Welcome back to campus and to the start of a new term; I hope everyone has enjoyed a fruitful and rewarding combination of holidays and research time. I'm looking forward to a vibrant and challenging Fall as we work together to develop the Academic Plan.
What follows is a very long posting and I apologize in advance for that. But in order to provide a precise focus for unit discussions of the Academic Plan I am providing below some points of concern that have influenced my thinking to date. I look forward both to reading your thoughts in this blog and to hearing your unit's response to the academic planning discussion points.
1. Trent once enjoyed the reputation of being Canada’s outstanding small university. We were known for our student-centred pedagogy, small classes, interdisciplinary collaborative work, top rate research, and excellence in the liberal arts and sciences. Despite the fact that we still continue to practice what we preach, today this reputation has changed; many of Trent’s current superb accomplishments are hidden by endless discussions about shrinking enrolments, budgetary problems, and low morale. We have become what James Martin and James E. Samels describe as a “fragile" or "stressed" university.
2. Enrolment at Trent has been flat for 6 years while the system has grown. Compare, for example, Trent’s 0.08% growth with the 12.3% Ontario University system Undergrad FTE growth. This trend continues into 2011-12 with the university having a target of 152 new and retained FTE’s in 2011-12, but having zero growth. (As of August 15, 2011, Peterborough is up by 33; Oshawa is down by 31.
3. While the total student FTE has remained relatively constant, the overall mix at the institution has changed dramatically. We have seen a considerable increase in student numbers in some departments while others have shown a steady decline. This has meant that with no new net growth we receive no new funding from MTCU and as a result the university has been unable to allocate resources to departments that have grown. The current staffing of academic departments in recent years, moreover, is a product of evolution rather than planning; it seems inappropriate that any future academic changes should be driven by retirements rather than by planning.
4. Trent’s financial situation continues to be highly vulnerable, given its substantial dependence on enrolment. As of August 15, 2011, the University is experiencing a structural mismatch of revenues and expenses that results in annual budget reductions. In the 2009/10 budget year Trent University continued to rank second highest amongst our six comparator Ontario universities in the cost (academic salaries) of education per Basic Income Unit. Yet we cannot address this issue through increasing class sizes even if we wanted to: we are challenged by our own architecture and lack of large lecture halls.
5. The operating budget has been cut every year since 2008, resulting in significant reductions to the instructional budget. In 2010-11 the overall operating budget cost to operate Trent University was $91.3 million dollars; the overall revenue was $90.6 million dollars (this was after a $6.7 million dollar budget reduction)..
Departmental Discussion Questions:
1. Metrics
Given that quantitative metrics capture only a part of the teaching, research, and service excellence of an academic program, what kind of qualitative metric provides the most appropriate way to understand your program’s many activities (including graduate supervision)? Certainly teaching awards, Tri-Council or industrial funding, and external and internal recognition for service are some ways of measuring; what other ways are there distinct to your unit?
2. Areas of Expertise
In addition to its traditional focus on teaching excellence which will continue, Trent needs to focus and foreground its academic and research activities more effectively. Which three areas do you think define the reputational academic strength of the university most effectively at: a) a national level, and b) an international level? Which areas do you think define the reputational academic strengths of your own unit?
3. Prioritization
In terms of repairing the damage caused by recent cuts, can you suggest areas where the administration should focus its energies and resources? Some priority areas include library acquisitions, additional computer and IT support, more administrative support for units (especially those with graduate programs), and additional teaching faculty, but it would be helpful to suggest which of these areas needs to be tackled first.
4. Moving Forward
In terms of finances and enrolment, Trent University is facing a precarious future. Any implementation of the academic plan will have to contain a significant budgetary component. This means our academic plan will have to include cost-saving measures and innovative ways of maintaining the integrity of our academic enterprise while honouring all aspects of the Collective Agreement. Possibilities could include the amalgamation of units, the increased use of technology in our pedagogy, or totally out of the box solutions to problems. Where do you see your unit in 2015 and what part might it play in Trent’s academic recovery?
5. Recommendations
Can you provide three potential recommendations/outcomes from the academic plan that your unit would like to see implemented at Trent?
Gary Boire
Provost & Vice-President Academic
August 15, 2011
From Ray March:
ReplyDeleteYou argue that Trent’s student population must stay constant for the foreseeable future because we lack sufficient teaching areas, lecture rooms and auditorium. Yet we live in a community that has a surplus High School and it appears that Thomas A. Stewart High School, about 2-3 km south of the Symons Campus, has been identified as being surplus. While the Bd. of Education wishes to retain the playing fields, the school building is available. I would recommend that the Bd. of Governors of Trent, who have lost the greater part of the confidence of the people of Peterborough through the Student Residence fiasco, should make a determined effort to enlist the support of the people of Peterborough in obtaining Thomas A. Stewart High School for one dollar. Trent started in a school building that was surplus to needs and Trent could flourish in another school building; not only flourish but could revitalize the name of Thomas A. Stewart in this area. A bus service between the city, Thomas A. Stewart High School and the Symons Campus should be facile to arrange on the east side of the river.
