Monday, August 28, 2000
Element of surprise
UGA Partners receive briefings on strategic, physical master plans
President Adams named to Knight Foundation Commission
Cutlip, former journalism dean, dies
Campus Closeup
Kudos
Retirees
Opening the school year

Improving the undergraduate experience
By Beth Roberts
beth@uga.edu

For the last year and a half, UGA has been intensively engaged in the “self-study” required every decade by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools as part of the reaccreditation process. Using the new alternate procedure adopted by SACS since UGA’s last self-study, the university has focused on the quality of the undergraduate experience. Bob Boehmer, associate professor of legal studies in the Terry College of Business, is directing the project; he provided Columns with a progress report.

Columns: There is a December deadline for the report, as I remember.
Boehmer: That’s right. Going backwards, the visiting committee will be here Feb. 25-28, which means that by the end of this semester we need to have the final report, so that we can deliver it to the people who will be coming here.
There are seven committees. In addition to the steering committee, there is a committee on compliance with SACS criteria. Four committees deal with the undergraduate experience--research, information technology, physical facilities and overall quality. They’ve all got draft reports completed. Then there’s a committee that’s dealing with all of the nuts and bolts of the actual visit, and they’ve got a plan ready.
The draft reports are on the Web site and are being circulated on campus for input. Then the committees will revise their reports, and on Sept. 21 the steering committee will start considering them. They will adopt a final report by the end of the year and transmit it formally to the university administration and SACS.

Columns: What procedure was used?
Boehmer: We tried to balance creativity with consistency, so the committees didn’t employ identical means but they all did the same thing. Last fall, they said: 1) Let’s read the literature and report what the literature says; 2) Let’s look at comparator institutions and find out how they’re dealing with this issue; and 3) Let’s write a description of the way it is now at UGA.
Then last spring they all identified the central themes in their area and addressed recommendations for each theme.

Columns: Can you give us a preview of the recommendations?
Boehmer: They’re not approved by the steering committee yet, but there will be quite a few.
In the area of research and the undergraduate experience, there will be a series of recommendations about specific steps that we need to take--from how to inform undergraduates through how to create incentives for faculty to be involved. I think there’ll be recommendations about the need for a well-funded, high-profile university office whose function is to make research a central aspect of every undergraduate’s experience.
In the physical facilities report, there will be recommendations about increasing the number of students who live on campus. There will be specific recommendations about funding and design.
The committee on the quality of the undergraduate experience has some recommendations about integrating new students into the academic community, how to integrate service learning into the curriculum and how to promote diversity on campus.
In the information-technology committee, a lot of recommendations will be ways to upgrade the computing infrastructure.

Columns: Are there any plans for follow up?
Boehmer: That’s a really good question. In the ’89-’90 self-study here, the UGA committees made perhaps 200 recommendations, and the SACS visiting team boiled those down to 10 that the university had to follow up on for accreditation. But a lot of hard work had produced some very concrete recommendations, and we could have benefited from a strategic follow-up, even if we didn’t have to do it.
One of the dangers of the accreditation process is that it tends to be a two-year flurry of activity followed by a huge sigh of relief. Then it goes in the university archives. Some things carry on, because they gained some momentum--a lot of ideas that are central on this campus right now came out of that self-study, like the physical master plan and the program-review policy--but a lot of good ideas just get filed.
If I had a clean slate in terms of designing this process, the two-year self-study would not even be a blip on the radar screen. We would be continually following up and improving on our plan, and when the accrediting body said it was time for the formal self-study we wouldn’t be starting over--they would evaluate what we’re doing continually. That’s the way the process can justify all the money and time that’s expended on it.
This time, the steering committee is committed to adopting a formal follow-up plan. The steering committee can’t say to the university community: “We will do all these 50 things.” But they can put an orderly follow-up process in place.

On the Web
www.uga.edu/undergraduate-experience
For drafts of the undergraduate-experience committee reports, select “committees”; for the draft report of the compliance committee, choose “compliance.”
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