New Plan for '21st Century Maricopa'

In an article titled Efficiency from Incompetence, David Moltz, writing in Inside Higher Ed, examines tensions in and around the Maricopa Community College District. Maricopa's board of directors hired external consultants for $1.4M and has asked its chancellor to review for implementation the many changes in the resulting plan, which is titled "21st Century Maricopa." There are many interesting dimensions to the circumstances. SCUPers will be interested in looking at the plan and its supporting documents. According to Molz, tensions are so high that many thought the consultants would be hired for the plan's implementation, but the board has charged the chancellor with the redesign of the entire district. From Moltz's report:

Months after it was chastised by an independent panel for displaying “a consistent lack of civility” and creating “a climate of fear and mistrust,” the governing board of the Maricopa County Community College District has asked its chancellor to review and possibly implement a sweeping series of recommendations to improve the “efficiency” of the Arizona system.

The plan to redesign the district, marketed under the moniker “21st Century Maricopa,” is the result of $1.4 million worth of Alvarez & Marsal consulting work requested by the governing board last summer. The request, however, was made before the college district’s accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, encouraged an independent panel to examine an anonymous complaint it received alleging that the Maricopa board had put the district’s accreditation at risk by severely micromanaging educators.

The board’s hiring of outside consultants to weed out redundancies in the district and find further ways to save money is viewed by many local observers as a slight against Maricopa's leadership.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

What We Found This Morning

Sometimes it's lonely on campus, being a planner. Start planning now to attend higher education's premier planning conference for 2010, SCUP–45, July 10–14 in Minneapolis, where you can network and converse with more than 1,000 of your peers and colleagues.

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What happens when "creative clutter" meets transparency in a new, elegant building? Robert Campbell reviews the new MIT Media Lab building at MIT.

Frank Moss, the Media Lab’s director, puts it this way: “It will take time to regain the sense of mess and to repopulate with junk.’’

It’s the classic marriage of form and content. The new building is Snow White and the Media Lab is Mad Max. Time will reveal how well the marriage works.

That said, viewed simply and purely as a work of architecture, this is a wonderful building. You can think of it as an exercise in transparency. The Media Lab has long been famous for hiding itself in a building by I.M. Pei that was a nearly windowless box. The new building, which joins the Pei at one edge, is exactly the opposite. From outside, you can look all the way through it from one end to the other. It’s sheathed in shimmering glass and metal screens that allow about half the sunlight through to the interior. You feel that the building is temptingly veiled, not blanketed.

NEW! Let us know what you think of this type of resource. Mini-poll below.

A quick look at our early morning sweep through the higher ed media on Monday, November 30, 2009. Our guess is that you'll especially like Today's Campus' new Campus Photos section and University Business' 35 Smart Building Ideas.

@ Inside Higher Ed

• Sweetbriar College (VA) Enrollment Decline and Resulting Budget Shortfall
• Nevada System Chancellor Suggests Community Colleges Might Limit Enrollments
• How Do You Change a Culture Without Blaming the People Who Led Before?
• India/USA, Different Higher Ed Challenges
• New Programs: Sustainable Building, Library Science, Architecture

@ The Chronicle of Higher Education

• The Buildings & Grounds Blog: $1.5B in Projects at Stanford; Architecture Firm Sues Ohio State; Reactions to Demise of Berkeley Museum Plan; New Buildings and Projects at New England Conservatory, UCF, Lasell College, and NCSU; Boston College Plans 160,000 sf Academic Building; Roosevelt U; Roosevelt U's Planned 32-Story Building, Classrooms & Housing
• Harsh Economy Drives New Brand of Communication from Top
• Legislation to Allow Foreign Universities Into India May Face New Delay
• Education Secretary Warns Colleges of Limits to Help From Federal Budget
• Crisis Fatigue in a Difficult Economy
• Dos and Don'ts of Task Forces

@ Today's Campus

• Management Roundup: Best paid faculty. Underpaid women. Innovative risk management. An interview with a think tank prez who thinks differently. Celebrity MBA program. New Organizational Design for colleges. And more.
• Global Times Reward Global Study
• Q&S w/Kimberly CLine, President of Mercy College
• Campus Photos of Special Appeal

@ University Business

• 35 Smart Building Ideas
• Pushing ADA Beyond the Limits
• The Role of Colleges in Disaster Relief
• The People's Colleges: No Frills, No Debt, Good Deals

Your thoughts?

The New Jersey Coastal Communiversity: Access through Partnerships

SCUP leader Arnie Gelfman, of Brookdale Community College, has been telling us about the New Jersey Coastal Communiversity for some time. Now we can learn more by reading this article:

The New Jersey Coastal Communiversity, led by Brookdale Community College, is a partnership of colleges and universities that provides local access to postassociate degree education. In operation for six years, the partnership exemplifies the strength of a collaborative model of higher education institutions to address statewide needs. Alan Deutschman's research on organizational change (Deutschman, 2007) posits that the three factors of a successful change process are Relationships, Repeating, and Reframing, from which a threatening Change or Die challenge can be transformed into a Change and Thrive scenario. The Communiversity received the 2008 Bellwether Award in the area of Planning, Governance, and Finance. This article presents the development of the Communiversity through the Change or Die framework with a focus on planning, governance, finance, outcomes and lessons learned.

Is Greater Financial Independence Ahead for Universities?