The Trent Bd. of Governors needs to be galvanized into productive action. As a Professor Emeritus for more than a decade now, I am disgusted at the way the BOG has rigorously ignored retirees and has blunted the enthusiasm of retirees for supporting the University financially and in other ways.
Thank you Ray. I will share this with the Planning Committee
ReplyDeleteFrom Robert Loney (Part 1 of 2)
ReplyDeleteI've worked in the Environmental and Resource Studies Program since 1991, arriving at Trent in 1989. I'd like to share some thoughts about your above Blog post.
Re point 1. Trent did indeed have the reputation of Canada’s outstanding small university. But if you look at indicators like the Maclean's rankings over the years, we lost that bit by bit starting in the late 1990s. From 1992 through 1995 we were 2nd best in Canada for Primarily Undergrad university. Then we dropped to 3rd and finally disappeared from the top 3. In 2008 we were 6th. Whether or not we believe the rankings are accurate, many potential students and parents include these and similar rankings in their decision of what university to attend.
In the last decade it seems like Trent has tried to jump many new bandwagons in order to find a 'new' reputation, instead of fixing what was broken (as indicated by the various ranking categories).
Rankings: http://communications.uwaterloo.ca/macleans.php
Re point 2. Enrolment has not kept up I expect partly because of our broken reputation. Why would a student choose to go to Trent where budget cutbacks have greatly reduced the quality of education? For example, recently Biology has had to eliminate labs from courses due to cutbacks. Students end up getting less personal attention and poorer quality education because of reduced staff and core faculty numbers. Substituting part time instructors for faculty doesn't help, since they are not as accessible (not here except the day they teach) and not as integrated into Trent's community.
Enrolment has also not kept up partly because we have had some periodic problems with the registration process. We are doing better with the process this year, but other universities keep upping the anti, being more aggressive in their attempts to attract students, and we have to keep up, or preferably, work with other universities to change the process to a less competitive one. It is in my opinion a waste of resources for every university to fight with every other university for students.
As for Oshawa, I appreciate the attempt to try and take advantage of the closer proximity to Toronto. Unfortunately Trent is based in Peterborough, with Oshawa a secondary minor satellite campus. In ERS we've never been very successful getting good enrolment (i.e. over 20) in upper year courses in Oshawa. Competition with UOIT, who are growing rapidly in Oshawa, will be difficult to overcome. If we are in an exploration of where to re-focus, I would suggest Oshawa not be a place to do that. Its funny... in recent past we have gotten rid of 'satellite' campuses/residences such as Peter Robinson, because it was deemed inefficient to maintain, even though it did have community benefits. And yet here we are trying to attract students to Trent by running a far away campus closer to the Toronto-Oshawa-Hamilton region. If students are not attending our Oshawa campus (as enrolments seem to have indicated for several years), then maybe that is also inefficient to maintain.
From Robert Loney (Part 2 of 2):
ReplyDeleteRe point 3. I agree that many of the negative changes in enrolment within departments have not been a product of planning, but of a freezing or slowdown in hiring, and not replacing retiring people. ERS has a core group of faculty who will be retiring in the next decade, and we've struggled to get replacements for past retirees, so there seems to be little hope of replacements for most of those upcoming retirements. The same has happened only worse for staff. When a job is eliminated all the work that person was doing is added to all the remaining fellow workers loads, stressing and overloading them, resulting in poorer quality service. As long as this practice goes on there will continue to be adverse affects. It may save money to get rid of a position, but if it reflects in poor service that drives away students, how can that be a good thing?
A lot of people seem to think growth is the answer- a need to double or triple our enrolment. I disagree. A similar fallacy is proposed in traditional economics. Growth has consequences as well as benefits. While we might get more income via government grants and tuition, we also have to provide service to these new students, which costs money. If ERS's enrolment increased 100% and we didn't get additional people or money for equipment and resources, we'd be in big trouble. Growth adds challenges. Many of the systems we use to manage students and processes at Trent would be overtaxed if we doubled our enrolment, and would have to be re-invented (example: switch to 4-digit course numbers, which cost tons of money). Growth in enrolment does not automatically mean a better bottom line.
The main problem with Trent's financial balance is clear: Trent administration and faculty have, for at least the past decade, achieved salary raises far above that of inflation, far above that of other workers at Trent, and far above what Trent can afford. An example: a middle faculty position salary increased 49% between 2002 and 20011, an average increase of 4.5% per year, during a period when inflation was an average 2.5%.
