Responses Received from AUFA Communicator Survey re: Strategic Plan

RESPONSES RECEIVED FROM

AUFA COMMUNICATOR SURVEY RE: STRATEGIC PLAN

The following are responses the AUFA Communicator Committee received when asked the following two questions. In total 54 responses were received.

As a member of Faculty, do you feel that you were adequately consulted in the process of consultation described above in the SPP report?

As a member of Faculty, do you feel that your views are adequately represented in the report which has resulted from the process of “inclusion” as described in the SPP report?

16 responses received for “yes”

48 responses received for “no”

6 responses received for “yes”

47 responses received for “no”

1 response received for “yes” and “no”

Comments:

However, I am not convinced the final product reflects a “consensus view” or “comprehensive view” of the issues and opinions raised during the planning process.

I would not necessarily expect specific issues / concerns that were raised by individuals through the various opportunities to engage in the consultation process to have “survived intact.” Presumably some have survived, some not, and in some cases the authors of the report will have attempted to envelope specific input into broader “consensus” themes. However, I am disappointed in the lack of specificity in the plan. For the most part the general themes and issues raised seem reasonable, but the report is scant on how these will be manifest in terms of action plans. Also, it would be interesting to see the “raw data” from the Post It Note day. While participating that day, my memory is that there were a number of compelling, specific issues raised in that session. Are these reflected in the final report? It’s difficult to judge at this stage without having the opportunity to explore the data.

There are two sides to consultation – asking for views and listening to views. In my opinion they did the former, with the intention of ignoring the latter.

My opinion is that the outcome was essentially decided in advance of the request for views.

Much of this “consultation” was done during class time when I had to teach and could not attend.

No comment.

There was ample opportunity to submit thoughts. The problem is in the way in which they were assembled, as many will inevitably feel that their views are not represented. Provided that the process of consultation is still under way, and the feedback to the draft plan is taken into careful consideration, there may be adequate consultation. If the feedback is ignored, then I would not feel that I have been adequately consulted.

I could answer this question either way. There are a lot of things I like, and many others I don’t.

While it is true that we were all given an opportunity to fill out a survey and an opportunity to place post-it notes, I feel it is somewhat misleading to refer to this as a “conversation”. I would be delighted to be given the results of the surveys and post-it note days, adequately analyzed, and use that information as a starting point for a real discussion, with groups of people in a room having a verbal conversation.

There seem to be me to be two types of statements in the report. There are some statements of specific things which we apparently will be either required and/or encouraged to do, and there are some statements of goals and/or ambitions. For example, the plan includes the following statement

To ensure that every Acadia graduate leaves the University with a strong awareness of environmental issues and concerns, Acadia will encourage the Senate, schools, and academic departments to require that every student engage in a serious and meaningful way with environmental questions and concerns while enrolled at the University. Most students will meet this requirement by successfully completing one of Acadia’s many academic courses that focus on the environment; others will do so primarily in outside-the classroom learning activities.

This appears to be a clearly articulated goal with a specific plan for implementation.

Contrast this with

Recognize the faculty as Acadia’s greatest asset through investments that make Acadia a preferred place to work and study; support efforts among the faculty to create and sustain enviable work environments and arrangements that support a healthy balance of personal, family, and professional commitments and activities.

This statement, while laudable, appears to be a statement of goals with no specific details as to how they will be achieved.

My overall impression is that generally (although not exclusively) the things that I am really interested in fall into the second category, whilst the first category seems to address issues that I personally was primarily interested in.

Without seeing the analysis of the survey/post-it note data, it is difficult to know to what extent the communities values are represented in the Plan. I do know that my interests were not reflected in the specific plans.

In summary, my issues are

1) We seem to have gone from a very promising beginning with opportunity for input through to a “Plan”, with no discussion in the middle.

2) The “Plan” seems to me to be a blend of goals/ambition statements, with no detail attached, and a set of detailed recommendations/policy statements.

No comment.

The strategic plan process has been anything but genuinely consultative, democratic, and reciprocal.

No comment.

I feel that the AUFA document expressing the opinions of the faculty, address many of the issues but even that document are not the opinions of all the faculty, only the opinions of the AUFA executive and those that were able to attend the meetings.

It does seem there is a little bit of ‘cart before the horse’ with regards to the SP relative to the initatives set forth by administration, prior to the plans development, but equally as bad, the AUFA document is implying that there is an evil force up the hill that is going to lock us to our desks and make us teach what they tell us. I think a middle ground is probably more reasonable.

1.The post-it planning day was insulting to faculty. 2.Much of the consultation, as in Senate, was in fact information sessions and I suspect that the 1200 members consulted involves much double counting.

