Judith Ramaley
President
Portland State University
Sherwin Davidson
Vice Provost and Dean, School of Extended Studies
Portland State University
Barbara Holland
Executive Director, Community Relations
Portland State University
Marvin Kaiser
Dean, Liberal Arts and Sciences
Portland State University
Michale Reardon
Provost
Portland State University
Wayne Bennett
Senior Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School
Clemson University
Leading Large-Scale Institutional Change: Successes and Challenges
Practical Changes at a Large Urban Public University: Portland State University
Large-scale change can result from a financial or governance crisis or from a leadership change, or can be generated intentionally through an internal process. If planned systemic change of a developmental nature is the goal, it is more likely to occur with the strong support of top leadership and within the context of a strong and clear mission statement, an environment that promotes a candid assessment of the current conditions at the institution, and a pattern of faculty roles and responsibilities that support the institutional mission.According to Barbara Holland, executive director of community relations, the process of institutionwide change has been underway at Portland State University since 1990. This highly participatory process was initiated just prior to the passage of a tax initiative that led to the dramatic reallocation of state general fund support for higher education in Oregon. As a result, an internally initiated process blended with an externally generated crisis to provide the context for institutional change.
In the first year, the change process began in the usual way with a strategic planning exercise that yielded a new and distinctive mission statement and a set of strategic goals. This was followed by an evaluation of the institutional factors essential for success of the strategic direction set by the plan. An external consultant provided data and methodologies for this administrative review, which was actually conducted by a faculty/staff team. The first major change began in the administrative support units and involved a mixture of strategies including consolidation of related units, reengineering of administrative processes, introduction of a quality initiative to improve support services, a staff development program, and investment in new technology to support new management information systems and campus communication and connectivity. The funds released through these efforts, combined with academic resources freed up during the budget reduction process and early retirements, were utilized as an investment pool to support curricular reform and faculty development related to research and learning in an urban setting.
Changing a curriculum is difficult because faculty accept the curriculum as inherited and as a given. Portland State used Toombs and Tierney's concept of curriculum to guide their thinking about transforming the curriculum, namely, that "the curriculum is an intentional design for learning negotiated by the faculty in light of their specialized knowledge and in the context of social expectation and student needs."
According to Michael Reardon, provost, "all changes should be based on a very serious research process, not faculty gathered to sit around and remember what [the curriculum] was like, or simply deciding through a negotiation of self-interest what a curricular change should be."
Most of the change that has resulted so far has been in general education, although reviews of the undergraduate major and of graduate education are underway. Portland State has made a distinction between general education and liberal education, recognizing that both are appropriate goals for undergraduate learning. Portland State has replaced its traditional lower-division distribution requirements with a new four-tier curriculum extending throughout the undergraduate experience. In the first two years, students acquire skills and competencies in a set of inquiry courses built on themes such as "Einstein's Universe." In the sophomore and junior years, students are guided into "connected learning" in a sequence of cluster courses organized on a central theme. The final component is a capstone experience, required of all undergraduates, that involves interdisciplinary teams of students who work with faculty and community participants on a project designed to meet a significant community need. This experience serves three goals:
- to enable students to apply the expertise learned in their major and in earlier phases of the general education curriculum to real issues and problems;
- to give students experience working on an interdisciplinary team that provides the opportunity for collaboration with other fields of specialization;
- to allow every student to become actively involved in a community-based learning experience that has significant value for the community as well.
