After nearly a year of review, research and strenuous work, the undergraduate academic prioritization report has been completed and published. 

This report became public on the faculty portal last Wednesday night, and is the product of months of work from the Academic Prioritization Subcommittee (APS) of the Strategic Review Committee.

“We have worked each Thursday and most of us have given a full working day every week to this since July, August,” Howard Walters said. Walters is a professor in the College of Education, and their representative on the APS. 

“It’s been debilitating, but we’ve done it.”

The report will move up to the Institutional Prioritization Committee, where it will be considered, and receive any necessary changes before it moves on to the Board of Trustees, which will make the ultimate decision on these recommendations. 

However, sudden change should not be expected.

“We have, in my mind, but I think the committee would agree here, on a very small level we had a start to finish during this year heading toward this report as a product,” Walters said. “But there’s a bigger picture that people need to keep in their minds as you try to figure out what the meaning of this is and that is this is step one in a two-to-three year process. Ill-defined, but in some ways, its taking shape of a strategic recasting of AU.”

The process began with self-studies conducted by individual departments. 

“As the process would go through everyone was supposed to complete self studies, the undergraduate ones were due by the end of the summer,” Dan McDonald said. 

McDonald is chair of the Art department, and one of the College of Arts and Sciences representatives on the APS. “Different colleges treated them differently, some on purpose some just because of the inherent differences in colleges.” 

The report categorized all of the academic programs at AU into five distinct categories; enhance, maintain, review, revisit and restructure, which included three subcategories-reorganize, reduce and discontinue. 

Restructure had subcategories added during the process.

“It used to just be restructure, eliminate,” McDonald said. “That was the only position and we realized that some things needed some more flexibility but were not disposable we had to fix them because they are essential to the mission of the institution or to the financial well-being of the institution.”

In addition, biology and political science were noted as programs of distinction, a signifier brought to McDonald and the committee that is used to denote which programs can help create a strong identity for the university.“There were times in its past where [AU] was known for particular things,” McDonald said. “That’s kind of wavered, and we went through a period where it was anything goes. ‘Whatever anyone wants to do, let’s do it,’ and so the determination made by certain people was we need to be a little more stringent in what we do well…We have to know what we do well and do it really well.”

Although this report makes some clear recommendations, it is not intended to be the final word on the future of AU’s undergraduate academics, but rather to serve as a statement of where the university is currently.

“This is more of an assessment of what is and now in strategic planning we need to decide what we want it to be,” Walters said. “This sort of closes out where we are now but gives us an indication towards where we need hardest to start moving forward in a different direction and frankly it’s the healthiest thing that’s happened in this institution in a long time.”

Both Interim President William Crothers and Interim Provost Doug Fiore were not available for comment at the time of publication.

Last spring, Ashland University’s Board of Trustees decided to engage in a comprehensive review of Ashland University. Committees were established to evaluate and review each and every aspect of the university, including all academic programs, undergraduate and graduate. 

On April 8, the undergraduate report from the Academic Prioritization Subcommittee was published on the faculty portal. This report represented the product of nearly a year’s worth of work from this committee, which was composed of five faculty members, three Trustees, Interim President William Crothers and Interim Provost Doug Fiore.

Neither Crothers nor Fiore made themselves available for comment at the time of publication.

Each college was represented on this committee with one professor from each of the professional schools and two from the College of Arts and Sciences. Dan Fox represented the College of Business and Economics, Jodie Flynn represented the College of Nursing and Health Sciences, Howard Walters represented the College of Education, and Dan McDonald and Jeff Sikkenga represented the CAS.

According to the report, the subcommittee was given the goal of placing 20 percent of all of the undergraduate academic programs into one of five categories:

• Enhance – Programs that receive this recommendation should receive additional resources, which could take the form of “capital investments, augmented faculty, or other resources.” In several of the individual program reports, program-specific marketing dollars were also recommended. 

One way to earn an enhance recommendation is to be designated as a Program of Distinction, which are the programs that ought to be immediately identified with Ashland University, and marketed as such. These have a distinctive character, academic excellence and a significant number of majors, or the potential to attract such numbers.

• Maintain – Programs with this recommendation do not require any immediate attention, or have issues that require further review.

• Review – Programs that receive this recommendation require additional review. This was given to programs that are undergoing curriculum changes already, and are not yet prepared for a final review. Often, these programs were also given a timeline for the conclusion of the review.

