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updated 2/02/04

Brian Lofman, Co-Chair

The purpose of my opening remarks is to bring you up-to-date on what ASEC has been doing over the past several weeks. We have held 10 meetings, including many lengthy meetings since the new year began. We’ve been meeting twice each week, and have engaged in the following 8 sets of activities.

Mike Edelstein gave us an overview of the founding of the institution, how the College has evolved over time, and specific events that had a bearing on critical decisions that were made by administrators. This helped some of the newer faculty members in particular to understand why the structure took the forms that it has, and how much of what we see and experience today is an outgrowth–however elegant or ungainly–of those formative years.

We requested information and data about convening groups and programs, faculty, students, courses, organizational charts, budgeted resources, and facilities. Babs Varano in Institutional Research has provided us with most of this information. Some of it is available through the reports our institution must generate for accreditation and planning purposes.

We have taken a look at the current academic structure so that, to as great a degree as possible, we as Committee members are all on the same page. This then served as a kind of baseline for our deliberations in pondering, where do we go from here? Perhaps most importantly, we realized early on that convening group membership information was incomplete, so we embarked on a venture to gather more complete and current information–we’re still in the midst of integrating it all.

We believed that taking a look at the academic structure of other institutions might provide us with comparative frames of reference as we delved into the intricacies of our own structure. Committee members examined structures at 10 diverse institutions located in the northeast, across the nation, and even internationally. It is important to note that we did NOT undertake this research to uncover a structure that we would somehow impose on the College; rather, we hoped to gain insights that would be infused into our brainstorming activities.

We have considered the models proposed by Roger Johnson and Mike Edelstein. We also reviewed statements from individual faculty members posted on the ASEC webpage (http://phobos.ramapo.edu/facassem/asecpage.html).

We’ve looked at Task Force Reports: on Teacher Education, on International Education, on Graduate Programs, and on the Library.

We conducted an open forum on Wednesday, January 21 to hear from the faculty at large. Most of those who presented had already submitted a statement or a proposal that appears on the ASEC webpage. We as a Committee were able to ask questions and get clarification so that we might gain greater insights through this process than if we had relied on the documents alone.

We have scheduled and had conversations with multiple invited guests. We met with a representative of student government. We also conversed with Pat Chang of Student Affairs. We met with John Mulhern about teacher education, Cliff Peterson about international education, and Angela Cristini and Anita Stellenwerf about graduate programs. The Committee has focused not only on the current state of affairs, but has been looking to the future: What will be the size of these programs? How do and will these programs provide and employ resources from the various academic areas across campus? How do these programs fit within the context of the institution’s mission and vision? And so on. We also spent time with the Deans in a very lively and interesting panel session. Time and again, our Committee was hearing the never-ending dilemma: "so much to do with so little resources." It seems that no position in the academic arena has been left untouched in this regard.

We had a lengthy conversation with Sandy Pfeiffer concerning factors that might help guide us as we accomplish our charge as a committee. He encouraged us to recognize through our deliberations that students should be our primary concern, and that our efforts must dovetail with the work of CLA on the proposed unit plan, not only in substance, but also in timing.

Each Committee member highlighted specific structural issues being faced by the various schools. We later held a detailed workshop session where every Committee member discussed both strengths and weaknesses of our current academic structure. Shortly, Martha Ecker will be providing you with an overview of our current structure, and Rena Bacon will follow-up with the results of our discussion about strengths and weaknesses. You will then have an opportunity to talk about the current structure in the first set of Roundtables.

The Committee decided to break into three task groups and engage in model-building activities. These groups were based on certain areas of concern that emerged in our early deliberations:

1. Interdisciplinary and disciplinary issues.
2. The other 3 pillars of the institution’s mission, encompassing experiential learning, intercultural understanding, and international education.
3. Issues related to student population, student needs, and academic resources.

Each group discussed how a structural model might best be built; this resulted in areas of agreement and disagreement within and across task groups. In some cases, individuals broke off from their group and developed their own model. The idea behind this exercise was NOT to generate a consensus at this early stage, but rather to explore structural variations as further input into our deliberations, and to provide you today with a sense of the diverse ideas with which we are grappling. Later on, Kai Fikentscher, another Co-Chair of the Committee, will be introducing these models and their presenters. You will have a chance to give input in the second set of Roundtables.

The 3 Co-Chairs and indeed all Committee members have spent considerable time deciding how to structure the process, how to handle the questions before us, how to engage the campus community in this endeavor, and how to schedule our time so that our deliberations are as inclusive as possible. Given the size of our Committee–we have a total of 14 members including ex officio members–our planning efforts have been quite involving, but ultimately productive.

I hope I have succeeded in apprising you on just what we have been doing over the past frosty weeks. I also hope you will agree that the process we have been following is systematic, analytic, and creative. Finally, I hope you sense that we are doing the best we possibly can, given the weighty charge before us.

Now I am pleased to introduce another Co-Chair of the Committee, who will provide you with a rundown of some of the key substantive issues we have been addressing, and how our evolving conversations have taken shape. Please welcome Carol Bonilla Bowman.