Involving Faculty in Change
University structures can be reorganized and a curriculum redesigned by a small number of faculty but, unless the faculty experience changes and significant numbers of faculty buy in to the changes, these early efforts will not change the core business of the institution, and change, no matter how well launched, will not continue. Marvin Kaiser, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, described how Portland State turned curricular change into a scholarly activity rather than a negotiated process based on self-interest by exposing faculty to a broad range of ideas about the goals and design of a successful undergraduate experience. Several faculty attended national conferences where recent research on the undergraduate experience was discussed. Major contributors to the national debate on higher education, such as Ernest Boyer, visited the campus and participated in conversations with faculty. The institution became one of the first PEW Roundtable members and utilized the roundtable model to review Policy Perspectives on higher education and interpret national issues at a local level.The faculty were asked to study the concept of academic productivity and define research and teaching productivity in an urban, community-based context. The provost established a universitywide committee to develop new promotion and tenure guidelines supportive of the urban university mission of Portland State. Both in evaluating current practices and in developing a new working definition of faculty roles and responsibilities and new standards of excellence in an urban university context, the faculty experienced tension. To the faculty, the president appeared to be calling for more professional outreach; the provost was talking about undergraduate education; and the dean was emphasizing research. To whom should the faculty listen? To whom did they owe allegiance?
The resolution to this apparent disparity became clear when a task force of fifteen junior and senior faculty rewrote the promotion and tenure guidelines based on a broader definition of scholarship derived from the work of Ernest Boyer and Robert Diamond, adapted to an urban university mission. Each faculty member, in consultation with the department, will now develop an individual scholarly agenda that is consistent with the departmental mission and goals as well as the overall university mission. Uncertainties remain about how to resolve the potential conflict between individual and departmental interests and the needs of the university for faculty involvement in collective responsibilities such as general education, and about how to document and assess academic productivity when faculty are involved in both departmental and interdepartmental projects and activities. In addition, fears still remain that the broader definition of scholarship will water down "real" scholarly activity, with particular questions about whether community involvement and professional outreach are legitimate forms of research and scholarly activity. The application of rigorous standards to these activities may allay these concerns.
The Integration of Teaching, Research, and Outreach
Sherwin Davidson, vice provost and dean of the School of Extended Studies, described how the newly established Center for Academic Excellence supports the integration of teaching, research, and outreach at Portland State. The center emerged when three separate faculty task forces all recommended the creation of support centers. The center is built on the philosophy of faculty leadership of change. Its goal is to coordinate and stimulate, not direct or control, the introduction of new approaches to teaching and learning, community/university alliances and partnerships, and assessment. The center currently has three core functions aligned with the basic pillars of the university mission:- Community partnerships and regional alliances -- to develop excellent working relationships with community partners (a significant form of professional outreach at Portland State);
- Teaching and learning excellence -- to design new educational delivery systems, encourage faculty development and research on learning and the impact of the new community-based research and curricular models -- provide professional development opportunities for department chairs, and provide programs for teaching assistants;
- Assessment center -- to focus on faculty classroom assessment of student learning, involve faculty in the work of the Center for Academic Excellence, assess university-community partnerships, and work with faculty and academic departments to evaluate the outcomes for their majors and the impact of their curricular improvements.
Discussion and Conclusion
Michael Reardon posed the question of whether it is possible to achieve apolitical ends without utilizing political means to resolve conflicting interests. Is it, in other words, either possible or desirable to try to escape campus politics?Responding to questions about whether the changes at Portland State are being recognized and accepted, Reardon said that both faculty and students have been positive about the results and that the campus has entertained a steady stream of visitors from other universities interested in studying the changes at Portland State. Kaiser noted that faculty who play more traditional roles sometimes wonder if they are valued less for the work they do. Davidson described two recent examples of community recognition of the changes at Portland State, including a recent City Council resolution recognizing the establishment of a long-term partnership for water quality.
Could this model work at a rural university? Holland believed that it could be applied to any institution. The first step is to identify the decision-making process and culture in your organization that will allow people to approach this kind of change and one that will create the right kinds of interactions with people in the local community to make the campus and its resources more accessible to community participants. Portland State has been successful in its transformational activities because the executive team posed the right questions, framing them as a set of research problems that allowed faculty to approach change utilizing their traditional way of conducting research, and then allowed the process that had been set in motion to reach its own logical conclusions. This ensured faculty ownership of the decision-making processes, based on a clear scholarly agenda of significant questions about the nature and quality of the undergraduate experience at Portland State.