• Revisit – Programs in this category are new, and do not meet the data needs for the Subcommittee to review them. If possible, a timeline for the conclusion of the review is included.

• Restructure – This was originally one category, but was broken up into three distinct subcategories during the review process.

• Reorganize-Programs with this recommendation need serious reorganization or reallocation of resources due to misalignments of faculty, curriculum or other issues affecting the outcome of that program.

• Reduce- Programs with this recommendation should receive reduced resources as it does not require its current level of resources to meet student needs.

• Discontinue-Programs with this recommendation should be discontinued due to low enrollment or lack of potential for growth in size. 

However, as the process began, the subcommittee recognized that there “were serious structural, organizational and leadership issues” that required attention throughout the university. For this reason, all of AU’s undergraduate education programs, including those housed in the CAS, and most of the programs housed in COBE, received a restructure/reorganize ranking. 

In the CONHS, nursing and dietetics received an enhance recommendation, while athletic training and the gerontology certificate program received a restructure/discontinue recommendation. 

The CAS had six programs receive the enhance recommendation, including biology and political science, which earned the only two “Programs of Distinction” designations. Biotech received a restructure/discontinue recommendation, the only CAS program to receive that recommendation, while philosophy and music received reorganize/reduce recommendations. In addition, computer science was recommended to be combined with the information systems major in the COBE, which may also result in reduced faculty in that area. Foreign language received a restructure/reorganize recommendation, but the subcommittee also noted that the majors might not be necessary to achieve the goal of teaching foreign language at the university. 

According to the report, the subcommittee found in the College of Education that it was  “evident that a significant realignment and assessment of curriculum, along with a comprehensive review of curriculum development and delivery, was necessary to the viability of these programs.” 

Linda Billman, the interim dean of the COE, was unavailable for comment at the time of publication.

“When the revenues coming in, everything’s fine, you take your eye off the ball sometimes,” said Walters, the COE’s representative to the process. “My opinion is that’s what happened here. We took our eye off the ball and had a whole lot of things cascade at once, reduced revenue, increased expenses, capital issues, some decisions to build some buildings and take on some debt which everyone sees as something that came back to haunt us and we are digging out of that now.”

Despite these issues, the university is still able to rely heavily on the COE’s revenue stream. 

“We generate a lot of revenue, though not as much as we used to,” Walters said. “Last year was our lowest year financially in our education graduate program and our profit was still nearly $4 million above any costs attached to this place including the building, and that’s our lowest in 25 years.”

Dan McDonald affirmed this sentiment, saying the two areas that finance the university are the business and education colleges, even though both of those areas received a restructure/reorganize recommendation.

One issue facing the COE’s curriculum is the pressure that comes from external accrediting bodies. Professors are constrained by the licensure exams students must take to become teachers, exams that contain content they cannot control. In addition, faculty members have their own knowledge and information they want to pass along to students.

“These competing interests between internal and external content, those competing pressures distort the curriculum and sometimes you end up with redundancies,” Walters said. “Some of us in the college are working really hard now to remap out curriculum top to bottom so we know every step of the way and every course in sequence, how are these courses fitting together and are we be as efficient as we can be so that we are not making students take and pay for extra classes when we could consolidate programs and consolidate courses.”

The report also points to structural issues within the COE, but, although not dismissing the recommendation, pointed to the primacy of the content.

“Structure can look like a lot of things; content is very much driven by success rates on those external exams,” Walters said. “Parents that pay one-hundred twenty thousand bucks for their kid to get through Ashland University to get a teaching degree they expect their kids prepared to be prepared to pass that test at the end of it, and so we have to be efficient about how we do that, how do we do that in four years.”

Structural issues were identified both in the COE and in the COBE. Part of that, though, stems from the fundamental differences between a professional school and a traditional college, such as the CAS.

“Faculty are not aligned in departments the way they are in CAS,” Walters said. “For example, I teach students in four different departments and dozens of different programs but some of that’s the nature of professional schools. It will never be as neat and tidy curriculum wise as you see across the street… To some extent a professional school is going to be different in organization in structure and curriculum than a traditional college. The question is we don’t know how different and we’ve not examined that question sufficiently and we should have and now we are going to.” 

The report also identified similar structural issues within the COBE, recommending the creation of a singular department of management. The subcommittee also “found there to be a lack of clarity in mission, vision and functionality throughout the COBE.”

Attempts were made to reach Jeff Russell, the dean of the COBE, but he was unavailable to comment, as he was on vacation.