Now recently Trent is not hiring many new people, not replacing a lot of retired persons, cutting budgets for equipment and supplies (directly affecting quality of education), and this year even cutting our primary product, courses, all to pay for these high salaries. Both Trent administration and Trent Faculty need to take responsibility for this. The formula used to calculate Faculty salaries based on other universities' Faculty salaries should be eliminated. Salary raises at Trent should be reasonable for what Trent can afford and compared with inflation, and similar between different Trent workers.
Re point 5. Reduced budgets to buy equipment and resources are reducing the quality of education. We end up spending much more time fighting for money (often unsuccessfully) instead of getting the work we should be doing. And then we don't have the money do even maintain equipment, much less buy new or introduce new upcoming methods in science labs. So we stagnate in teaching as well, unable to keep up with current trends in technology and the workforce. This leads to a further erosion of our attractiveness to current and potential students. We need to take money that is being paid to those high salaries and start injecting it into budgets to support our main reason for being here- teaching students.
From Robin Quantick:
ReplyDeleteMany of the structural issues that make Trent (in its current form) UNSUSTAINABLE could be changed with a ratio structure. If classes could only run with a minimum of 24 students to a maximum of 72 and seminars
/labs would be limited to 12 participants and that TA's would only be assigned for classes of 24 or more with responsibilities for no more than 2 seminar groups of 12 students each then the course offering would stream itself based on enrolment/demand. It would also mean that more senior faculty would spend more time with the bread and butter of any university community... first and second year students... If this were combined with a ratio approach to graduate student supervision/enrolment; something like a 15 point maximum in which Master's students equate to 3 points and PhD students 4 points with no faculty member allowed to go over the 15 point total a new kind of partnership could be struck... an arrangement in which fiscal sustainability and teaching and scholarship/research worked more cooperatively.
Posted by: Suzanne Bailey (English), Mitch Champagne (Education), Lynne Davis (Indigenous Studies), Christine Freeman-Roth (Philosophy), Alan Slavin (Physics and Astronomy). 1 of 2.
ReplyDeleteWe hope that somewhere in the academic plan that Trent is developing there will be a discussion of how Trent teaches, not just on the areas in which it should teach. There are dramatic changes taking place in university pedagogy to increase student-student interaction, and Trent must be in the vanguard of these changes if it is to retain its claim on excellence in undergraduate teaching. With on-line lecture courses being available from world-renowned instructors with virtually unlimited resources, Trent needs a better model to remain competitive. Moreover, many studies have shown that engaged students are much less likely to drop out of university.
Since its inception, Trent has recognized the importance of seminars as a vehicle for the cut and thrust of student discussion to develop the deep understanding and analytical ability that are the ultimate goals of university teaching. Increasing class sizes have forced the abandonment of seminars in many of the areas in which they used to be the primary method of instruction; however, the introduction of modern technologies is allowing a return to seminar-like approaches even in large classes.
Typically, a student retains only 5% of what is heard in a lecture, but more than 50% of what s/he discusses personally even if this discussion is carried out in small groups within a large class in a lecture hall. This is true in all disciplines. For example, research in pedagogy over the last 30 years shows that science students learn much more effectively, and develop better analytical skills, through guided peer discussion than by lecture instruction. A recent head-to-head demonstration of this is described in http://www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/2011/05/12/interactive-teaching-methods-double-learning-engagement-in-large-undergraduate-physics-class/ . Trent's Department of Physics & Astronomy was one of the first physics departments in Canada to embrace these changes some 12 years ago. As part of this evolution, the Department introduced remote-response devices ("clickers") for student participation in 2006, and their use at Trent has expanded to 25 courses across many disciplines in 2010-11, primarily in the sciences.
Posted by: Suzanne Bailey (English), Mitch Champagne (Education), Lynne Davis (Indigenous Studies), Christine Freeman-Roth (Philosophy), Alan Slavin (Physics and Astronomy). 2 of 2.
