Governance matters
REGENTS UPDATE
One of the responsibilities of the Faculty Senate President is to attend Board of Regents meetings and represent the university in the Council of Faculty Senate Presidents, an advisory body that addresses issues of interest from a governance perspective.
Members of the board are committed to improving the quality of higher education in the state. They have been engaged in developing processes that require institutions to identify goals and measures of performance to ensure accountability for results. These initiatives include the revision of the regents' mission statement, changes in the budgetary process and the development of five strategic questions for the future of higher education.
These five strategic questions offer important insights into the current direction of the board. They focus on the alignment between K-12 and higher education, levels of participation in higher education, retention of and completion by students, alignment with the Kansas economy and learner outcomes and basic competencies of graduates. With respect to each, the regents seek to establish quantifiable indicators of performance that can be used to promote improvement and accountability.
The regents' initiatives are part of a broader national movement and respond to national and state political realities. Properly constructed performance measures are helpful tools for improvement, since employees should expect to be held accountable for their performances. Nonetheless, this sort of measure can also have a negative effect, as time, effort and resources may tend to focus on the measures rather than the underlying goals that the measures are intended to further. Thus, it is important that these measures be well conceived.
Governance has responded to these developments in two ways. First, at the university level, the University Senate has formed a task force on learner outcomes, with faculty, staff and student membership, chaired by Dan Bernstein, professor of psychology and director of the Center for Teaching Excellence. The ultimate goal is to help the chancellor and provost work with the regents toward the establishment of constructive measures of performance that will further our mission. Second, the Council of Faculty Senate Presidents is developing a statement stressing the value of education in terms of fostering moral and ethical thinking, increasing awareness and appreciation of the world around us, and developing lifelong habits of learning, as well as the need to reflect such values in the strategic questions identified by the board.
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