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[polly_mer]

What / who establishes which are core programs?

It usually comes down to subjective evaluation.  That's why I've been advocating for LIFO in this thread, it is completely objective and least likely to do long-term damage to the institution.

The usual "official" authority on program centrality is the mission statement or strategic plan.  This can be a source of all kinds of mischief.   Watch out lest your campus executives empanel some kind of "consortium of stakeholders" to reexamine your school's mission.  These stakeholders are likely to be community leaders who don't know very much about higher education, students who know even less, and a few administrators with their own agendas.  The faculty voice will be horibly diluted in this mess.  Any document that emerges will either be too vague to be useful for genuine decision-making, or will provide a smokescreen for senior administration to do whatever they feel like doing. - DvF

Yep.

We just had a meeting with the stakeholders to help us evaluate our program in preparation for ABET accreditation.  A good chunk of the meeting was explaining why many of the proposals were completely unworkable in terms of requirements from the university and ABET.  Another good chunk of the meeting was explaining why those wonderful suggestions will take 3-10 years to implement and that the immediate need for something will likely be gone by then because the world will be different.

[engineer_adrift]

LIFO seems to have some problems of its own.  In my school, our department is the youngest but we have 50% of the engineering school enrollment; the other 6 departments split the rest.  I'm sure they'd love LIFO, but it does not make much sense from my perspective. 

It seems to me that every university in the US needs certain departments (math, English, e.g.) to cover the general education requirements at the undergraduate level.   

My provost asked me yesterday to think about a faculty committee to identify the 'core curricula' at our university.  That has trouble written all over it, especially as i don't think a faculty committee can produce an unbiased report independent of its own member's parochial loyalties.

So I continue to watch this thread with interest.

Best
E_A

[engineer_adrift]

We just had a meeting with the stakeholders to help us evaluate our program in preparation for ABET accreditation. 

It takes a long time and many meetings to produce a useful advisory board for ABET purposes, but it can be done and can be very rewarding.  Keep pushing and good luck!

Best wishes
E_A

[daniel_von_flanagan]

It seems to me that every university in the US needs certain departments (math, English, e.g.) to cover the general education requirements at the undergraduate level.   

It sounds from your post that you are in an institution that evolved from a special purpose school into a more general university.  Probably LIFO would be problematic for any such school where the mission has evolved drastically.

My provost asked me yesterday to think about a faculty committee to identify the 'core curricula' at our university.

The "general education" sense of "core" is different from the meaning when discussing centrality of departments to a school's mission.  A suite of foundational courses for undergraduates need not be tied to the existence of specific departments, though at many schools core requirements do end up being owned by specific departments. - DvF

[polly_mer]

We just had a meeting with the stakeholders to help us evaluate our program in preparation for ABET accreditation. 

It takes a long time and many meetings to produce a useful advisory board for ABET purposes, but it can be done and can be very rewarding.  Keep pushing and good luck!

Oh, we had a great meeting with lots of good discussion (7 hour meeting, but a good 6 hours' worth of valuable discussion so worth it).  However, the process is definitely interesting since the various stakeholders have so little of the puzzle individually.

[msparticularity]

Okay, but here's the problem: LIFO cuts at many universities are done by individual, and only very rarely by program.

I don't know if LIFO is ever done by program (or by campus); that's the problem.

New campuses are often pushed by legislators and system administrators to solve a perceived regional socioeconomic problem, and are bulldozed through with some lies about efficiencies, but the socioeconomic problem never gets solved and careful analysis (like the Delta Cost Project) supports the obvious fact that adding students to the margins of existing campuses is always far cheaper than building a new campus. 

Likewise, new programs are rarely cost-effective and never cost-neutral, even though when they are created and sold to the campus there is often some kind of formal analysis claiming that they will be.  When reality sets in and they end up with just as fat a budget line as every other department or program in the unit, the extra resources end up coming from everybody else. 

Universities have to be ready to create new programs - that's how knowledge moves forward - but there should always be an exit strategy for when the new field is no longer all the rage, and core programs need some protection against being ransacked to supply the newer ones. - DvF

Ah--and here's where I think we come to one of the hearts of the issue: interdisciplinarity. The new programs I have seen grow up to fill very real demands (from students, faculty, and the wider world out there) are often quite interdisciplinary in nature. I'm thinking here not only of gender studies, American studies, and other "studies" topics, but stuff like the programs in the cognitive sciences that work across medical and psychological fields. My observation over a number of years (and reflecting also the input of my father, who recently retired after over five decades in academia) has been that these new areas tend to get constructed as entirely new programs, with new hires sited in new departments that, as DvF notes, have whole new lines in the budget and associated costs.

So, the dilemma: in the case of some of the departments I know, new programs have been created as independent units due entirely to faculty resistance by older established departments: in some cases grounded in concern over lack of competence to venture into the new field; in others the idea that the new areas are somehow a threat to the "pure" version of the discipline. Typically, then, the newer structure is created by administrators who don't want newer faculty in the new areas to be marginalized or even bullied by people who are resistant to moving the those directions. But then, as DvF says, we end up with program proliferation that is unsustainable on economic and intellectual grounds, since the world moves on. And there we get back to the principle of academic freedom; can/should older and more established departments be forced to become more flexible and more interactive--both with newer areas and across fields--so we can prevent this kind of internal fracturing that drives costs up and effectiveness and responsiveness down?

[zharkov]

What / who establishes which are core programs?

That is what the vision, mission, identity, and strategic planning are for.   The school's leadership and faculty need to understand what the school is to be in 5 and 10 years.  Thus the budget is basically the financial plan for implementing that strategic plan.

[engineer_adrift]

What / who establishes which are core programs?

That is what the vision, mission, identity, and strategic planning are for.   The school's leadership and faculty need to understand what the school is to be in 5 and 10 years.  Thus the budget is basically the financial plan for implementing that strategic plan.

. How often does that *really* happen?

[zharkov]

What / who establishes which are core programs?

That is what the vision, mission, identity, and strategic planning are for.   The school's leadership and faculty need to understand what the school is to be in 5 and 10 years.  Thus the budget is basically the financial plan for implementing that strategic plan.

. How often does that *really* happen?

Strategic re-planning? Every 3 to 5 years.  But the way you put that question, E_A, makes me suspect that the leadership of your institution is not, perhaps, providing the leadership in this area that it needs.  Not in creating the mission, etc., but in leading the effort to enable the community to do so.

[cgfunmathguy]

What / who establishes which are core programs?

That is what the vision, mission, identity, and strategic planning are for.   The school's leadership and faculty need to understand what the school is to be in 5 and 10 years.  Thus the budget is basically the financial plan for implementing that strategic plan.

. How often does that *really* happen?

We just approved an academic strategic plan with a vision for the next 5-10 years. Priorities are being discussed by various constituencies (including faculty and administration) so that the budget can be configured to support the ASP. It really does happen in some places.

Of course, we're an independent private college. In a public system, much of this planning occurs at the state level rather than at the institution. The institution may say "We think that we should look like X in the next 5-10 years", and the state leadership (Board of Regents or whatever they may be called) might ignore that completely and instead say "We want your institution to look like Y in the next 5-10 years." They'll then give you a budget, and the administration must figure how to make the campus look like Y with that money. Of course, everyone will wonder why the campus is trying to be Y when X is a much better fit for the school and the surrounding areas, but that has now become the mission.