“I am confident that the College of Business and Economics will consider the recommendation and fully address the concerns of the Committee,” said Dan Fox, the COBE representative to the subcommittee, in an email. “The impact that such an approach would have on program quality, students, and potential employer perception will all need to be considered before we can implement such a change.”

Fox declined answering any questions about the lack of clarity within the college, but did say the report should not be used to disparage any of AU’s programs.

“Many programs were placed in Restructure or Review categories,” Fox said. “Very few programs were eliminated and very few programs were put in the maintain category. Hopefully, the results of the committee are not misconstrued to cast negative light on any programs. The future of Ashland University depends on understanding and adapting to the challenges of the future. No program is exempt from the changing environment that we face in higher education. This is a good time to restructure programs and prepare for a brighter future.”

The nursing and dietetics programs within the CONHS received enhance recommendations, as well as being noted as potential Programs of Distinction.

Athletic training and the gerontology certificate program received restructure/discontinue recommendations. However, the recommendation is a bit misleading. A feasibility study will be conducted to determine if the certificate could have a market as a graduate program. 

Athletic training as an undergraduate program will be discontinued, but it will be transitioned into a graduate program in order to keep in line with changing industry standards. 

“Many schools across the country have transitioned from undergrad to a grad,” Dennis Gruber said. Gruber is the athletic training program director. “In Ohio a couple of schools have done that, many schools are already in a situation to where they will do it as soon as our governing bodies decide that’s what we want to be. To give you a bigger picture all healthcare are looking at a master’s minimum as entry level, so we are aligning ourselves with that. So the discussion to move towards a master’s had been undertaken prior to the prioritization process itself.” 

The CAS saw six of its programs receive an enhance recommendation. Political science and biology earned the designation as programs of distinction, while psychology was also designated as a potential program of distinction that received an enhance recommendation. 

“Psychology is a strong program but they went from seven to four people in a year and a half and they desperately need someone in developmental psychology,” McDonald said. “Let’s fill that position and review it.”

Other programs receiving that recommendation are biochemistry, criminal justice and geoscience management and technology. 

Biochemistry was recommended to receive additional program-specific marketing dollars, while the report says criminal justice requires a second professor to maintain the department. Geoscience management and technology, one of AU’s newest majors, has additional marketing dollars recommended, but it also will be reviewed to ensure geology majors are showing growth by the end of the 2016/17 academic year.

Biotechnology was recommended to be discontinued by the biology department, according to Mason Posner, who chairs the biology and toxicology department. Even though the program is being discontinued, the department still believes it can prepare students to enter the biotechnology field. He is also excited about the recommended enhancement of the biology program.

“The things that we proposed made it unique wasn’t biology in a vacuum but in relation to the other programs we had in the department. Our toxicology major would be the most unique things about us. We have one of ten undergrad tox programs in the country,” Posner said. “We market all these together. We market biology with all these unique opportunities where, even if you aren’t a toxicology major, you still get to take these classes.”

Forensic biology and chemistry were also recommended to explore the potential of combining the two into one forensic sciences degree. However, Posner is unsure if that is feasible, given the individual programs purposes.

“My initial thinking was those two career programs and career paths are pretty different,” Posner said. “Instead of training someone who is just prepared for forensics, we are training a biologist who has the knowledge to go into forensics…chemistry is training a chemist with the knowledge to go into forensic chemistry.”

The report noted majors and students within the foreign language department are below historical averages, and added that there may be a “possible misalignment with the current student population and either the program’s teaching methods, effectiveness, or program curriculum.” In addition, the subcommittee is not convinced a major is necessary to teach a language at AU. These recommendations will be further reviewed, and a conclusion will be drawn by January 1, 2016.

William Cummins, an associate professor of foreign language, did not comment on the recommendations.

The department of music received a restructure/reorganize/reduce recommendations. The subcommittee cited a lack of a viable business model in their rationale for the recommendation, as well as a greater number of faculty members than necessary for program needs. The committee also requested an analysis of the number of faculty who teach private lessons, and the portion of their teaching load completed in this method.

Thomas Reed, chair of the music department, had no comment.

The theatre department was also charged with developing a viable business model with better faculty to student ratios in their rationale for the program’s restructure/reorganize recommendation. 

Philosophy received a reorganize/reduce recommendation, with the report finding the department faculty members exceeding the institutional need.

Across the institution, 11 programs received a maintain recommendation, and another three received a revisit recommendation. In addition, 13 programs are still under review.