ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERSHIP, POLICY & DEVELOPMENT�THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA

Karen E. Watkins, UGA, Chair�Lesley Bartlett, UW-Madison

Gerardo Lopez, U of Utah

Tom Fisher, UMN

STRENGTHS

What are the department’s unique strengths and characteristics?

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• Excellent faculty, diverse programs, long history and legacy
• Strong new hires
• Healthy demand for most programs
• Diverse undergraduate enrollment
• Significant impact in terms of faculty research, involvement in professional associations and journals, and student placement in faculty and leadership roles
• Quality education for graduate students: e.g. doc dissertations winning major awards, success securing competitive fellowships at university level
• Great success in reducing time to degree across programs
• Undergraduate students in HRD and BME find the curriculum to be highly flexible and relevant to their respective careers. They especially appreciate the “applied” nature of their courses and the opportunity to learn about content as it applies to real-world settings.

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CHALLENGES

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• There is a clear need to generate more revenue from diversified sources

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• The department needs to continue to rethink/re-imagine themselves to move beyond five silos and become one coherent unit. Faculty should think beyond disciplines as they were and envision fields as they could and will be.

• Faculty are undertaking significant levels of departmental, college, and university service. However, there is a leadership gap when it comes to leading the department.
• Some faculty are not fully engaged in the life of the department, including in department meetings.
• There is an uneven distribution of labor among faculty.
• Some P&A faculty feel unsupported in their career development.

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UNDERGRADUATE CHALLENGES

• Two large majors, quality concerns. Students describe some courses as “easy”, boring, or too much lecture

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• Students concerned about lack of skill development especially for relevant software like the Adobe Suite, Greenhouse IO, Salesforce

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• Many faculty and programs are not participating in undergraduate teaching

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• Students would like tracks or more focused advisement on electives to build marketable concentrations such as IT, diversity & inclusion, HRM, etc.

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• Students want a better bridge to internships, job placements

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GRADUATE CHALLENGES

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• Graduate students need steady, predictable funding over multiple years. There is no clarity among faculty on how to right-size the department in order to support graduate students

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• Strengthen the MA programs; some may need to close or merge

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• Distribution of advising within programs and across programs is uneven and it is unclear how advisors are assigned.

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• The department has small enrollments in some grad classes and should consider whether this is the optimal use of resources.

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GRADUATE CHALLENGES CONTINUED

• There were some student complaints about the 1 and 3 credit courses they are required to take. The quality of instruction is uneven.

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• The Inquiry course came too early, before they were prepared to commit to a research question or topic; some felt the three credit course should become a sequence.

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• Students expressed a need for more research preparation and more research experience.

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• Two doctoral programs of study have no core courses. It is unclear whether the doctoral programs are differentiated from the MA programs.
• MA in Evaluation Studies- two courses in evaluation?
• HRD has no core courses required for the PhD?
• Phd in Leadership for CIDE-- there are no leadership courses?

RECOMMENDATIONS

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What suggestions do you have for effective preparation of students for the undergraduate programs’ target careers?

• Need to cultivate relationships with alumni and local businesses
• Need a position to develop and manage internships
• Need a new advisor position; current advisor has over twice the typical load of advisors at the university

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RECOMMENDATIONS - Diversity

What are the next priorities for OLPD in terms of diversity, equity, and inclusion?

• There is a notable absence of faculty identifying as Latinx.

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• We would like to hear more about indigenous education and whether/how it is being infused across the department.

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• Immigrant and international populations may need different support in the current climate.

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RECOMMENDATIONS

Consider options for working across programs:

• Use the department’s current diversity to invent new and highly marketable MA programs, such as Global Higher Education or Leadership and Evaluation.

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• Adapt evaluation certificate to meet the needs of Education Leadership for EPL students, program evaluation and Data Analytics for HRD, other niche markets.

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• Encourage students in one program to minor in another.

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• Consider affinity groups along areas of common interest:
• engaging interdisciplinary research and policy analysis
• diversity and equity inquiry and practice in education and work organizations;
• globalized and intercultural practices in educational and work organization through community-partnered research

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RECOMMENDATIONS

Find alternative revenue sources

• External sales, contracts, workshops (e.g., annual workshop in school law; in culturally responsive leadership)
• Incentivize faculty to bring their consulting businesses into the department or set up a parallel structure that collaborates with their private businesses.
• Evaluate whether and how the Minnesota Evaluation Studies Institute could generate more funding
• Provide consulting for businesses, e.g. in evaluation, in HE, HRD to support Graduate Students
• Provide active research support tailored to securing funding for the areas in the department (e.g., for HE: Lumina, Pew; for CIDE, USAID and other funders)
• Consider an internal ‘grand challenge’ initiative, requiring collaboration across programs, to achieve departmental goals related to above. Possible incentive is to assign GA with a deliverable grant date.

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RECOMMENDATIONS, CONTINUED

Diversify existing program streams

• Use the department’s current diversity to invent new and highly marketable MA programs, such as Global Higher Ed or Leadership and Evaluation.

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• Adapt evaluation certificate in ES to Education Leadership and Data Analytics in HRD, other niche markets.

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• Develop alternative programming for summers to tinker with reinventing the programs and department offerings.

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• Teach online courses, already developed, esp. in summer

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• Reduce or eliminate costly degrees and certificates. Some degrees have less enrollment than seems sustainable. Continue to sunset programs with small enrollments to make room for new program initiatives

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RECOMMENDATIONS – Program Mergers

Consider merging programs with considerable synergy (e.g, Higher Education, Education Policy and Leadership, and Evaluation Studies).

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• Individually, programs have small faculty, with key retirements, and are stretched thin with buy-outs.

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• With fewer programs, you have fewer people in program administration and more available to the department.

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• A strategic hire across these programs would help integration post-merger, preferably with quantitative skills to replace lost expertise

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RECOMMENDATIONS - Faculty

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• Make strategic hires that serve multiple departmental needs. Consider a tenure line faculty with a background in organizational leadership, organizational studies, or social psychology preferably with a quantitative research background to complement existing faculty research expertise, to serve BME, and to be more competitive in seeking grants

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• Clarify advising expectations (number, quality) for tenured and tenure-stream faculty across the department.

• Consider an awards committee to nominate faculty to go up for college and university awards.

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• Support career development of P&A faculty. Clarify work scope and criteria used to gauge and evaluate their work. Develop plan for career advancement. Provide multi-year contracts.

RECOMMENDATIONS – Graduate Programs

Modify graduate programs

• Consider integrating departmental themes into MA core

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• The department may need to reduce doctoral enrollments in order to offer competitive funding packages. This will have implications for doctoral classes, which may need to be reduced or blended with masters classes.

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• Align doctoral research sequence. Draw on CIDE sequence and evaluation studies faculty. Consider having the doctoral research sequence mirror the proposed MA inquiry sequence.

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• Students need more funding to attend conferences and network professionally.

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RECOMMENDATIONS – Undergraduate Education

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• Incentivize more faculty to work in undergraduate initiatives, including the First Year Experience Program, to diversify revenue generation

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• Consider developing an undergraduate Education Studies major, drawing on CIDE, EPL, ES, and HE departmental strength in educational foundations and research methods, with a domestic and a global track, that is open to transfer students.

• Prepare TAs by having them enroll in teaching and learning course on campus.

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