February 5, 2008

Executive Committee
Faculty Association

Colleagues:

I would like to respond in a comprehensive rather than piecemeal way to the questions that have been addressed to me regarding the innovations in advising that have been proposed by Academic Affairs. At the outset I would like to acknowledge my awareness of the concerns that lie behind these questions, concerns that were amplified for me yesterday in a fruitful conversation with the academic chairs. In light of the response generated by the proposals I have decided to proceed, at least incrementally, with one initiative, and to ask the appropriate committee, augmented as necessary to achieve sufficient inclusiveness, to conduct a thorough review of the second proposal in order to affirm it, modify it, or suggest possible alternatives.

The initiatives proposed by Academic Affairs are discrete but related. The first pertains to advancing and formalizing the role of faculty in the mentorship of students within the context of their majors; the second involves the centralizing of professional advising services. These initiatives are designed to address two separate but related issues. The first is the clear evidence that UNF students would benefit from as much engagement with and guidance from their professors as they can get (and which we assert as a distinguishing feature of a UNF education); and the second is equally clear evidence that, as good as our current advising system might be, there is significant room for improvement.

Both of these initiatives derive from one of UNF’s core values. The university has been and will continue to be committed, within the limits of its resources, to providing a highly supportive environment for learning and the attainment of academic goals. This commitment has been a hallmark of a UNF education from its inception, and it is a commitment about which we will need to be ever more deliberate as the university expands to an institution around 50% larger than its current size. It is worth noting, in this regard, that the advising award that the university received from NACADA was conferred in 1990 at a time when the university enrolled 10,000 fewer students than it does presently and perhaps as many as 20,000 fewer students than it will in the future.

The initiative to develop undergraduate program coordinators, responsible for “meeting with students in the major to discuss the program, course selection, careers, research and mentoring opportunities,” and other matters pertaining to undergraduate study, derives directly from a proposal put forth unanimously by the Faculty Advising Subcommittee of the broadly representative Undergraduate Studies Council. An integral part of the subcommittee’s recommendation was that coordinators should be compensated for their efforts, and it is our intention to do so. In no case will faculty be asked to assume such duties against their will or without suitable compensation. While certain details of this initiative have yet to be worked out (including the appropriate amount of stipends, the supervision of coordinators, and whether or not coordinators might assume additional duties related to undergraduate programs) it is my hope that we can begin to establish these positions by next year.

The proposal to restructure our current system of advising responds to a different set of circumstances. According to recent NSSE data, no more than one quarter of UNF students judge the quality of our advising services to be excellent, and regrettably this percentage decreases from freshmen to seniors. The need for improvement of advising has been recognized for a number of years and confirmed by a senior survey conducted last spring (in addition to NSSE), a Noel-Levitz student satisfaction inventory, and the professional consulting firm Scannell and Kurz. After years of deliberation about the matter of advising, there are several reasons why it would be appropriate to take action at the current time. The university’s funding will be determined in part on the basis of its ability to retain students and to graduate them in a timely manner. To that end our Office of Undergraduate Studies is overseeing the development of academic roadmaps and the technology that will enable students and advisors to be mindful of and alert to students’ progress toward the completion of their degrees. Additionally, along with the rest of the SUS, UNF is experiencing fiscal austerity that is requiring us to become more efficient in the way that we provide essential services.

While legitimate arguments certainly can be made on behalf of maintaining our current system, I believe there are compelling reasons why we should very seriously entertain the possibility of centralizing professional advising. Our current decentralized, bifurcated structure not only divides student advising services between colleges but between lower and upper divisions as well. Centralization would bring these two levels of advising together. A student now has to wait to move to a college (at 60 credits) to receive major advising. Ideally such advising should start as soon as a student declares a major in conjunction with advising on General Education. In this way a student would be clearly informed about his or her anticipated major and its expectations and requirements in his or her freshman and sophomore years. In addition to providing continuity of advising service within a single unit, centralized advising also would facilitate a greater uniformity in the standards and quality of our advising as well as greater availability over more extended hours than we can provide currently, thus making such a system more efficient than our decentralized system. Perhaps most importantly, centralization would allow for a synergy among our advisors that they cannot achieve when they are dispersed across ACE and the colleges.

Centralized advising does not mean that advisors would not retain areas of primary responsibility. ACE advisors would continue to counsel lower-level students, and professional advisors would continue to serve students in the majors for which those advisors are already responsible. But in addition to those primary responsibilities advisors would be “cross-trained” so that they would be qualified to provide advising for a range of majors. Those advisors who currently have teaching and service assignments would retain those assignments. No advisors would lose their jobs as a result of this restructuring. Indeed, we need more advisors, not fewer.

Since there is widespread enthusiasm (as signaled by the unqualified support of the Undergraduate Studies Council) for the establishment of undergraduate program coordinators, our intention is to implement this initiative as soon as resources permit. On the other hand, while I have stated a personal preference for a centralized advising system, since that proposal has generated considerable controversy, I am going to ask David Jaffee, chair of the Undergraduate Studies Council, to reconvene an appropriate subset of that group, supplemented as need be with additional faculty, staff, and student representatives from the colleges, and assisted if the committee so chooses by a NACADA consultant, for the purpose of reviewing the available data on advising, seeking more data if necessary, considering alternative advising models, making projections of relative costs, and coming up with a set of recommendations about what changes we should consider incorporating into our advising system. My hope is that these recommendations will be available for general consideration no later than the end of fall semester, 2008.

I trust this will be regarded as a reasonable way of proceeding on the controversial half of the two Academic Affairs initiatives. It remains my conviction that, whatever form they might eventually take, innovations in our advising system ultimately will benefit our students and that it is thus our responsibility, in the spirit of continuous improvement, to pursue their realization.

Mark E. Workman
Provost and VPAA