Address to
the Board of Control on April 29, 2011
Chair Richardson and members of
the board; distinguished audience
We would like to first inform you
of the results of the evaluation conducted recently on the President and the
executive team. The opportunity
to evaluate the administration is an important faculty and staff function,
which, if conducted carefully, can give faculty and staff a stronger sense of
participation in the governance of the university. More importantly, it could lead to an
institution that is more efficiently organized.
President
Mroz has almost always insisted on these evaluations and this speaks volumes to
the mature and responsive type of government with which he runs the
institution. Indeed he participates by
preparing a summary of accomplishments, contributing questions and reviewing the entire evaluation before it is distributed to faculty and staff. We have had difficulty judging the value of
this process since in previous years less than 20% of evaluations
were returned. One could claim that this
low response rate was itself indicative of an institution that is being
properly run since perhaps some may have felt that if there is nothing worth
complaining about, why complete this task.
On the opposite side of this is the claim that it does not matter what
anyone says, it does not make a difference.
We in the Senate reject this and have tried over the years to assure
people that these evaluations are important.
During the last few years we have implemented different evaluation mechanisms seeking to illicit a greater rate of response.
Some strategies are outlined on
this slide. The end result of these trials is that we
have settled on the Survey Monkey which allows for questions and a space for
commentary after each question. We
arranged for a summary of these evaluations by the Senate’s Administrative Policy
Committee to be presented during the Senate meeting which was attended by President Mroz and this summary is also
available on the Senate’s website in keeping with the traditional practice. It is important to note that if the
faculty and staff see none of the results of the evaluations, a sense of
mistrust and futility may result. We
believe that the strategies we have followed this year, namely, having the President directly address the evaluation in the Senate on April 20th and also distributing these
comments unedited only to you and the President will increase confidence in this system and
result in more meaningful insights into the running of this institution. Incidentally, this mechanism of distribution is not detailed
in Senate Procedure 503.1.1. We will
review this circumstance next fall with Provost Seelwith the intention of formalizing this procedure.
Our current survey strategy does
appear to be somewhat successful as the response rate has increased over the
years and we are now up to about a 37% response rate. The one drawback is the length of the
commentary at 160 condensed pages.
This next slide
depicts the breakdown of the responses.
Unfortunately we have 115 responses of unknown status. The total at 518 completed evaluations is
equivalent to the 37 % response rate. The
exact numbers of employees is also not clear.
In any case, I would just like to give you the Senate’s perspective of
these results. It is as you know
important to provide some sort of historical insight into the data and President
Mroz in recognition of this provides for an identical set of questions to be
listed.
This slide shows the data from the
2009-2010 evaluation and the next depicts
that from this year's. Noting the fact
that both lines decrease significantly from left to right, the scores from the
faculty have increased for most of these questions. At the same time, the scores from the responses
of those claiming to represent the administration have decreased.
One conclusion from this next slide
could be that the administration emphasizes research possibly at the
expense of teaching and service. Part of this problem we believe is a lack of communication since it is clear that the University has to improve in research so as to present a more competitive and desirable outlook for prospective undergraduate students. This should allow the university to distinguish itself from among the other universities down south which have chosen recently to offer engineering degrees. We believe that the university should continue its efforts to enhance undergraduate teaching while at the same time doing more to convince students and employers of the importance of current research objectives.
These next slides depict various
aspects of administrative
affairs, personnel
and balance
and diversity. On this slide, we
note a pronounced divergence between the scores by the administration and the
rest. One possible conclusion from this is that
we do need to work on our undergraduate programs and that the responses to
question 23 were possibly confused in the sense that the administrative responders
answered this question as if diversity was being promoted, which it is, whereas
the responses from Faculty and Staff addressed the reality of the situation.
President’s Mroz’s own questions
illustrate the fact as seen on this slide that his
campus fora are reasonably well attended, about roughly 75% of responders
think we are doing the same or better than most universities and about 65% read
his statement
before filling out the survey. Therefore
from this, the Senate concludes that it is the collective opinion of the 518 souls
who responded that under President Mroz the
university has continued to make good progress under difficult financial
circumstances.
As I have mentioned previously,
we did have many presentations this last year in the senate and a summary of
these is presented in the next series of slides. It is important to note that there were
several meetings held between members of the executive and various senate
committees as illustrated on this slide and
we also continued the process of having the winners of our teaching and
research awards make presentations to the Senate.
Indeed we now feature a picture as
seen on this slide
which depicts the work of our research award recipient on the Senate main page.
During the course of the previous
year, various executives also presented material to the senate as shown on this
slide. This is a very important function since it
serves to communicate information to the faculty and staff and, in some cases,
allows for suggestions to be made to effect meaningful and substantive change
to some of these proposals. It is also
very important as a vehicle to distribute information in an official capacity.
We also heard from representatives
of our graduate and undergraduate student reps and in summary had the numbers
of meetings illustrated on this slide. It is noteworthy that in addition to all
these various presentations, the Senate and its various committees deliberated
on at least 52 proposals.
These are shown in detail on the next
three slides, slide
1, slide
2, slide
3 and as you can see many of these proposals address the issue of
eliminating and shelving of programs.
Many of these degrees were not offered for decades and it made no sense
to have these still listed on the books.
I am not certain if this was a comprehensive cleansing of our programs
and we stand ready to shelve and eliminate more depending on what Provost Seel
discovers.
Finally we note that the
administration did approve proposals 5-11 and 6-11 which addressed the
contentious issues of governance at the departmental level and the searching
and evaluation of Chairs respectively.
The Senate looks forward to the implementation of these proposals and we
are prepared to address any problems that may arise as a consequence of their
implementation. While the inner workings
of the administration remain unknown, we acknowledge and
are grateful for the efforts of Provost Seel in effecting the realization of
these proposals. Indeed one can conclude
that the numerous interactions that I have mentioned here resulted in the increased
participation in the Presidential Evaluation this year. In itself this could be a sign of the healthy
nature of the collaboration between the administration and the faculty and
staff.
Unfortunately I need to rush
off to pick up my wife and drive 10.5 hours to attend a graduation ceremony for
our son down south. I will also not be
able to attend the festivities tomorrow but my good friend Professor Emeritus
Marshall Logue will substitute and assist in the hooding of my two PhD
graduates. Logue was an invaluable
source of advice over the years for me and my two students both in chemistry
and other aspects as well.
Thanks
for listening.