions, financial or electronic, tended to get lost as detail work.
• Hard questions were deferred. There are no recommendations for new programs or for enhancing old ones, though a major fund drive is the usual opportunity for making a quantum leap in the offerings we give our undergraduates and graduate students.
• The Steering Committee is non-supportive of our faculty's longstanding interest in enhancing scholarship and orthodox graduate programs. Scholarly efforts were reduced toward MQP support, rather than being recognized as legitimate in their own right. References to pedagogical work correspond to the interests of several of our faculty, though those interests have not eventuated in substantial support, theses and dissertations, or publications on a large scale yet.
• Requests for the global program appear to have been approved without receiving substantial critical attention. In particular, while student finances have not changed much in the last few years, student interest in going abroad has decreased substantially. Our global efforts are certainly less unique than, e.g., our fire protection program, but FPE was substantially ignored. There is considerable evidence that our on-campus IQPs are much weaker than the off-campus ones, in ways (student motivation) that increasing the number of off-campus students will not help. Funds are proposed for the IQP areas least in need of help.

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Part IIC. Dogs that did not bark:

These are topics that in my attention should have received more careful attention, both for themselves and for what they say about us:

• (0) updating core academic programs. I include here new labs, etc., for existing programs, and strong enhancements. For example the 20 million requested for globalization would fund a dozen+ faculty and ca. 2 dozen graduate fellowships, enough to move one or two academic programs from the sidelines to center stage (and greatly strengthen undergrad programs in that area.) IMHO, obvious targets are CS, life sciences, and materials.
• (1) Departure of Al Sacco (and other notables in the past): We had an opportunity to bring in 10-15 million dollars in the next decade, and a Space Science Center likely named for Christa MacAuliffe. That center would have had a heavy K-12+ alignment, and would have done enormous pipelining on a national scale. We did not succeed in keeping Al. A major issue, say my sources, was hard-dollar matching funds for the Center. As a general statement, there should have been a Task Force to study our failures.
• (2) Fall in graduate enrollments. Several department heads have noted to me that our graduate program enrollments are falling badly, though they appear to have stabilized this year. Is this a short or a long term problem?
• (3) Use of Faculty Resources in restructuring WPI: We are happy to talk about sending IQP students to help foreign countries with their school systems. However, charity begins at home. We have a substantial MG program with strengths in managing change and in management information science. Where are proposals to exploit MG and CS strengths when our information networks and administration are discussed? Contrary to remarks at the Monday meeting that Faculty don't have the core competency to fix administrative processes, we in fact have faculty who have this as their professional expertise. We should take advantage of internal experts. If nothing else, they're cheaper than consultants.
• (4) Discrimination against women:
  • For example, we have a natural drift of a few people out of the faculty and up the administrative ladder. For faculty, the gate step is typically though not always the department headship. At WPI, Department Heads have long terms, five years renewable once. Once upon a time, we had long-time department heads, who would serve for decades. That time is long gone. Under modern conditions, every time you see a department head being appointed for a third consecutive term or longer (an extra year or two because a search collapsed is another matter), you should realize that the echoes you hear are almost certainly a door being slammed -- perhaps someplace well further down the promotion chain -- hard into the face of a deserving woman.
  • For example, we have brought up women not to complain loudly in our culture. As a result, if a department head is trying to staff an unpopular course, say a service course that students would die to avoid, or a course that requires good math skills or systematic memorization, it may readily happen that neither male nor female faculty will want to teach the course. However, the male faculty will complain more belligerently, so the course will go to a female faculty member, whose reward will be low evaluations, lower salaries, and reduced likelihood of eventual promotion.

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Part III THREE PLAUSIBLE MOTIONS:

A) Endorse the current proposals:

These are my personal opinions. You can take them or leave them:

