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The Academic Master Plan (AMP) is the latest – not the last – step in a mammoth Downtown Denver Campus and Denver community effort to assess not only the goals of the campus, but what it will take to attain them. “The AMP represents our first baby steps in transforming the campus into a fully transparent, collaboratively governed, planning-centered organization, one that is clear about what is does well and where it is going in the future,” according to Provost Mark Heckler.
Cliff Young, director of the undergraduate program in the Business School, explains that many months, meetings and much woman- and manpower has culminated in this latest version of the Academic Master Plan (AMP), which can be accessed through the Downtown Denver Campus homepage.
Early last fall, three different search conferences, each composed of 40 faculty, staff, student representatives and community members, launched the process.
“In those meetings we identified what the present university environment was, where we would be in three years if nothing changed, where we would like to be in three years, and what would we need to do to get there,” Young said.
Representatives from the committees met twice to consolidate these goals. “In the first meeting, we combined common clusters according to where we would like to be in five years or so,” Young said. “We started with about 18 clusters and whittled it down to 12 statements of desired future goals.”
In the second meeting, these 12 desired statements or goals were reviewed for feasibility and process. “From this we generated recommended action,” Young said. These recommended actions cover the areas of:
* Reward system
* Facilities and physical infrastructure
* Diversity and inclusion
* Curriculum and student development
* Links to the external community
* Links to the internal community
* Funding
* Institutes and Centers
* Support and Services for Students
Faculty and staff members from the committees volunteered to research and champion each aspect of AMP, with Young and Lorna Moore, professor of health/behavioral sciences and anthropology, reviewing the reward system. In addition, the AMP Action Fair earlier this month gave the Downtown Denver Campus community the opportunity to sign on and get involved in their areas of expertise or interest. Young said the highly-successful event brings new faces and ideas into the process.
In reviewing the reward system, Young and Moore’s team realized the importance of establishing rules for tenure that are consistent with colleges and universities throughout the country. As the formula for tenure reads now, a faculty member must be “meritorious” in both teaching and research, and “excellent” in one of those areas. “Notice ‘service’ is not explicitly stated,” Young explains. “The result is we have a somewhat archaic way of defining excellence in these areas.”
The Downtown Denver Campus has a variety of faculty positions, “and if we’re going to motivate all of them to engage in action for the common good, we have to develop a reward system where these people feel both secure and valued. To do that, we are looking at developing an inventory of all faculty positions, not only at the DDC but at other CU campuses: what their duties are, how they’re rewarded, contracts, security, and whatever motivates them.”
Standards for promotion and tenure are initiated at the department level for most of the schools and colleges. Young noted that faculty are also given yearly reviews with possibly differing standards than the tenure process. The disparity needs to be rectified, he says. “Right now the annual review processes are independent,” Young explains. “People can get a good annual review and still fail the tenure process.”
What Young and Moore have found is that because of this disparity faculty are playing it safe. “Junior faculty will not engage in areas or activities that will in any way hinder the tenure and promotion process,” he said. Under the current structure, with merit and excellence loosely defined and service not in consideration, faculty are cautious about the kinds of activities they become involved in until they attain tenure.
Faculty would also like to be in a position where their skills, experience and service to the campus and the community makes them strong contenders for positions at other universities across the country. “What that means to UCDHSC is we cannot ignore basic standards of the academic community as a whole, we cannot build a reward system to measure success at UCDHSC that doesn’t relate to the global arena,” Young said.
Young and Moore are encouraged by the breadth of previously-involved and new committee members dedicated to improving the reward system. “We have a number of faculty on the committee who represent a cross-section of better thinkers,” Young said. “Based on comments with interested parties who came to the action fair, the goal is to be able to define at the department and college level what constitutes ‘meritorious’ or ‘excellence’ for this campus, academic goals that can be defended at the campus and system level.”
Young foresees more independence in a revised reward system, with “excellence in service” joining research and teaching in playing a role in the annual review and tenure process. “We’d like to define it in a way to guarantee to a young faculty member that if they engage in service in addition to research and teaching it will benefit them,” Young said. “There won’t be a disconnect between the annual review and long-term tenure review. And, very importantly to the whole process, it will make the reward system consistent with the values and goals of the university.”