Get Herald RSSAt the fourth anniversary of its adoption, the Plan for Academic Enrichment - a comprehensive statement of the University's goals - is being reexamined on every level. A review of the Plan, the first full evaluation since its inception, was released last month after a meeting of the Corporation, the University's highest governing body.
The study calls on the University to improve on initiatives included in the original plan, such as providing support for faculty. It also recommends that the University add new focuses to the plan, such as encouraging growth in the Graduate School, raising Brown's global profile and continuing fundraising to support all the initiatives.
Titled "Phase II," the review was almost a year in the making. It includes input from the faculty, staff, graduate students, the Undergraduate Council of Students and "anybody who had thoughts," said Richard Spies, executive vice president for planning and senior adviser to the president. Spies and Assistant to the President Marisa Quinn wrote the review, which includes a statement from President Ruth Simmons, who has made the plan a cornerstone of her presidency.
Simmons and the Corporation called for the review last spring. The Corporation endorsed the document at its meeting last month.
"Any time when an institution is growing rapidly, there's always a reassessment process that has to go on," Secretary of the University Albert Dahlberg said last month.
Supporting faculty
The University is nearing the original Plan's goal of creating 100 new faculty positions, which would increase faculty size nearly 20 percent from 2001. But the infusion of new faculty has not been matched by support for graduate programs, research and departmental budgets, faculty members said in a report included in the review.
"Absorbing this expanding faculty has placed considerable pressure on stagnant departmental budgets, static or declining staff and graduate student pools, and in some areas physical facilities," the Faculty Executive Committee said in its report, which was included in the Plan's revision. "There is a genuine unease that if this situation is not corrected soon, the tremendous advances made to date will evaporate and the investments will fail."
Spies acknowledged that infrastructure has not kept pace with hiring new faculty.
"It's one thing to recruit them here" and another to support them, he said. "We've got some catching up to do."
It's not sensible to "race ahead" and continue hiring at a high rate while leaving other initiatives behind, said Ruth Colwill, associate professor of psychology and chair of the FEC. The faculty report called for slowing the hiring of additional faculty, or hiring less-experienced faculty, as options to help solve the problem.
Still, Spies said, most people involved with the review thought faculty growth had been good for the University. "Nobody disagrees with that," he said.
In their report, professors also expressed dissatisfaction with what they called a "star system" that characterizes the recent growth in hiring. They argued that the University invests too much in bringing big-name faculty to Brown and not enough to support of those faculty already here. But that concern is not widespread among faculty, Colwill said.
One critical support structure for faculty is the Graduate School, which the review acknowledges received short shrift in the original Plan.
"We probably underestimated the degree to which the Graduate School had to grow," Spies said.
The revised Plan marks growth of the Grad School as a specific goal, particularly in the Ph.D. programs. The school is currently crafting numerical targets for that growth, Dean of the Graduate School Sheila Bonde said - growth that will, in turn, require support for additional graduate students.
Undergraduate life
The preliminary report of the Task Force on Undergraduate Education, released in January, takes its directives from the Plan and in turn forms the basis for the review's analysis of undergraduate education.
The Corporation enacted one specific goal of the Plan - improving financial aid packages for undergraduate students - at the same meeting in which it endorsed the Plan's review.
The review also calls for improvements to advising, as did the task force report. But it also questions the quality of undergraduates' residential experiences.
The review sets a goal of having 90 percent of undergraduates live on campus, an increase from the 80 percent who currently do so. It calls for building rooms more attractive to upperclassmen, such as apartment-style housing. An increase of 10 percent in housing would mean making room for 600 new beds, according to the review of the Plan. But that plan will depend heavily on when financing becomes available, since plans for a new dorm have been sidelined by other building priorities, such as new athletic facilities and a student center. Still, administrators know that Brown will have a new dorm, Spies said - they just don't know when.
"A truly global university"
Brown's internationalization agenda has undergone huge changes since the Plan's birth and occupies a much more prominent place in the updated Plan. What began as an inquiry into how Brown could raise its international profile has now become a set of plans endorsed by the Corporation, said David Kennedy '76, vice president for international affairs.
Those goals include recruiting students and faculty from overseas as well as strengthening the Watson Institute for International Studies and the international relations program.
Kennedy also recognized the importance of language studies in achieving the University's internationalization goals. The FEC noted in its report that language classes are larger at Brown than they are at peer institutions. Kennedy said he is working with Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron on the issue. The faculty also called for more support for faculty traveling to lectures and symposiums, a key method of raising Brown's profile overseas. Kennedy said he is investigating how to pay for more travel.
"You have to be able to keep in touch with your global peers," he said.
Looking ahead
The Plan's goals have been intimately tied to the Campaign for Academic Enrichment, which, as of Dec. 31, has raised $1.14 billion out of its goal of $1.4 billion by 2010, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Of that $1.14 billion, about $500 million in unrestricted cash will go toward the Plan, with another $120 million going to causes other than primary Plan objectives, the report says.
But since certain aspects of the Plan, such as growth of faculty and graduate students, will require additional funding in the coming years, the review notes that fundraising is more important than ever.
"Rather than winding down fund-raising upon completion of the Campaign, we will need to increase the level of fund-raising and build on the success of the Campaign to move to an even higher level of philanthropic support," the review says.
Beyond support for faculty and graduate students, the construction of new facilities called for by the Plan will consume a large chunk of the Campaign's funds.
Brown must spend at least $600 to $700 million on facilities between 2011 and 2016, the Plan says, including $175 million for a new dorm and $100 million for a new research building in Providence's Jewelry District.
The only way to continue to make progress is to keep the money flowing, Spies said.
"We have to continue to raise funds to support the Plan at a pretty high level," he said.
