Strategic Planning and Assessment Council Update

The Strategic Planning and Assessment Committee (SPAC) works with the Associate Provost for Strategic Planning and Assessment to ensure that institutional assessment data informs strategic, programmatic, and budgetary decisions. The committee monitors implementation of these decisions, forwards recommendations to the Associate Provost for Strategic Planning and Assessment, and provides progress reports to the community and stakeholders. In Fall 2022, SPAC met with President Wheeler to update him on SPAC and hear his initial thoughts about where to focus its time and priorities.

At the beginning of the 2021-2022 Academic Year, President Christian and Cabinet charged SPAC with three goals:

1. Re-envisioning academic program development, review, and evaluation
2. Strengthen coordination between strategic planning goals and priorities and institutional targets/metrics/assessments
3. Planning with Global Goals

We summarize the work of the SPAC subcommittee that worked on Goal 1.

Before developing an academic master plan, the RAPID³ (Re-envisioning Academic Program [Internal] Development, Design and Delivery) subcommittee of SPAC was formed. It was charged by SPAC and Cabinet to examine academic program development, design, and review, and to recommend improvements to make those processes easier. The RAPID³ subcommittee is Shala Mills—co-chair, Kris Backhaus—co-chair, Valerie McAllister, Vika Shock, Lucy Walker, Reynolds Scott-Childress, Anne Balant, and Rich McElrath.

During fall 2021, the RAPID³ team held structured listening sessions with key groups involved in curricular development as well as an open forum. The listening tour included the following focus groups: Education Council, LAS Senate, Curriculum Committee, Graduate Council, Deans, and Open Forum. During the listening tour, the RAPID³ subcommittee posed general questions about experiences with program development and revision. The following themes emerged from meetings with campus constituencies:

• People don’t have an understanding about how the entire process works.
• Program developers lack tools or experience to do market analysis, ROI, and budget proposals.
• There is concern about time investment for faculty, about processes going forward without deans or department chairs being aware, and about inertia caused by not knowing whether there will be institutional or SUNY support.
• There is some concern about the timing of committee meetings and lack of clarity about what each level of review is looking for.
• There is lack of clarity about intersections between departments/schools with interdisciplinary programs.
• There are challenges associated with physical routing of paperwork (including revisions and signatures).
• There are concerns about program launch/marketing/follow-up.

The information collected informed recommendations for making academic program development, implementation, and evaluation processes more agile and adaptable. During spring 2022, the RAPID³ subcommittee wrote and edited a report and presented it to SPAC for consideration and feedback. The subcommittee finalized its report, which it submitted to the Interim Provost for preliminary review followed by presentation to the President’s Cabinet.

In its report, the RAPID³ subcommittee noted that the program approval process included elements outside campus control—such as those at SUNY and New York State Education Department (NYSED)—which might be reviewed at a future point, but were outside the scope of its recommendations.

The RAPID³ subcommittee recommended the following five actions:

1. Improve the initiation process.
2. Improve communication and sharing of information.
3. Improve paperwork support and management.
4. Improve the review process.
5. Improve the launch process.

Details about each recommendation can be found in the RAPID³ Report and Recommendations to Cabinet.