• 0) There is no overarching vision beyond a few sentences. What is it that we are attempting to attain?
• 1) We have two different Strategic Plans. As seen above, both of them have rather weak bases in the Task Force Reports. Some programs (off-campus outreach; Future Leaders) potentially have the faculty promise to engage in unspecified academic activities. In the past, such promises have had less than favorable outcomes.
• 2) With the removal of the 'threats' statement from Version II, there is no indication at all of what problems we are trying to solve.
• 3) There are no cost estimates, though some of the proposals are potentially quite expensive. Some proposals for funding for particular ideas are, in my opinion, wildly out of proportion to the importance of the target to WPI as a whole. Saying that we will approve programs now, and have the Administration give us the cost numbers later, has a recent, negative precedent. The administration promised FAP the numbers to evaluate the UTC program. The Provost sits on FAP and new that the numbers had not yet been delivered. The Administration never came through with the promised numbers.
• 4) Because there was almost no time, there was very little benchmarking done on any proposal. Are we reinventing the wheel, and if so is our wheel round or square? (the Assessment report has some good exceptions to this statement.)
• 5) We have two core "core competencies" -- things we should do well. We teach undergraduate and graduate students, and we engage in scholarly endeavors. Most of the things we do for our core competencies seem unlikely to be substantially enhanced by these proposals.
• 6)You should make up your own mind. This is a once in a decade opportunity. The fund drive is receiving the strong support of the trustees, some of whom are making great personal financial sacrifices to support it. It is our ethical responsibility to them to make it likely that those moneys are spent wisely, rather than being frittered away on bits and pieces.

B) Organizing for next year:

Rumors have floated over my transom that there may be a proposal as to how next year's planning effort should be structured. Of course, these are only rumors. However in my opinion, no one except part of the Steering Committee can have seen such a proposal, which may have been hastily written in the past few days. This is a very important issue, which demands the thoughtful consideration of the faculty. For this reason, I would urge that any such proposal be tabled. We need time to think about it.

Let me qualify that suggestion. A proposal to have a committee that is entirely appointed by the administration, and has no elected members at all, not even the few we were allowed last time, should be categorically rejected by the Faculty. While it is always possible that an entirely appointed committee will suddenly be struck by the wisdom of Solomon, that's not what the smart money is betting. A wholely appointed committee essentially guarantees that the planning effort will fail.

Part IV. LESSONS FOR THE FUTURE

I'm going to try to be as non-judgemental as possible here. Clearly, almost everyone would have been happy if the effort this year had been a shining success. No one wants an effort like this to fail. However, let us learn from the past, and avoid the steps that did not have the favorable consequences that were desired.

• 0) As several Governance Committees have remarked in their Annual reports, there was zero contact between the Steering Committee and large parts of Governance charged with issues on which the Steering Committee was attempting to steer. This makes little sense if there is to be a strategic plan developed and supported by the Faculty, and much sense if the Steering Committee wished to drag us in directions that we were not necessarily inclined to go.
• 1) There is an enormous role for the administrative support staff on task forces, informing the individual questions. However, the core questions are academic, and are therefore the responsibility of the faculty. Any central committee should therefore have a substantial majority of elected faculty on it, just as our last *successful* planning effort --- the PLAN --- did, and in contradistinction to the *failed* efforts of the last decade. If additional appointed members are desired, recourse should be had to Governance to appoint them, as is done with the Project Board.
• 2) There is no substitute for openness. If you don't want to take people by surprise, they must know what is coming. Excluding individual personnel issues, which seem unlikely to arise often, all meetings should be fully minuted and the minutes distributed. In some cases, frankness is encouraged by phrasings that focus on issues, e.g., instead of a hypothetical "The Provost proposed program elimination of physics" one should say "It was proposed that Physics be program eliminated."
• 3) There should be open consideration in a rational way of what task forces are needed, with additional task forces added if necessary.
• 4) There should be adequate time for completion of benchmarking and other work. At the start of this year, our faculty's leading expert on change management said that this process would need two years. We tried to do it in one year. Now we still need most of two years.
• 5) There should be rational community involvement. Open meetings with no agendas are not going to advance us effectively. An agenda with opportunity for open discussion, like the Alden meeting of the BRTF, is what was needed. An early indicator that there were difficulties with this year's process was that the open meetings were being substantially (not completely) ignored by the Faculty Governance Committees.
• 6) A Steering committee should be tasked to Steer, not to plan. In particular, all proposals in the final Strategic plan should first have passed through a Task Force, and been given a public examination. The Steering Panel may come up with its own ideas, but in all cases these must be passed down to a Task Force and properly vetted, rather than being inserted into the plan out of nowhere, as was done this time.
• 7) Budgeting -- there should be a plausible costing of any major proposals.
• 8) Program involvement. We have a dozen+ academic programs, each with full-scale plans of their own. There is no indication that these were even consulted, let alone sufficiently incorporated in the Recommendations. Next time, departmental plans should appear early in the analysis.

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