"Unpredented pressure" on current financial models for public institutions is expected by Moody's Investors Services: 

The financial effects of recessions are typically not felt immediately by leading global public universities because tough fiscal policy decisions often must funnel through a lengthy government budget process before impacting university funding. The government budgeting process, therefore, often renders university financial performance a lagging indicator of economic activity. This delayed impact is even more pronounced in the current recession due to the prevalence of short-term government stimulus spending, which often may postpone or soften funding reductions for universities. However, when stimulus spending expires and governments seek to achieve better budget balance, many universities are likely to experience substantial funding reductions or, at best, an extended period of limited funding growth. At the same time, universities face demand to enroll additional students as alternatives to education (i.e., employment) are weakened by economic contraction, forcing many people to seek opportunities in higher education to enhance skills and credentials. With policies of limiting enrollment places and tuition fees, market pressure to add capacity, and government funding unlikely to increase, Moody’s expects unprecedented pressure on the current financial model of public universities.

AGB's Trusteeship Magazine: Several Articles

Nonmembers of AGB can no longer access the entire contents of this great magazine. Here is the current Table of Contents, though. (PDF) The lead article in the current, July/August 2009 issue is titled "The Gremlins of Governance: by Richard Chait, and its description reads: "Many college boards wrestle with 'three gremlins of governance.' None haunts every campus to the same degree, and yet all are familiar and problematic." Other articles of interest in this issue include: "Your Institution in a Global Economy" by William Freund; "Getting By Isn't Good Enough for Higher Education" by Geanie Morrison and Denise Merrill; and "Presidential Transition Teams: Fostering a Collaborative Process," by Rochard B. Artman and Mark Franz.

The Association of Governing Boards of Colleges and Universities (AGB) has recently published a new report titled, "The AGB Survey of Higher Education Governance." Its executive summary and introduction is available at no cost here. (PDF) Description: "A wide-ranging study of best practices and policies for higher education governance reveals that while many important policies and practices are in place to guide the work of college and university governing boards, there is also room for improvement. Covering issues such as assessment of individual trustees to presidential compensation, the report, based on a survey of 700 respondents, is the first comprehensive and focused look at higher education governance: how well boards are meeting their responsibilities, what issues are at the top of their agendas, and which policies and good practices guide their work." The full report can be purchased here.

Leveraging Crisis for Competitive Advantage

This essay gets filed under the heading of "Never waste a crisis," this author examines whether institutions are just "weathering the storm" or engaged in significant realignment. He finds that private universities have a competitive advantage in circumstances like the one we are in now.

University competition is a game played on the leading edge of institutional behavior, not at the center. The optimal strategy is to move money from the less productive trailing edge to the more productive leading edge. Executed consistently over time, this strategy delivers an ever-increasing leading edge of highly competitive quality that pulls the center of the university’s operations relentlessly forward towards higher standards of performance. The financial crisis cycle provides periodic opportunities to move more money from the trailing edge for investment in the leading edge. Those institutions that take advantage of these crises benefit greatly.

Downturn Threatens the Faculty's Role in Running Colleges

We keep hearing the phrase "Never waste a crisis," and that seems to be running through everyone's heads these days. Robin Wilson describes how some faculty are concerned that the current crisis will be leveraged to decrease the faculty's role in higher education governance:

Professors are losing their grip. Tough economic times are leading administrators to propose swift changes that short-circuit faculty governance, long a prized principle that gives professors wide-ranging authority over educational matters.

The results, faculty members say, are hastily conceived plans that reorganize academic programs, decrease professors' roles in shaping the curriculum, and jeopardize tenure applications — all done with little advice from the faculty, in the name of saving money.

. . .

"A decline in resources has made administrators more interested in becoming independent movers and shakers," says Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors.

Antioch: Report From Ground Zero

This lengthy op-ed from Inside Higher Ed by Paula Treichler protrays her perspective of the past year in the history of Antioch University, as someone deeply involved in activism on behalf of students, faculty, staff, and alumn - but no longer an official member of the institution's management or governance. (Official views and news can be found on Antioch's Story of the College, and on other portions of its website. The op-ed piece is introduced in this way:

Antioch University was given an advance copy of the following op-ed, with the permission of the author, and offered the chance to respond with its own statement that would have appeared simultaneously with the publication of this piece, so that the university could offer its views and analysis of the issues discussed. After initially indicating that it would do so, and confirming as late as Wednesday afternoon that it would do so, the university stopped returning calls or responding to e-mails about theop-ed piece and indicated through an outside public relations official that it would not respond at this time. At the same time, the university’s lawyers sent a letter objecting to any use of the phrase “NonStop Antioch,” the former name of an effort mentioned in this op-ed.

Several from AGB's "Trusteeship" for March/April 2008

The Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB) has a bimonthly magazine, Trusteeship, which is widely read by college and university trustees—probably including yours. It's only available to members of AGB in print, but AGB publishes the entire issue, not separated out into articles, as a PDF which can be downloaded (for now) by anyone. You can find the latest here (PDF). It includes, among other items of interest, the following articles:

• Do Rankings Reward Poor Institutional Decisionmaking?; 
  
• Moving a Board to High Performance; 
  
• Balancing Sports Spending With Campus Values; 
  
• Email Risks for Boards and Presidents; and
  
• Trustee's Roles in "Green" Campuses.