The document imposes a template of engaged and community learning. There is an implied sense of crisis which is never explained. The past is celebrated in a prefatory material, then changes to curricula imposed. I can’t believe that Acadia wants to graduate students with tailor-made majors which will not qualify them for post-graduate study.

Many of the consultations were organized in such a way as to select people, rather than allow people to select themselves to participate

The views that I heard (mainly from faculty, but from some students as well) expressed at the few “consultations” I attended were not included in the final document.

Senate has authority over academic programs, yet they did not task the process. Faculty create the learning environment, yet they did not guide the process, instead, outside American consultants with personal ties to the AU President were hired at unknown costs. Faculty on the “advisory group” did not advise, and in fact were not even consulted on the document prior to its widespread release. I never knew what the sequence was: for example, whereas the Learning Commons was being developed and designed, the Strategic Plan was designed to propose we have one. So what is Strategic about proposing to have what is already underway? Finally, I found there were built in mechanisms to discredit faculty input anyway, thoughts like “faculty are against change”, and “faculty do not want to improve their learning”. These are myths, and suggest a high level of cynicism of Strategic Planners, and defies the notion of collegiality by which I think the university functions under. Actually when I described the process to a VP Academic friend of mine at another institution, they laughed at the idea of having professional strategic planners hired from outside the institution, and suggested it would all be a waste of money and amount to nothing.

I am disappointed that the AU President chose to initiate this process, and continue even when these kinds of concerns arose at the outset. She ignored the initial criticisms, and created a problem for herself. It is of her doing, not faculty of Acadia, and she can’t blame this one on the last AU President.

No comment.

I will qualify the yes somewhat. In so far as issues of 'Acadia Values' and the various other things that the meetings focussed on, I think that the consultation was adequate. I did actively seek opportunities to participate in the process.

I think that the main problem with the consultation process was not with what it did, but with what it failed to do. It failed to engage the Acadia community (however defined) in justifying the need for a plan. I personally feel that there are good reasons for Acadia to examine the environment it is operating in (demographic trends, particularly in NS; urbanization; demands of government funders; ...) and in the need to devise an appropriate response. Before asking the community to participate in the formation of a plan, we should have been engaged in understanding this environment.

Again a qualification. My own interests (research, teaching, and service related) fit well with the plan. Thus, it personally reflects my issues quite well. However, since we were not engaged in understanding the environment to which this plan is a response, it is entirely possible that some community members would have devised responses to that environment far superior to the plan that has emerged.

So, I have no problems with the plan, and support it in preference to no plan. However, that does not mean I am convinced it is the best plan.

At first, I thought I was adequately consulted. I filled out the forms, made comments during the faculty conversations stage…

Now I know that I had been deceiving myself and wasting my time.

I have not seen one of my suggestions –and that of others from my Department- represented in the report. The whole exercise sought reinforcement of an already decided agenda in the hope that nobody would notice.

I submitted a reply to the survey that was sent.

Several comments that are in the plan could have been taken directly from my survey; I doubt that I was the only person to express the point, but my thoughts were there in several areas.

I feel the ‘communication’ has been very unidirectional, and not at all in keeping with the sentiments of openness as stated in the

Strategic Plan.

The Strategic Plan proposes some wide reaching changes (pages 15-17), most of which came as a complete surprise to me. They

are not in keeping with the Acadia tradition, and while change can be good, I would prefer to see these ideas developed with the needs of our students and faculty in mind.

No comment.

Admin seemed to have hired the consulting firm in the summer of 2004; they were at the VP’s ‘Retreat’ then. The draft AUFA Response is very good, and I’d like to see it circulated, beyond faculty, as soon as possible—we don’t have much time to maneuver in.

I do feel that there were opportunities for faculty to present their views. However, some of these were done in such a silly way (post it notes?) as to be useless. While for others, it is clear that the majority opinion was simply ignored, i.e. I don’t believe the faculty survey results are represented in the final document.

Put simply, if this description of the University’s “vision” were shown to new faculty candidates, we could not hire quality faculty.

No comment.

Although theoretically, efforts were made to consult, in practice, the conclusions seem to have been reached far ahead of time. I don’t know of a single faculty member who would put “transformative, engaged, community-based learning” at the top of their priority list. Yet we knew, months ahead of time, that would be the main conclusion that would be drawn.

Here are the comments I typed into the bottom of my faculty survey, when those were done. I see nothing in the final product to suggest that these cynical views were not fully borne out: “Mostly, the impression of this whole process has been: "We already know what the answers are. We're going to pump money

into internationalization and community-based learning. We will try to generate enthusiasm amongst faculty and students for these initiatives, but in the end we decided long before we started this process that the curriculum was hopelessly out of date, faculty don't know what they're doing, and we have the proper solutions. We want a new way to market Acadia, and it's going to be this engaged learning that GDG liked at Dyson. We will engage in an expensive process, hiring lots of consultants, to come to that con-conclusion in an "open" manner, but that's the conclusion we intend to arrive at, one way or another."