ReplyDeleteClickers are less appropriate in the humanities where issues usually don't resolve into primarily right/wrong choices as in science classes. However, several Trent professors are already using interactive techniques in their humanities "lecture" classes that both keep students engaged in the subject andl develop the desired analytical skills. For example, Christine Freeman-Roth (Philosophy) has students discuss an issue in groups, and then a "reporter" summarizes orally the conclusions from each group. Lynne Davis (Indigenous Studies) uses student-led workshops with theatre, drawing, and other creative approaches from popular education and critical pedagogy, to analyze current issues and to link analysis to social action. The high level of interaction creates a sense of community and communicates to students that their own collective analyses can have significant consequences in the world, countering the sense of helplessness which often overwhelms young people as they become aware of global economic and political forces. A Trent English instructor in the Education program, Michel Champagne, uses a technique which also allows for small-group feedback even in a very large class. Mitch raises relevant questions in a blog which is posted in class, and students discuss the issue in small groups and respond electronically to the blog during class via the "backchannel", using smart phones or wireless laptops. After several such postings have occurred, Mitch provides the synthesis to draw the ideas together and move on to his next idea. Students are actively participating in the class, and the electronic devices become an integral part of the learning rather than a distraction. Such interactive approaches have most of the advantages of seminars, but can occur in a class too large to staff with separate seminar groups. Moreover, the approaches have some advantages over traditional seminars: they get almost all students participating, and Mitch says the discussions on his blog continue long after the end of the class, as found with similar instruction at other universities. Since over half of students now have wireless communication devices (smart phones or laptops), any group of 5 students will have at least one student who can provide the group response. Of course, these interactive approaches also bring substantial challenges to the instructor, who cannot rely on a packaged lecture but is forced to think on his/her feet to provide the needed synthesis. That also makes it fun.
Such interactive approaches are a form of "Accountable Talk" which has been shown over some twenty years of study to be very effective at raising academic performance at the primary- and secondary-school levels (http://www.springerlink.com/content/r337757q83736242/fulltext.pdf ). In Accountable Talk, students are held accountable to the other members of their learning community, to the knowledge under study, and to the accepted standards of reasoning. These are the requirements of any academic discourse, so the same principles should be equally effective at the university level as long as the instructor provides correct guidance to what is an acceptable response and moderates the replies to keep students on track. Because each student must reply with a known ID to access the blog, the postings remain civil in Mitch's class.
The use of clickers in science courses is now a well established technology, but text responses in non-science courses are only just starting to be used at the university level; for example, see http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/HotseatOpeningtheBackchannelin/213668 .
Dear Provost,
ReplyDeleteIn response to your blog posting August 17th “Facts & Figuring”
It is with enthusiasm that I respond to your posting on behalf of Trent University’s Alumni Council.
Alumni Connections
On the weekend of August 20th, the Alumni Council held its annual retreat. The retreat began with President Franklin presenting the council with the current state of affairs of our University. That information shared by President Franklin led to a Council planning focus on how we could contribute in a more meaningful way to recruitment, retention and the overall student experience.
For many of our alumni Trent is something to be cherished, protected and shared with others in the community. Our alumni have gone on with their lives to make many outstanding contributions in their fields. The Trent experience has profoundly impacted most of their personal lives as well. This sense of being a part of the unique Trent experience came from the intimacy with faculty and staff, a feeling of belonging through the college system, the exceptional physical space, but perhaps most importantly, Trent’s ability to go beyond providing a simple degree and turn them into thinkers that want to give back. Retreat planning identified several key areas in which our Alumni can give back and will have a profound impact.
Student Recruitment and Retention
It is our desire to assist the student population by bringing our partnerships with the academic departments and the University’s Career Centre to the forefront. By sharing the experiences of where, and how, our Trent education led us professionally and personally we hope to bring a new understanding to the student population of what a degree at Trent can accomplish. We are renewing discussions with the Career Centre and the academic departments. We know alignment with the unique direction of each department is critical in this process and we hope to add value to each program by facilitating focussed symposiums, mentoring programs and networking opportunities. Within the next month we will begin establishing several pilot programs and your involvement in this early stage would be most welcome. The invites will be sent soon.
Our second request for additional involvement is within student recruitment efforts. We believe allowing us to directly communicate to an applicant the successes of our Trent education and the meaningfulness of our student experience will serve to solidify an applicant’s decision to attend Trent University. When council members passionately discussed their potential recruitment contributions we heard thoughts such as, “Before any letter of acceptance is mailed, imagine the congratulatory phone call or in-person visit between one of our accomplished alumni and an applicant to the same field of interest as our alum.”
It is our understanding that in the past there was success with an “Alumni Send-Off” program in various cities. During this event our Alumni would meet with new students offering them encouragement, helping alleviate concerns, and providing advice on how to get the most from their time on campus. Our further plan is to revitalize and create student assistance programs such as this one.
Underutilized
Alumni are an underutilized resource of the University who can be very helpful in keeping Trent strong and vital by participating in planning and directly working to promote the reputation and value of our institution. Many alumni are eager to help and be actively involved and while our alumni can boast being one of the strongest university alumni associations in terms of financial support, this should not be our primary connection to the University.
TUAA is already busy planning its portion of the University’s 50th anniversary with a focus on bringing our student population together with our alumni. Trent is something to be celebrated; we welcome the opportunity to add more cause for celebration.
Sincerely,
Christopher Armitage ‘90
Vice President of Campus Affairs
Trent University Alumni Association