Provost’s Wednesday Communiqué — October 24, 2012

Provost’s Wednes­day Com­mu­niqué — Octo­ber 24, 2012

“It’s tech­nol­ogy mar­ried with lib­eral arts, mar­ried with the human­i­ties, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.” — Steve Jobs

Opti­miza­tion with Con­straints: In nav­i­gat­ing com­plex sit­u­a­tions, humans are con­stantly try­ing to improve their approach and solu­tions. In other words, they are try­ing to opti­mize. In all cases how­ever, such opti­miza­tion is con­ducted under con­straints. Last Fri­day, Pres­i­dent Frank went before a fac­ulty town hall in order to answer ques­tions and to engage in a con­ver­sa­tion about new bud­get mod­els. Dur­ing some of the exchanges, I was struck by how much the prin­ci­ple of opti­miza­tion of con­straints was dis­played: from ques­tions about bud­get­ing to com­ments about the mis­sion of UNM and how resources should be allo­cated, it was obvi­ous that while all atten­dees shared the same objec­tive, their infor­ma­tion and con­straints var­ied greatly. In the case of a Uni­ver­sity, the hard con­straints should be our com­mon val­ues as a pub­lic research uni­ver­sity. Softer, but still impor­tant con­straints are imposed by our geog­ra­phy and our depen­dence on the State of New Mex­ico and stu­dent tuition for fund­ing. It is not, for exam­ple, real­is­tic to expect that we can reduce the num­ber of our incom­ing stu­dents by one third in order to improve our grad­u­a­tion rates, since that will run against our mis­sion as well as reduce our fund­ing. It is also not real­is­tic to admit more stu­dents who may not be aca­d­e­m­i­cally pre­pared, as that will jeop­ar­dize both our fund­ing (at the out­put end) as well as our research mis­sion (more efforts and resources going to reme­di­a­tion ver­sus sup­port­ing research).

The Yale Report: was writ­ten in 1828 by the fac­ulty of Yale Col­lege to defend the clas­si­cal cur­ricu­lum. “The report main­tained that because of Yale’s pri­mary object of grad­u­at­ing well-educated and well-rounded men (sic), it should con­tinue to require all of its stu­dents to fol­low a sin­gle, thor­ough cur­ricu­lum, with Latin and Greek lit­er­a­ture at its core. Before the release of the report, there was a grad­ual move­ment toward a more open, elec­tive course of study at col­leges around the United States. The highly-influential report, which is said to have set back cur­ric­u­lar reforms by decades, tipped the bal­ance at uni­ver­si­ties across the United States, includ­ing at Prince­ton and Har­vard, toward a con­ser­v­a­tive approach to higher edu­ca­tion.” Today, we are again at a time where cur­ricu­lum and the pur­pose of col­lege edu­ca­tion are being debated. While the Yale report erred in one direc­tion, let us make sure we do not err in the oppo­site direc­tion. To read the report, check out: http://collegiateway.org/reading/yale-report-1828/ and http://collegiateway.org/reading/yale-report-1828/curriculum.

No Lim­its to Learn­ing: “The Club of Rome — http://www.clubofrome.org/ — was founded in 1968 as an infor­mal asso­ci­a­tion of inde­pen­dent lead­ing per­son­al­i­ties from pol­i­tics, busi­ness and sci­ence, men and women (see how things changed over 140 years?) who are long-term thinkers inter­ested in con­tribut­ing in a sys­temic inter­dis­ci­pli­nary and holis­tic man­ner to a bet­ter world.” One of their most influ­en­tial reports was a 1979 (reis­sued in 1998) report titled “No Lim­its to Learn­ing: Bridg­ing the Human Gap.” The report “recon­sid­ers global prob­lems such as energy, com­mu­ni­ca­tions, cul­tural iden­tity, and the arms race, focus­ing pri­mar­ily on the human ele­ment rather than pre­dom­i­nantly on the mate­r­ial con­straints to growth. This is because learn­ing and the indi­vid­ual human being — not mate­r­ial resources — are the key to the world’s future.”

MOOCs (again): Another week, and more sto­ries about MOOCs. The lat­est comes from the State of Min­nesota, which will not block out-of-state uni­ver­si­ties offer­ing MOOCS in Min­nesota after all. http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/facing-backlash-minnesota-decides-to-allow-free-online-courses-after-all/40588. On the other hand, Texas is part­ner­ing with edX (the MIT-Harvard con­sor­tium) in order to “out­source online competency-based learn­ing and the $10,000 bachelor’s degree.” http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/10/16/u-texas-aims-use-moocs-reduce-costs-increase-completion. Both of these items point to the poten­tially dis­rup­tive effect of MOOCS on the cur­rent busi­ness model of higher education.

Faculty/Staff Sur­vey: The Foun­da­tions of Excel­lence self-study (described in my pre­vi­ous com­mu­niqués) is pro­gress­ing nicely, and I’d like to thank all of you that are par­tic­i­pat­ing (more than 1000 so far!). An impor­tant com­po­nent of this self-study is a faculty/staff sur­vey that will elicit your opin­ions about the degree to which UNM imple­ments an effec­tive first-year expe­ri­ence both in and out of the class­room. The sur­vey responses will be an impor­tant source of infor­ma­tion for the Foun­da­tions of Excel­lence task force as it eval­u­ates UNM’s first-year effec­tive­ness and rec­om­mends appro­pri­ate insti­tu­tional improve­ments. The Foun­da­tions of Excel­lence Faculty/Staff Sur­vey opened on Mon­day, Octo­ber 22, is being admin­is­tered via the Web (all fac­ulty and staff should already have received an email with a link to the sur­vey), and can be com­pleted in no more than 10 to 20 min­utes. Your par­tic­i­pa­tion is very impor­tant, whether or not you teach or inter­act directly with first-year stu­dents. I encour­age you con­tinue to sup­port this effort that is aimed at strength­en­ing the learn­ing envi­ron­ment for first-year stu­dents, so please fill out the sur­vey! … and just to make it more worth your while, by com­plet­ing the sur­vey, you will auto­mat­i­cally be entered into a draw­ing for two iPads, one for fac­ulty par­tic­i­pants, and the other for staff participants.

Chaouki Abdal­lah
Provost & Exec­u­tive Vice-President for Aca­d­e­mic Affairs

A PDF ver­sion is avail­able at: Provost’s Wednes­day Com­mu­niqué. Your feed­back and input are wel­come at: provost@unm.edu or at the elec­tronic town hall. Please also see the Provost’s Blog.