April 17, 2009
Volume 1 Issue 9
In this issue:
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A Message From the Provost
Dear Colleague,
During the past few months, our country and state have experienced historic changes in leadership in the midst of an overwhelming financial crisis and an unprecedented effort to stimulate the economy. Our campus has gone from planning for a 10% cut in our state budget to hoping for a 1% increase as was suggested by Governor Quinn in his State of the State address on March 19, 2009. The news about major cuts at our peer institutions around the country, both privates and publics, and the daily count of lost jobs reach us at work and at home and make us wonder when the next wave will hit us. Yet we know that our country is trying to reconstruct the collapsed financial institutions and the manufacturing industry and that the public research university has a critical role to play in reshaping our future. In this environment, our institution is confronted with a historic opportunity to live up to its land grant mission and participate visibly in this reconstruction.
Working toward a better future, the contributions we will be asked to make and sustain cannot be achieved unless every member of the University, every dean, every department head, every unit director, every faculty member, and every staff member of our community shows leadership and accepts ownership of our goals and efforts. Leadership requires vision, focus, commitment, responsibility, independent thinking, and engagement with all constituencies. The institution is us, and without our efforts and personal commitment it cannot become a better place.
The ability to be fiscally responsible and a good steward of campus resources is the foundation of successful leadership. My office has been engaged in an intensive resource management effort to develop a deep understanding of existing needs, of opportunities for new revenue, and of savings through shared services and other cost-cutting activities. What we have learned is that our institution needs to be more nimble, less bureaucratic, less expensive, and more entrepreneurial. We cannot afford to support the status quo. Instead, we need to actively look for and pursue all opportunities. The financial vulnerability of our state drives us towards finding new sources of revenue. These sources include: increasing our research funding from the federal government; enhancing fundraising and the growth of the endowment through private giving; developing on-line and executive education opportunities; pursuing licensing and start-ups; and building and strengthening collaborations with corporations and foundations.
The campus should aim at creating and nurturing the contexts in which unexpected, path-breaking innovation can take place, and through which faculty, staff, and student creativity can flourish. Innovation cannot be supported unless the campus academic community is ready to embrace risk, accept failure, recognize ambitious efforts, and support unconventional thinking. While we are living through an economic crisis of historic proportions, the federal government is now providing unprecedented opportunities for research and education through the stimulus package. Our campus has developed a website that discusses the distributions of the stimulus funds among the various federal agencies. Our campus has the intellectual depth and breadth to take advantage of these opportunities and, through them, to create new pathways to research and education. We all know we can play a visible role in the reconstruction of our economy and our institution should lead our peers by example.
At Illinois, our expertise as scholars, our training as educators and mentors, our collective experience in higher education, and our efforts to engage with the community have prepared us well for times like this. We should not miss the opportunity to respond to the call to lead our country during this historic reshaping of the future. At the same time, we must continue to support our campus mission of academic quality and excellence. We will strive to find new ways to support our faculty research and instruction, to enhance the educational experience for current students, and to increase access to our institution for future students.
In the above context, I would like to mention two additional efforts led by the campus in support of our strategic priorities. The first one involves important changes in the promotion and tenure processes that help us better support multidisciplinary work and the second is an effort to improve quality of service and reduce cost by rethinking our efforts in information technology.
Sincerely,
Linda Katehi
Changes in Promotion and Tenure
Several changes in the promotion and tenure guidelines will take effect in the next academic year (2009-2010). These changes are designed to enhance the metrics used to evaluate faculty scholarship, much of which is increasingly interdisciplinary and translational in nature. The changes also increase the transparency of the P & T process for our faculty. It is important to underscore that the current financial crisis will have no negative impact on our P & T processes or decision making. Furthermore, the promotion bonuses that our campus provides for successful cases will be honored regardless of whether we have a merit salary program for next year.
The P & T modifications were spearheaded by the Promotion and Tenure Reform Implementation Committee, chaired by Professor Andreas Cangellaris, interim head of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The committee met with unit executive officers from all colleges, the Council of Deans, the Urbana-Champaign Faculty Senate, the Faculty Advisory Committee, the Teaching Advancement Board, and various other groups around campus to gather recommendations and feedback.
The majority of these changes affect three of the Provost’s Communications – Communication 9: Promotion and Tenure, Communication 10: Guidelines and Procedures for Notice of Non-reappointment for Non-tenured Faculty Members, which addresses the appeals process; and Communication 23: Appointment and Review of Faculty Members with Budgeted Joint Appointments.
Pertaining to metrics, a key change in the P & T process is that the term “research” has been expanded to make explicit reference to interdisciplinary and translational research as important components of a faculty member’s scholarly activities. New guidelines are provided to assist units in the review and evaluation of faculty members involved in such scholarship. For example, units now can solicit internal letters of evaluation pertaining to a faculty member’s role in multidisciplinary projects on campus. In addition, guidelines are provided for more comprehensive evaluation of faculty members for whom public engagement is the primary criterion for promotion as so specified at the time of appointment. Finally, the criteria pertaining to early promotion and tenure cases have been clarified, and units are now encouraged to augment the required documentation of teaching effectiveness with additional methods of teaching evaluation.
Pertaining to transparency, the changes involve extensive revision of the procedures and the language aimed at making the P & T process, including appeals, more clear, open, and uniform across campus.
The intent of these modifications is to broaden, foster, and reward all types of scholarly activities that are necessary for our institution to be successful in its mission.
IT@Illinois
IT@ Illinois is a campus wide initiative aimed at restructuring IT support to meet our 21st Century challenges. Illinois has massive IT resources but the administration of those resources has developed in a piecemeal fashion as technologies have undergone enormous changes. Our challenges today include inefficiencies, duplication of service, and in some cases, unsatisfactory service in our current practices. Our first step has been to try to understand these challenges. How well can our current structures adapt to these challenges? How can we adapt our structures to meet the challenges more effectively?
We organized a campus symposium in December 2008 to explore major changes of practice in scientific and scholarly research, in formal and informal education, and in University participation in economic and civic life. At the close of the symposium, the participants challenged the campus, and especially the many individuals serving in IT professional roles, to consider what changes in our organization will be needed to make us successful in the 21st Century.
The first phase of this initiative, led by Dr. Sally Jackson, Associate Provost and Chief Information Officer, has been a period of intense reflection on characteristics of our current support strategies and how well they fit the changes in faculty research and teaching. Common to all of our discussions is the recognition that IT support must be both local and connected. Faculty endeavors in all fields now depend on easy access to technology and to technical expertise. This access must be immediate and highly attentive to the individual needs of faculty, but it must also connect each faculty member to a complicated world of other possible resources.
In the coming months, non-IT staff, faculty and academic leadership will be invited to join the IT@ Illinois discussion. Our goal is to find a strategy that will allow us to.integrate responsive local support with increasingly important success factors like the ability to collaborate at a distance and the ability to operate seamlessly with resources found anywhere. This new approach must be accomplished not by adding staff, but by changing what we ask our staff to do. Your participation will be solicited in a next wave of activities and we very much look forward to your ideas, discussions, and feedback. You can track everything that is happening around IT@Illinois on their website.
Feedback
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