The consultation process was fatally flawed from the start. The body on campus that is the legitimate forum in which I and my colleagues can air and hammer out our views, Arts Faculty Council, was circumvented in an egregious manner. Small groups of "select" faculty members were co-opted into participating in an ad-hoc backroom consultation process that was tainted from the start. I cannot endorse the SPP for this reason alone—it's assembling has shown contempt for the regular and valid procedures for gaining faculty input on university governance related to academic matters.

I see little if any evidence that any of my concerns were taken seriously. The SPP is an exercise in the worst type of top-down management, with senior administrators pretending they'll incorporate constructive criticism and then doing what they wanted to do in the first place.

(Exhibit 1: Gail Gottlieb was talking about many of these priorities when she first arrived here. Exhibit 2: The SPP document bears many indications that it was composed in the workshop of Keeling and Associates somewhere south of the border; for example, see footnote on p.2 re: "Transformative Education", which refers to a paper Keeling wrote, and also note the PR-driven education-speak platitudes that make much of the document read like a boilerplate only slightly tailored for the Acadia admin.

My impression is that our opinions were not taken into account, even though we were “consulted”. Most of the strategic plan was prepared in advance of the consultation process and it has not changed through the process. This is essentially the same platform Gail used when she ran for the position of Dean at Pace University.

I attended several different meetings, but the purpose of these meetings was not to consult, it was to give the appearance of consultation.

My impression is that the strategic plan does not reflect my views. Nothing I said in the various meetings I attended appears in the document. I also felt that the questionnaire we filled out was a seriously flawed instrument. It was designed to elicit certain responses, in order to “confirm” what Keeling & Associates already had prepared prior to the whole “consultation” process.

Although we were given some opportunity to express our views, I do not believe that we were consulted in a meaningful way. For example, I had an opportunity to express views at Senate in an open discussion format. It was simply a “chat” with no minutes or relevant summary of the views expressed being produced in response to the discussion. I guess we are to assume that Keeling (who was in attendance) and senior administrators “listened”. I did receive and respond to the faculty survey, however, the survey was biased and incomplete. It was suggested to senior administrators that to consult effectively they should seek input at the survey development stage. This suggestion was ignored, therefore allowing the survey developers to seek specific responses by asking leading questions on a limited number of topics. The survey did not provide an adequate format for providing meaningful input.

There is nothing in the strategic plan that represents any feedback that I provided. Furthermore, the plan does not represent the feedback that many provided in the Senate discussion. For example, during our Senate discussion we addressed the issue of flexibility – reducing the number of required courses for majors. There was fairly strong opposition to the idea of reducing requirements. One concern raised was the limitations this would place on our students applying to graduate programs with specific requirements. The response provided at the time by Dr. Dinter-Gottlieb was that only a small percentage of our students go to graduate school. I note that Senate’s concerns about increasing flexibility have been ignored in the strategic plan. Furthermore, at a meeting of Senate before the release of the strategic plan Dr. Nilson commented during his report that a common theme in feedback that they were receiving was that small class sizes were important. He said, and I quote almost directly I believe…Is it really class size or is it engagement with faculty? This indicated to me that they were going to take what we said and twist it to fit their vision of Acadia’s strategic plan. The actual document has done nothing to dispel this concern.

I was able to only make it to a couple of the events that were held concerning this topic. Of the ones that I was able to attend, I found that I was not able to contribute much due to the “type” of event that it was. I was also disturbed that the direction seemed to already be chosen before the meetings were held. The

exception was the post-it note session, but that in and of itself was flawed, as the comments of experienced faculty members and educators were treated at the same level as comments from random people who walked off of the street.

No. I feel that the university administration has already chosen the direction in which they want the university to go, and the faculty are just along for the ride. I doubt that they much listened to what faculty had to say on this issue, and I feel that my views of what a university should be and the direction that we should take have

been completely ignored.

There really were lots of opportunities for input; you can’t fault the admin or the committee for that, although obviously there are people who will find a way to do it anyway…

Despite the many and varied opportunities for input from faculty, this report sounds like the same-old, same-old from senior admin.

No comment.

This is a top-down document. It is administration telling faculty what we should be doing to better the university by recycling buzz words, such as engaged learning, and by advocating multidisciplinary research and other ideas that might look good in the local paper. Some of the ideas would be terrible if implemented, so much son that I would consider moving to another “normal” university. I would like to see a plan that is aimed at making the university better by helping Acadia attract the best students and faculty possible and by supporting research and high standards for students. Perhaps the university could award a large contract to AUFA to consult on developing a strategic plan that promotes these goals.

