Purposes and Principles
Evaluation is key to the academic mission because it enables faculty and administration to gauge whether they have attained a level of excellence commensurate with their goals and aspirations. The advance of scholarship demands that research faculty engage in an ongoing appraisal of their own, their students’ and their colleagues’ intellectual work. So too must the research university engage in an ongoing review of its central enterprise: research and teaching.
Most importantly, systematic and comprehensive review of the academic programs of the Arts and Sciences will provide faculty and administrators with the information they need in order to plan for the future of the Arts and Sciences. Planning should be at the center of any review process. Departmental self studies should not only evaluate past performance, but should also set forth goals and aspirations. External review teams should both help departments set goals and help them determine how best to achieve those goals. Furthermore, reviews of current departments, programs, centers and schools must play a critical role in the university’s planning and budgeting process. The identification of both strengths and weaknesses will contribute to creative resource allocation and must play a pivotal role in determining long-term institutional and departmental priorities.
Underlying Principles
Research suggests that successful review programs share four key elements. First, as mentioned above, successful review programs focus on the future, not the past. While it is important to gather data that illustrate the past and current accomplishments of a department, that data should be in service to the goals and aspirations the department has for the future. In other words, the review should serve not only as an evaluative document, but as a plan for the future.
Secondly, when planning is a key feature of the review process, reviews can no longer be completely standardized. Rather they must be tailored to the unit under review. Administrators and the department under review together formulate questions and choose from a menu of possible data sets those that are most pertinent to the department’s particular goals and needs. This process results in reviews that are valued by the department, that assess the unit’s program quality and effectiveness and that stimulate program planning and improvement.
Thirdly, program review must have a clear connection to the decision-making process and/or resource allocation if it is to be successful. A process that has real results is more likely to be useful to everyone involved.
Finally, review programs must have significant faculty input and engagement. Faculty participation is particularly important when reviews focus not only on the past, but on future goals and aspirations. If reviews are tied to school-wide planning and decision making, then faculty must be involved.
updated June 2006