No comment.

The plan looks like the "Hello" speech the president made BEFORE the planning process started!!!!! This is fine, but don't pretend it is anything but the new president's vision.

Mostly my own fault. I did not seek out the occasions to participate.

My sense of Acadia’s behaviour guided by this strategic plan will be fundamentally opposed to my desires for institutions of higher learning in Canada. To contract a consultant whose forte is the commoditisation of American health care is to predetermine the outcome of the process. Undoubtedly, Acadia will pursue a course of profiting from both students and the local community, attempting to enhance its reputation on the volunteer efforts of the student body and the work of faculty while finding ways to raise incremental income from as many endeavours as possible.

Is internationalization the result of a laudable ideal or the realization that our own population will not produce enough students for the capacity of the university system in Canada? At Acadia, will it be a way to raise more money or a truly multi-cultural educational experience?

Right from the beginning, I had a strong sense that the senior administration was working with a pre-determined agenda and a set of assumptions and conclusions that ‘”faculty participants” had little or no control over.

No comment.

I felt there were ample opportunities and my involvement depended upon my desire to be involved.

Y and N

The version of the strategic plan that was recently released is a barely palatable “mishmash” of values and half-formulated themes that have collide with extant objectives. In my opinion, it represents no one’s, and everyone’s views. The real issue will be future versions that operationalize some of these grand themes.

These events happened, but I saw them as BS and had other commitments on the “post-it note” day. To be honest, I expected that anything I said would be ignored anyway and did

not want to help with their façade? From the start – hiring an American business to do this, made it clear that this was an administrative BS piece.

Obviously not in that many of the recommendations I not only disagree with, but find infuriating and embarrassing.

No comment.

The main aspects of the plan seem to have been written before the consultative process. The consultation appears to have been conducted with the main goal of eliciting opinions that the authors were looking for, and only these were cherry picked to justify the plan. I can say that the pre-eminent role of the environment, the weakening of the major in the guise of flexibility an broadening education, the concentration on interdisciplinary research, and community engagement were themes which did not emerge from below, but seem to have been imposed from above.

Opportunities galore for “consultation”. I am not convinced, however, that consultation with faculty had an impact on what seemed to me a foregone conclusion in terms of the strategic plan.

See answer to first question.

No comment.

This plan offers nothing of interest to me, or any other faculty member I know. A preferable plan would be to create more tenured positions - thereby reducing course loads and allowing faculty to pursue their own unique research interests.

As an individual, I may have had the opportunity to be adequately consulted , but only because I do not currently have the heavy workload of many current faculty members.

The consultation process was flawed, if only because local community members, retired faculty, et al. had the time to participate in the various meetings, while the most important group on campus, i.e. hard-working full-time faculty, did not.

While the Report contains many positive and even idealistic proposals, it suffers from a general lack of documentation. At a university, this is not a frill.

One may reasonably ask who it was that wrote the Report.

The vice-president academic? A committee?

Could it be that a consulting firm formulated the Report with proposals such as “engaged learning”? If so, what consulting firm was engaged to inform us of “engaged learning.”?

Was the firm connected with Acadia?

Lots of opportunities were provided for those who wished to take them.

Probably not, but I doubt anyone would be able to say they were totally satisfied by their own representation. More opportunities will arise in the subsequent discussion - the procedure is not over yet.

Although there was a pretence of consultation with faculty, invitations to show meetings is not the same as actual consultation. The administration seems to me to have pre-empted any really critical examination of Acadia’s future through a process which really has very little to do with what faculty members actually think and feel about teaching, learning, and personal transformation.

For the same reasons.

I certainly had my say in one of the earliest meetings but that was really the only one. Subsequent “consultations” were really the VP holding one way “conversations”. The Departmental meetings achieved nothing, particularly as responses to questions were invariably general or evasive and too much time went to presentations from the President or VP that just restated the same old thing. All the key “pieces” in the report fit what the President’s election platform and didn’t, I don’t think, “bubble up” from the “consultation process”. The report that adequately reflects my views is the AUFA response to the strategic plan.

No comment.

I agree with the views expressed in AUFA’s document in response to the Strategic Initiative document.

No comment.

Like many faculty, I feel that the consultative process was largely engineered to reinforce conclusions and priorities set by the administration before the consultations began. I have heard from many faculty that the consultations were staged and largely not dialogues or discussions, and thus not consultations ultimately. But leaving aside the process, I certainly subscribe to the widespread sense that the vision outlined in the Strategic Plan doesn’t reflect faculty’s views of where the university (and I mean this term in its holistic sense) should be going. I have heard little from faculty that suggests that what is in the Strategic Plan has been derived from input from faculty.